Tangentially related: New York is home to NYPA[1], the largest public power utility/authority in the United States. NYPA is entirely owned by the public, produces some of the cheapest (and greenest) power in the country, and is funded in perpetuity by bonds instead of taxes.
Edit: This bond announcement[2] document claims that NYPA provides over 25% of NY's electricity and owns over 30% of the physical delivery infrastructure in the state.
Basically, they built a reservoir on top of a mountain, and pump water up there during off peak times. When NYC hits peak demand, they let the water flow down. Essentially a giant water battery!
There are a good few pumped storage sites in the world, here's the one most convenient for me to visit (now that COVID-19 precautions have eased) in Scotland:
It isn't practical to build mountains, so you need to find some natural mountains you don't mind cutting a big hole into, with a pre-existing lake at the top, at the bottom, or ideally both, and then spend a lot of money building the storage system, plus hook it up to the grid.
The US does have lots of spare mountains, but they aren't exactly in the middle of cities where it would be convenient, so the infrastructure cost is very large.
In the UK one rationale for these sites is that they have Black Start capability. In the event of a complete network failure, there is no grid power, most power stations can't be started from this situation, they need the grid first. At suitably equipped pumped storage sites a relatively modest amount of local electrical power (e.g. from a portable diesel generator) is enough to get the site running with no outside help, whereupon it can produce, for a few hours, a great deal of electrical power for the grid, and other generators on the grid can use that power to start themselves up safely. By the time the reservoir is empty, lots of other generators are back online. Black Start justified paying them money to exist even back when they weren't regularly used. Today cheap wind power means pumped storage is economic anyway, fill it up at night with cheap power (sometimes at negative cost) and then generate electricity in the early evening peak with all that water.
The infrastructure cost is not nearly the burden that the regulatory process is. Building any kind of hydroelectric in the United States is a massive political and bureaucratic undertaking. If you plan on building pumped storage you better set aside a decade or two of constant effort to get through that process. Once you have that part done the actual building of it is comparatively simple. I am an engineer in hydro and would absolutely love the chance to be involved in more pumped storage projects but they are quite rare for that reason, despite being a perfect match for what our grid currently needs (much more storage!)
Pumped hydro is cool, but we already have more storage than we need, its called "not burning gas". And until we run out of opportunities to not burn gas, theres no real demand for storage. Hopefully well get there soon, but the more people say "we can't build more renewables until we have storage", the longer that is going to take.
I don't know how to respond to this comment. You seem to be saying that not burning natural gas would somehow negate the need for electrical storage on the grid? If that's what you're trying to say you're definitely incorrect, there's no real argument to be made otherwise. Not burning natural gas means that we need to supply more electricity for heating loads, typically at times that solar is less able to serve that load. This increases the need for storage if your assumption is that the load will be served by renewable sources and not, for example, by natural gas thermal generation. The physics of this are pretty simple and obvious, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Europe has lots of gas heaters, and gas electrical generation. Which means they can build lots of renewables without any need for storage. They just store the gas they would have burned when it's windy and sunny, and burn it when it's not.
Every gas heater replaced with a heat pump, increases this 'storage' capacity.
Until that stops being true, they have no real need for storage, just more renewables.
One cheap and effective way to do this, is to ban new gas hookups on newly built or refurbished buildings. This saves a lot of money. It sounds like NY is doing this, so good for them. Smart move New York.
When including inflation, it's delivered at a cost of 2 billion dollars for 19 GWh of storage. $200 per KWh isn't exactly good, it's not even on par with lithium ion batteries.
But since it’s not a generation facility and has a 70% efficiency, that implies it stored and returned 2506 GWh of electricity. At peak retail prices where I am in California (absurdly expensive) that’s worth over 1.5 billion dollars. Obviously you won’t have retail pricing, the market is different and you have transmission costs, etc. but the economics are still surprising. 200 $/kWh might be perfectly fine for a safe, low-maintenance, environment friendly storage that can be used with no time constraints.
