Hey generali I don't agree with your signature

Generali

cells wrote: »

I can only talk about the UK as I know its systems fairly well

first the UK has also closed a good number of power stations and now still has an overcapacity. The main reason is light bulbs have gotten significantly less power hungry. A 100 watt incandescent replaced with a 10 watt led or florescent reduces PEAK demand by 90 watts. Multiply by 27 million homes and say 4 light bulbs a house gives you a peak demand reduction of some 10 GW and it holds true. Our peak winter demands were 65GW and now they are close to 50GW

A lowering of peak demand hasn't been a disaster its been quite stable

In Australia solar can probably be what efficient light bulbs were for the UK. Lower Peak demand and allow some stations to close. It won't however somehow break the system.

also the idea of a power station being hugely expensive to run is now not quite what it was. For example a 1GW CCGT operates with just 40 full time staff (working shifts so only about 10 on site at any one time). There is no significant operational cost just 40 staff to pay which for a 1GW plant is trivial.

Grid defection is a fallacy no one is going to defect from 10p a day when it provides so much. Even if every single home had PV the grid would stay.
Grids are affordable in hugely different sized nations from the USA with 300m people to Ireland with closer to 3m people.


also I have no idea why electricity prices in Australia are high but I suspect its purely to do with rules and regulations as your fuel costs are significantly cheaper (which is why yoi are a big coal exporter and soon a big gas exporter) and the technology used is the same so no reason your electricity should be more expensive than ours

My guess for the Australian system is that PV will play as a peaker plant maybe upto as much as 30GWp. Coal will remain as baseload. Gas could replace baseload if regulations force it.


batteries won't play a part in any significant stationary electricity storage. They have finite lives that are in the low thousands of cycles. Moreso than cost the tech needs to increase cycle lives to over 10,000 which is quite difficult as everything breaks down even a brick road has a finite life

What you're not accounting for is the capital cost of the power station. I'm sure the operational cost of a modern power station is low. My guess is that they cost what we economists call a "sodding fortune".

The capital cost still has to be paid for the power station regardless of whether the electricity from it is being consumed.

michaels

We have solar panels to charge our electric car for purely financial reasons (or be it because of subsidy rather than it necesarily making economic sense). The 'rules' also mean it is worth us having a clever switch to store some of the electricity we generate as hot water rather than using gas to heat it. Perhaps with subsidised batteries we might be able to store locally even more. I guess at some point the share of our electric bill that is 'grid cost' will become significant but I would have thought it will still be cost effective compared to trying to store energy across the year (although ther eis of course the possibility of gas micro-generation through CHP which would give us electricity in the winter when the solar doesn't.

Not sure if any of these technologies wil ever be economic though - 2 years ago when it looked like energy costs were high and rising the sums looked very different. Perhaps if it is decied that carbon emmissions are really very expensive in terms of externality and charged accordingly the maths will change again?

cells

wotsthat wrote: »

People do things for reasons other than money. People may make a rational decision to go off grid where that decision is cost additive. As they leave the grid other people's costs will increase and make their decision to leave too easier.

I know someone who runs a few big koi ponds in his garden and has installed solar. Being a big user of electricity he's seeing some decent savings. Right now the cost of storing electricity is too high for him to consider going off grid but if that price came down and he had a longer history of supply and demand patterns he'd go off grid even if he ended up somewhat out of pocket.

The grid is amazing but it makes us wasteful. Now my mate is generating his own electricity it's even more amazing how keen he is to use it efficiently.

I've got water butts in my garden and they won't pay for themselves for a few years (if ever). I'm not bothered one bit - watering the garden with rainwater makes me feel good.

you really cant compare a $20 water bucket which will last 100 years to a $20,000 solar and battery system which will last a hell of a lot less than 100 years (especially the batteries)

The decision to go off grid would be totally irrational, even if you have a PV and a battery system a grid is an extremely reliable backup at a grand cost of 10p a day. It also allows you to power high power equipment with no trouble at all whereas rapidly discharging your batteries is not good for their already shoody lifetimes

but as I keep noting, even if a million homes in Australia or the UK did a runner from the grid. the 10p a day grid becomes 10.01p a day still extremely cheap and reliable.

Also the UK and austrilia and pretty much everywhere else is still building homes and offices and shops and ...... So in the UK you would need 130,000 homes each year leaving the grid just to offset the 130,000 homes each year connecting to the grid.....

Or maybe think of it another way. 20 years ago France had ~8 million less homes. was the grid unaffordable back then? well then why would 8 million homes in france leaving the grid make it un-viable today


in short I totally understand the argument that someone leaving the grid will result in a a small increase in cost to the rest. however what you all ignore is that hundreds of thousands are connecting to the grid and even if the grid lost lots of customers its still extremely reliable cheap effective and is not going to go away

cells

Generali wrote: »

What you're not accounting for is the capital cost of the power station. I'm sure the operational cost of a modern power station is low. My guess is that they cost what we economists call a "sodding fortune".

The capital cost still has to be paid for the power station regardless of whether the electricity from it is being consumed.