There's a similar facility at Dinorwig in Wales. It's important not only to handle the load of all the kettles being switched on at half-time (what they refer to as "TV pickup", an almost 3GW increase in demand), but it's also a "black start" site.
It used to be, but not anymore, according to a Tom Scott video and interview with people working there. The National Grid used to look at the TV listings and put Dinorwig on standby for busy times, but there's so many TV channels and streaming options now that there isn't so much of a coordinated sharp spike of the whole country doing something at the same time. Its main use now is in balancing calm moments of solar and wind power generation, apparently.
Yeah it's actually very common, it's called pumped storage. Many power pricing models will treat them identically to batteries given they also bid into what's called the "ancillary services market," which exists for reliability purposes to balance the grid when supply and demand don't perfectly match up. You can read about other types of storage on the PJM ISO website: https://learn.pjm.com/energy-innovations/energy-storage
I found myself talking randomly to an Enron engineer years ago right around the time they were imploding. He described working on a similar project. Pump the water up in the dead of night. Let it flow down the next day.
Then, well, certain facts came to light and the project got halted. At the time we were talking, he was reporting to an empty office to search for a new job.
Pumped storage - always interesting highly doubt it will be realized in any real meaningful way (might be some interesting one off projectS). We've stopped building dams and its too difficult to site close to markets.
Whether it's close to markets or not is not particularly relevant. I am a engineer at a utility whose power mix is primarily hydroelectric and whose customer base is primarily not at the top of a mountain in a steep canyon river. That's what transmission lines are for! With the increasing role of regional ISO likes the subject of this article those transmission networks only get more efficient.
Proximity matters to minimize losses and lower transmissions costs for economic viability of the plant.
Obviously Im not talking about the population being at the top of the mountain I'm talking about geological formations that are viable that are close to the marke in order for the value prop of energy storage from pumped storage to realized
Was it a total disaster in an objective way anyone would have to agree with, or was it a total disaster from a particular viewpoint they may not share?
Hey I did as well. I always thought it cool and as kids wondered if we swam in there if we get sucked up the hill at night. Had loads of fun at the community pool there as well.
Pumped storage is an incredible technology. I’m glad that chemical battery technology is advancing, but I would love to see more construction of this sort!
It works the same in both ways, you just need the height difference and two reservoirs. When you need the electricity, the water flows downstream into the mine reservoir. Then it gets pumped up again when it's cheap. I do wonder about the economic feasability, but maybe I'm underestimating the amount of empty volume available in a mine.
That top left graph is showing you the (notional) system price for grid electricity in the UK. The x axis is settlement periods, which are 30 minutes long, thus period 14 on that graph ends 0700 local time, before many people are awake, system price was £0 per MWh. You want it? Have it. The evening peak a few hours ago was £327 per MWh. So if you bought 2GWh of electricity this morning and sold just 50% of it back this evening (accounting for losses) you made over £300 000 on that transaction.
Now, those sites aren't free, I'm sure you need a dozen or more specialist engineers who aren't paid minimum wage to run a plant like that, and the spares are doubtless expensive, it's not as though everybody has a spare 100MW turbine/ pump sat around you could buy. But you can do that most days and sometimes twice a day, so it's potentially a nice earner. Once upon a time all the ones in the UK were owned by the government but today they are owned by for-profit corporations.
Is it possible to scale that trade down to something one could do at home, without much equipment and therefore not require much in the way of planning permission? Scale that transaction down 1/3000th to get £100 for the trade. If you could do that every day it would set you up for a yearly pre-tax income of £36k; instead of trading 1GWh the trade would be 333KWh, equivalent to 1.2 Gigajoules.
Solve the Pumped Hydro storage equation E = mgh (Energy = mass * gravitational acceleration * height) for 1.2e9 = mass * 9.81 * 2 meter lift => 60 Megagrams of water => 60 tons of water lifted 2 meters will do it.
Water is ~1 ton per cubic meter, that's 60 cubic meters, about a 4x4x4 meter cube. Twice the volume of a small outdoor pool. And it would need enough pumping power to move it two meters in half an hour for one settlement period. One millimeter per second. That seems infeasibly huge. (Even scaling it down another 1/10th is 6 tons of water which is large. maybe if it could be lifting a cubic meter of Iron, 8 tons, by one meter, it could be £5/day or £1500/year. A tenth the size again it would never pay for itself, and now I'm almost at the systems of dragging lumps of rock on rails up a slope to store energy and letting them roll down to release it).
A quicker way to get to the same conclusion is that storing 333KWh in a half hour settlement period needs a 666KW electricity feed, way more than a home supply.
Does make me wonder if elevators in tall office buildings lifting ~10 people per ton, dozens of people overall, up dozens of meters, could be arranged so their work starts at cheap time and finishes at peak time to regenerate money as they ride the elevator down.
The elevator is counter-weighted, there is electricity used whether you're going up or coming down, the point of the elevator is to change where people are, not generate electricity, so you're imagining an entirely new (and perhaps more dangerous) machine.
The parent comment said the price settlement period was a half-hour at a time, I was trying to maximise income to see if it was feasible to scale down to garden size and make a useful amount of money for a small-ish build cost. If it takes longer to pump and longer to drain, it earns less, but you could do it. It doesn't make much difference, it's impractical whatever period.
Going over it again today I'm a factor of a thousand out, in the unhelpful direction, by using mass in grams instead of the correct mass in Kg. So after that adjustment it would take
~180,000 Kg = 3.6e6 Joules in a KWh / 9.81 grav accel / 2 meters
approx 180,000 Kg of water, 180 tons raised 2m to store a single KWh. So approx 60,000,000 Kg of water, 60,000 tons raised 2 meters to store my 333KWh to get a salary style income from doing that best possible trade every day. Approx twenty Olympic swimming pools worth of water. So it's even less relevant whether it's half an hour or not.
As well, a UK home power feed tops out about (240Volts * 60Amps = ~15KW) so the max one could store in a half hour period is ~7KWh. Trading that peak-to-trough would get you ~£2.20/day for moving 1200 tons of water up 2m and back with perfect efficiency, or £1.65/day with Dinorwig's 75% efficiency. Much much smaller, simpler and more convenient to get a 10KWh Li-Ion battery pack for £4k[1] and trade that for £700/year (even then it can't charge or discharge quickly enough for one half-hour period).
(I came to the realisation when working out that I could eat a biscuit, use that energy to walk up two flights of stairs, and then have a KWh of potential energy; free energy means I went very wrong somewhere).
Deliberately so, because if it the numbers are still wildly far from plausible with an easy model of perfect efficiency, there's no point making a more complex model of heat loss and equipment purchase and install and maintenance costs.
Its not about turning a profit, but running the grid. You have to meet demand. The options are basically to build pumped storage to smooth out supply and demand, or build more peaker plants to meet demand spikes.
Yes, but it's also about turning a profit, because you have to incentivize power producers to build pumped storage / batteries / etc. The ISO markets are unregulated in that respect, since the government doesn't build or control the power plants.
NYPA is unfortunately not green where it counts - their anti-nuclear stance in lockstep with Cuomo has led to NY needing to build three new natural gas power plants to compensate for losses from shuttering nuclear.
Certainly. I wish they would build more nuclear power, invest in more offshore wind farms (NY has plenty of eligible coastline), and all around do just about anything other than build more natural gas plants.
Read an article from my state today about a local utility that was created specifically to get local control and more sustainable energy.
But their proposed large scale solar farm was denied a zoning change because some town thought it was bad idea to remove ( a tiny amount of ) farm land.
The util contractor even said they would still water the land (dumb this is a desert) and have sheep.
Is there any proof that for profit incentives actually lower costs without effecting safety, reliability, and sustainability?
Texas stands out as proof it doesn't. And even when it's semi-regulated when the profit is fixed % it just incentivizes the wrong thing when we need to scale down/build more sustainable.