The capital cost of a new 1GW CCGT is ~£0.5B

At 5% interest rate that gives a capital cost of ~£25m
Add in the £2.5m or so of wages, its sinking you ~£30m a year

Thats a lot of money, but a new CCGT being more efficient that existing ones will mean its used quite frequently (>70% I would imagine)

and an old CCGT will have been paid off already

Also the argument of capital cost fails because these things already exist. My local CCGT was bought for peanuts when its former owner (ENRON) went bust. So if new technology X is fantastic the existing infrastructure goes bust and its new capital cost is peanuts

But I will say you are correct in that uncontrollable marginal sources of power like wind and PV that do not correlate well to peak demands will indeed eat into the market share of existing generators. However that does not mean existing generators will all fail and be closed down. It means the existing generators must be compensated some other way to keep going. The solution that we are walking towards is a capacity payment for plants/systems that can guarantee peak supply.




and finally we have always had unused capacity because of the variation in seasonal demand. Some coal and gas plants are shut for 9 months of the year some oil plants are closed for 10 months of the year and only sued a handful of hours in the whole year. This is quite normal and has been sustained for the best part of since the grid came into existence so why would having some unused capacity now somehow break everthing

cells

Generali wrote: »

What you're not accounting for is the capital cost of the power station. I'm sure the operational cost of a modern power station is low. My guess is that they cost what we economists call a "sodding fortune".

The capital cost still has to be paid for the power station regardless of whether the electricity from it is being consumed.

There are solutions to that too MR Generali

They are called OCGT or jet engines to you and me

Only about 40% efficient, but they cost peanuts to build

I couldn't tell you for sure, but CCGTs cost £500m for 1GW and OCGTs are meant to be significantly cheaper*

There was plans to build a big CCGT somewhere in England with two OCGTs to be used as winter peakers. They would have seen at most 2 hours use on Monday to Thursday for about 10 weeks of the year. operating ~80 hours a year (idle 99% of the time)

They were considered viable with a downtime of 99%. They may have actually been built already but I am no longer in the industry

wotsthat

cells wrote: »

The decision to go off grid would be totally irrational, even if you have a PV and a battery system a grid is an extremely reliable backup at a grand cost of 10p a day. It also allows you to power high power equipment with no trouble at all whereas rapidly discharging your batteries is not good for their already shoody lifetimes

I reckon my mate will do the costings by taking his old on-grid price and comparing against the total cost of being off-grid and deciding if the payback period is short enough to bear.

It's not like for like (some of his savings are from more efficient use rather than generation) and maybe he should consider the 10p/ day connection charge against the marginal increase in cost of going from solar-grid to solar off-grid solar.

Maybe you find it hard to put yourself in the shoes of people who have a different decision making process to your own.

cells

wotsthat wrote: »

I reckon my mate will do the costings by taking his old on-grid price and comparing against the total cost of being off-grid and deciding if the payback period is short enough to bear.

It's not like for like (some of his savings are from more efficient use rather than generation) and maybe he should consider the 10p/ day connection charge against the marginal increase in cost of going from solar-grid to solar off-grid solar.

Maybe you find it hard to put yourself in the shoes of people who have a different decision making process to your own.

He may well decide to go ahead, but in 5 years time if he needs to spend $5,000 to replace/repair his batteries he may understand that sunshine is free but upkeep is not

wotsthat

cells wrote: »

He may well decide to go ahead, but in 5 years time if he needs to spend $5,000 to replace/repair his batteries he may understand that sunshine is free but upkeep is not

Say storage costs stayed at £5k but the life was 30 years he might pull the trigger at that point.

It's still not rational because £5k is still a lot more than the £1095 cost of connecting to the grid for 30 years but it's not much money for a hobby that doesn't burn a single piece of fossil fuel post installation. He gets a lot out of showing off his system too - I was an easy sell - I was as excited as he was when his solar went in.

It's not something I'm bothering with just now but I'm almost certainly going to invest in solar in the 'retirement' house. I'll be including some off-grid technology such as using storage for outdoor lights, watering systems, gadget charging etc.

It'll simultaneously be the most expensive and coolest electricity I'll use.

cells

wotsthat wrote: »

Say storage costs stayed at £5k but the life was 30 years he might pull the trigger at that point.

It's still not rational because £5k is still a lot more than the £1095 cost of connecting to the grid for 30 years but it's not much money for a hobby that doesn't burn a single piece of fossil fuel post installation. He gets a lot out of showing off his system too - I was an easy sell - I was as excited as he was when his solar went in.

It's not something I'm bothering with just now but I'm almost certainly going to invest in solar in the 'retirement' house. I'll be including some off-grid technology such as using storage for outdoor lights, watering systems, gadget charging etc.

It'll simultaneously be the most expensive and coolest electricity I'll use.

Storage wont last for 30 years, the life cycles are very limited especially if you intend to rapid charge or discharge it some times

Yes of course people can and do spend money on their hobbies but its a fringe fraction of a fraction.

cells

michaels wrote: »

Not sure if any of these technologies wil ever be economic though - 2 years ago when it looked like energy costs were high and rising the sums looked very different. Perhaps if it is decied that carbon emmissions are really very expensive in terms of externality and charged accordingly the maths will change again?

accounting tricks only work for a time before the true costs show up.

look at the Germans who installed "free" PV and now they are !!!!ed off that their electricity costs so much made more ironic by the fact that they are still one of the worlds biggest carbon users despite the near 100 Billion Euro experiment