We in South Africa have a single state owned energy producer, Eskom. We consistently have power cuts (load shedding) to prevent grid collapse, it has the highest head count per MWH produced and is in total disarray.
I definitely believe having multiple independent producers makes a huge difference for competition and ensuring energy stability
Eskom is in disarray because of affirmative action policies that prevent the hiring of qualified engineers, and ensure the creation of corrupt suppliers that do things like charge USD$18,000 for a broom. [1] [2] It has little to do with actual infrastructure and is more related to huge knowledge gaps and political corruption.
Every major regional ISO does in North America and most of the ones in the equivalent market organizations in Europe do as well. The historian data this uses was made easily publishable about 8 years or so ago and you can get quite detailed API dumps from most of them, although usually at a time-delay to meet their requirements for market protection.
Worldwide OSIsoft's PI is the outsized leader in that but there are numerous other historians with modernized REST API outputs, etc, from Canary Labs and most SCADA systems will at least include their own discount version built on top of Postgres or something. The more dedicated ones use time-series databases versus relational ones but with modern storage and processing that isn't as big of a performance issue as it was in the 80s and 90s.
OATI is big in that space as well for inter-utility aggregation and transfer, as well as some other company I'm blanking on the name of out of Illinois that was widely used as least in WECC.
Interesting that the graph of power is split between "Renewables" and "other" which explicitly pulls nuclear out of that equation. NY has currently about 36.5% Renewables right now in their power mix. If they instead labeled it as "Fossil Fuels" and "Non-Fossil Power", the "Non-Fossil" Power production would be 54.3%!
Also, I love how constant that Nuclear line is across the generation graph.
Here is the percentage of the combined wind + Solar + Nuclear + Hydroelectric on some grids in the East & Midwest, along with their instantaneous direction of growth/decline at 5PM CST on 3/11/2022:
ERCOT 57.3 \ Electric Reliability Council of Texas
MISO 41.9 - Midwest Independent System Operator
NYIS 50.6 \ New York Independent System Operator
SPP 44.4 \ SouthWest Power Pool
PJM 42.4 ↗ PJM Interconnection (PA, NJ, MD, OH, IN, DE & Chicago)
...and at 6PM CST:
ERCOT 48.7 \ Electric Reliability Council of Texas
MISO 40.7 \ Midwest Independent System Operator
NYIS 50.1 - New York Independent System Operator
SPP 37.5 \ SouthWest Power Pool
PJM 41.5 - PJM Interconnection (PA, NJ, MD, OH, IN, DE & Chicago)
So you can see, that, particularly in wind-blow Texas and middle of the U.S. (SPP includes Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska), the penetration of renewables + Nuclear is quite dynamic.
Unfortunately, New York is in the midst of a decades-long "Renewables" push to close all of its nuclear plants and replace them with new natural gas power plants.
The all-Europe equivalent is ENTSO-E[1], which has down to 15-minute granularity (depending on operator I think) data for every generation unit in Europe.
There's a similar platform for the gas network too[2] - only daily data but it does have a map interface where you can see the main transmission pipelines across the continent.
I work in energy markets analytics, so grab data from these on a regular basis for SMEs.
Really interesting data here. I wonder if someone could reverse the estimate algorithm to see what impact weather has. I'm guessing that's the largest single factor? Might be useful to have that information readily available for those using their own personal solar panels.
The past few years have shown that our infrastructure -- electricity, fuel, shipping, etc -- is more fragile than we expected. We're running on very thin margins, which is efficient!, but not very durable.
These systems should have a larger buffer for variation than what they run at now, and we should regularly exercise their flexibility. A chaos monkey for infrastructure perhaps. It will be a pain to deal with outages in normal times, but much less of a pain than being surprised by their inflexibility in the middle of some other crisis.
For electric power it’s an especially tricky physics problem; you can’t overproduce power, or things will just blow up. Grid operators must perfectly balance supply and demand at every moment of every day and electricity moves at the speed of light, so the electricity powering your lights was a hunk of coal or a gust of wind within the last nanosecond.
large scale batteries could make the jobs of grid operators like me soo much easier.
Something to bare in mind when you're looking at both of those is the price is highly dependent on a number of factors;
- Type of generation, looking at the NY data they have a huge hydro generation, obviously the UK grid has much less of that
- Time of day, the Elexon graph is showing you the system price per 30 minute settlement period. You can see that some of those periods weren't anywhere near what you're quoting (there was literally a period where the system price was 0£ in the last 24h). https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=balancing/systemsellbuypri... makes the volatility much more obvious.
- The weather, it plays a big part in the system price due to price disparity of renewables (commonly wind in the UK grid) compared to oil based and gas generation.
- The interconnect, the UK grid has interconnectors to the EU grid so there's some price impact from that
You should also consider that the whole idea of a network of large independent system operators is part of the reason why power can be cheap in the US - you can dispatch the most economically viable generation source over a wide area. The UK is roughly equivalent to a mid-sized US state in terms of energy market (roughly half the market of California, for example). Having the UK act as it's own electrical balancing authority and responsible for it's own power contracts is remarkably inefficient. The prices reflect that. In a sane world all of Europe would be under a common balancing authority that could dispatch power economically based on the generation and load across the entire region. The US is moving in this direction, we've already got several very large BAs and will eventually be under a single authority or a few very large regional authorities.
This is one of those many cases where the politics of the situation and the physics of the situation go to war and the politics wins.
The UK already has power interconnects with lots of Europe, and all trading is done in a half-hourly market, so effectively a power generator in greece is competing with a power generator in scotland on price. Obviously as soon as the interconnects are full to capacity, that is no longer the case...
> In a sane world all of Europe would be under a common balancing authority that could dispatch power economically based on the generation and load across the entire region
There are some pretty solid geographical reasons why the UK the isn't tied into the European grid (more than by a few interconnects).
I assume that the UK is like the US in providing separate commercial electricity rates, so I'm not sure that there's a meaningful comparison to be made directly here.
No, consumers will likely be paying the capped price.
(A regulator on behalf of) the British government sets a six monthly price cap, based on the actual prices from a historical six month period, ordinarily this cap just means that people who are too poor or too lazy to "shop around" for a better deal pay no more than this amount for their electricity, but because the UK uses a lot of natural gas to make electricity and European gas prices are very high now (even though the UK has its own gas fields and doesn't use very much Russian gas) the cap is actually lower than any rational supplier would offer, and so there are no "better deals" out there, the alternatives are fixed rates far higher than the cap for long periods, essentially a bet that prices will go much higher and stay high.
Right now the price cap is 21p per kWh (plus standing charges) and in April it rises to 28p per kWh, it is already anticipated that in October it will be closer to 40p per kWh.
Because metric units are convenient that means right now wholesale energy prices above £210 per MWh mean a loss even before expenses to the suppliers, and from April until October, wholesale prices above £280 per MWh are likewise a loss. Peak prices of typically £300-£400 are literally bankrupting the suppliers.
For small suppliers the consequence is they went bankrupt last year, in huge numbers once these prices began to bite. Some hadn't even been profitable with normal prices, so now asked to eat millions of pounds per month of losses they just folded. Their customers were handed to the other suppliers, on these capped rates, which are of course hurt those suppliers too. The biggest will probably survive this, if necessary with government money (although none of the "suppliers" for consumers actually supply any electricity anywhere, they exist on paper to satisfy a pro-business agenda for government, obviously if you're confident of the principle that capitalism is a good idea then more capitalism is a better idea right?)
Anyway, as a result of the cap, essentially all consumers are not paying what electricity actually costs. British consumers are angry because their bills went up maybe 40-50%. But the wholesale prices more than doubled. They, as you might say, ain't seen nothing yet.
Which raises the question... Can I as a consumer put a big pump in my back yard to pump water uphill (paying the price cap), and then own a company that generates power from the water flowing down the hill, and get paid wholesale rates, profiting from the difference?
You're not going to get a wholesale contract for the electricity from a swimming pool full of water moved once a day. I have no idea where you even go to get the contract, but if you remember that lobby "meeting" scene from "The Big Short" you've got the idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUC1BuH_Gdo
By the time you're moving enough water to get a wholesale contract to sell your power, you're also going to need to buy enough electricity that you had to sign a wholesale contract for that and now you're just another small energy storage company, you are competing with the hollow mountain and all the startups who've bought a lot of batteries and a building on an industrial estate near a big transformer. You could doubtless make some money, this is a growing industry and enthusiasm goes some distance but you aren't going to get away with having a capped consumer supply contract and then selling that as wholesale electricity.
All RTO/ISOs in the US have a variety of dashboards to describe realtime and historical information, as do the Canadian entities. So you can see the same thing for CAISO, ERCOT, SPP, MISO, PJM, ISO-NE...etc on their websites.
Check out ElectricityMap.org, they scrape the independent dashboards (CAISO, NYISO, ISO-NE, ERCOT) for generation mix data, anything else (in the US) is pulled from EIA’s balancing authority API with a 6-12 hour lag (ElectricityMap uses machine learning to provide real time estimates based on historical data for data delayed zones, and it is spooky how accurate it is [Chile in particular] when the data backfills and “catches up”).
Woah Quebec seems to have the lowest (?) Carbon intensity on the map. Hydro power is just amazing, and I'm glad we had very forward looking PMs back in the 60-70s who pushed for massive hydro projects even when the costs were gigantic. There's still so much hydro potential in the province that isn't being used though.
Makes me wonder if it would be possible to build up our hydro capacity specifically for export instead of just exporting our surpluses like we do now. Maybe it won't be profitable now, but would it be too energy inefficient to transport much more electricity from the north of the province to further south than New England?
Yes that deeply saddens me honestly. I had a friend work on the Site C turbines and what an amazing project. Just massive
As an immigrant it's amazing to see the complacency and also the hostility that some here have towards infrastructure development when in my home country it's probably the thing we'd want the most
There is a fair amount of missing / misleading data on that map, e.g. Brazil is the 25th largest consumer of coal[0], but the map claims 95+% of Brazil's energy consumption is renewable and lists their coal percentage as "?"
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49436 ("Brazil largely relies on hydropower for electricity generation; in 2020, hydropower supplied 66% of its electricity demand. Wind and solar generation have grown quickly in recent years and had a combined 11% share of the country’s electricity generation in 2020. Biomass accounted for an 8% share. Fossil fuel-fired plants made up another 12% of electricity generation, while nuclear power accounted for 2%.")
Biosphere carbon is carbon neutral. If you grow a tree, pulp the tree, and burn the tree, the amount of overall carbon available has not changed as the process of growing new trees will reuse the same carbon. Ignoring external energy costs, obvs.
It's a little weird to think about but those wood burning plants are mostly taking the production waste of lumber processing and using it for fuel, similar to wood pellet grills but much larger, and it burns surprisingly clean, relatively speaking anyway.
What's killing us is pulling billions of tons of carbon that was buried deep in the earth and reinjecting that into the atmosphere.
However, while carbon neutral from trees would have been great in the past and hopefully will be again in the future, right now it’s not our saviour because it takes decades to rebind the carbon in a new tree and we don’t have decades anymore.
So it’s like natural gas, a marginally better thing than coal and oil but still not great.
Same with carbon offsets from planting trees, it might be fine to require planting trees for every flight or something but it really should not be used to “offset” the emissions because it won’t.
If the sawdust and twigs was just going to be dumped to rot, then it would give off methane, so similar to food composting, burning that output can be GHG negative. Its not going to be a primary source of power, because solar and wind are so ridiculously cheap and scalable, but every little bit helps in the short term. Once fossil fuels are elimanted it'll make sense to do other things with them, rather than burn them.
That's not true though, because it's not 1:1 -- we don't burn one tree, pause, plant a new tree, we burn millions of trees while many more millions of other trees are simultaneously being grown and are at various stages of maturity, only a handful of which (relatively) will be burned for fuel like this.
The carbon from the tree burned can be absorbed by all the other, currently growing, trees.
Huh! I guess it depends on whether those trees will actually end up being repopulated. I'm still not sure I'd put it in the same class as solar energy for that reason (not arguing against it as a power source), although perhaps solar generates so little the distinction is meaningless?
Solar and wind and hydro and nuclear aren't carbon neutral though, they're zero carbon (again excluding external costs of production, etc). With carbon-neutral the amount of biosphere C stays constant, with carbon zero is may potentially go back down as natural or artificial carbon capture processes happen.
It's not a distinction that is made in public discourse commonly but matters if, for example, it's powering a carbon capture system or producing methane from atmospheric gasses. Doing that via a carbon-neutral system would be a net negative energy relatively to carbon usage case, whereas using a nuclear reactor or solar plant to do it when it's overproducing relative to immediate grid load would work out.
> With carbon-neutral the amount of biosphere C stays constant, with carbon zero is may potentially go back down as natural or artificial carbon capture processes happen
The net effect is the same. A country running on biofuels and a country running on solar will have the same net production irrespective of carbon capture. One emits and absorbs while the other never emits.
Assuming a totally steady-state biosphere, and that zero-carbon energy and carbon capture are mutually exclusive, which are not a valid assumptions. Almost every first-world country's biosphere is limited by human action, so a country running on "zero carbon" energy can allow the biosphere to capture carbon at effectively the same rate as the biofuel country, and not release the carbon back into the atmosphere.
The problem with growing trees (or other biomass) for energy isn't that it isn't renewable, it's that the power/area is very low. A second and almost as important problem is the large amount of water it consumes (by transpiration). PV is an order of magnitude more efficient at converting sunlight to usable energy and uses little or no water.
Biomass ultimately can be useful for relatively minor uses (chemical feedstocks, perhaps aviation fuels), mostly as a carbon collector rather than an energy source.
Those trees are farmed for burning. So the wood is renewable - Every X unit of time, the earth renews that supply of wood. Renewable does not mean without carbon dioxide, although this is a carbon neutral process (CO2 taken out of the atmosphere when the trees grow, and released back as they burn).
are you sure? as I understand it, trees are farmed for wood and the waste (twigs, bark, and bits that are not able to be used in construction) are burned.
Take Drax in the UK. Every year Drax buys 14 million tonnes of wood, dries it, and then burns it to produce electricity. This is "renewable" energy and they get subsidised.
But wait, does the UK use so much wood that 14 million tonnes of it is waste like you're imagining ? No of course not. Drax imports whole forests of foreign wood, shipped in, to feed this process, these are labelled "waste" but they aren't any different than any other forests.
The trading activity that happens on these (namely via FTRs or Financial Transmission Rights) is a massive trading sector in itself, although the barriers to entry and the idiosyncrasies keep most people away.
Source: My first internships were crunching analytics on this very ISO at a prop shop.
None of the explanations below are correct. It is warmer but most people don’t have electric heat (resistive or heat pump). Fewer people are home but they are at work and commercial and industrial uses are the largest use. Electricity use peaks midday.
The drop is being caused by solar generation which peaks exactly during those hours. Behind-the-meter solar (and net-metered solar) won’t show up in the aggregate wholesale NYISO generation mix but it will clip demand in exactly the way you see here.
The morning and evening dips are generally caused by people operating ovens, microwaves, start-up of some factory equipment, but in this season, no A/C. A/C completely changes the curve as you approach June. Late afternoons become a single peak for the 24 hour periods.
Will you be factoring in the cost of an accident (you can adjust the rarity of the accident to get your expected value) destroying the entire economic engine of the state?
A lot of nuclear closures make no sense. Germany's indiscriminate shutting down of all the nuclear power plants in the country without waiting for renewable alternatives to be online was a bad idea.
However, specific shutdowns do make sense. A nuclear plant situation upstream of the biggest city in the US, right by the entire city's water supply is very high up in the list of existing nuclear shutdowns that make sense.
Will you be factoring in the healthcare costs associated with burning more diesel and natural gas? (Not even getting into the externalities of climate change.)
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I thought Kurzgesagt did a pretty good job of breaking this down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM. Basically, no matter how you look at it, nuclear is among the safest forms of energy we have, behind only solar, wind, and hydropower. Admittedly, deaths ≠ costs, but I imagine the numbers would be similar.
nuclear is also incredibly hard to build an accurate model for because the concern tends to revolve around the risk of human stupidity causing major issues.
on top of that, i feel like there is a lot of hand waving involved with the waste. if we really industrialized nuclear fuel worldwide - we would be creating a lot of nuclear waste. theoretically, this isnt a problem.
what id like to see, and may do one day if i run out of projects, is at what risk factor does nuclear equal fossil fuels. not, look how much better it is, but "this is about how dumb we would need to be in our handling of nuclear plants to cause about the same damage as our current system does"
making it apples to apples like that would make it much clearer.. % risk of this or that is tough to internalize for a lot of people. but is active sabotage of 1 out of every 10 plants necessary to be as bad as current energy? or is just 1 plant failing enough to make nuclear worse and we are just saying the likelihood of just 1 plant failing is astronomically small
Fossil fuels have enormous global risk, so that's not bad for nuclear.
The problem is that nuclear is competing against renewables, not fossil fuels. So, new nuclear needs an argument for why it's better than renewables, not why it's better than something that's on its way out anyway. The usual arguments, intermittency of renewables and land use, don't work well when examined closely, at least when justifying new nuclear power plants.
First of all, we’re currently closing nuclear plants that would could otherwise have a lot of life left, so this isn’t merely about whether to build new plants. But putting that aside for a moment:
> The problem is that nuclear is competing against renewables, not fossil fuels. So, new nuclear needs an argument for why it's better than renewables, not why it's better than something that's on its way out anyway.
Is it, though?
From where I’m standing—wind and solar just can’t seem to produce enough energy. I mean, look at the top link. Solar doesn’t even get its own category. So we fall back on fossil fuels.
Nuclear seems to be the only non-carbon source of power we have today that is actually capable of generating electricity in the amounts our society needs. Build a few more nuclear plants, and boom, New York’s electricity could be CO2 free, in a few years!
> wind and solar just can’t seem to produce enough energy
"They are not producing enough energy, therefore they can't produce enough energy." This is an obviously wrong argument, since there is nothing preventing vast expansion of renewable capacity. The world is constantly hit by 100,000 terawatts of sunlight; total world primary energy consumption is 18 TW.
> Nuclear seems to be the only non-carbon source of power we have today that is actually capable of generating electricity in the amounts our society needs.
i am equally interested in seeing it compared it to alternative fuels in the same manner. the point is more about putting nuclear into perspective with human error. and what kinds of human error are necessary to make nuclear dangerous.
I feel there is an assumption that there will always be enough people at every plant who are fully competent, which i do not think is the reality we would see if we replace most energy needs with nuclear
Also the Japanese government is projecting a total of somewhere between $200 billion and $600 billion to clean up the mess left behind -- amortizing that on the $/MWh produced by the power plant would probably lead to slightly more expensive power...
The proper way to make the accounting is to sum the cleanup for Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and then divide by the 120-180 operating nuclear plants and further divide by the 25-35 years of continuous operation:
∑ accidents
---------------------------
∑ fleet x years operated
Edit: This bond announcement[2] document claims that NYPA provides over 25% of NY's electricity and owns over 30% of the physical delivery infrastructure in the state.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Power_Authority
[2]: https://www.nypa.gov/-/media/nypa/documents/document-library...