Prediction: Coal has fallen. Nuclear is next then Oil.

[DigAdrenaline]

Reliability is key for an electric grid. renewable energy is certainly part of the portfolio but cannot be the entire power supply. Green hydrogen is not cheap as it needs storage

Grid reliability is FAR less of an issue with local generation and minor storage. As planned by (as only one example) Tesla's Solar roof and Powerwall. Adding in lower consumption via things like LED lighting and vastly more efficient cooling (hopefully heating, eventually) makes this continually easier.

Kev.

 

[SageBrush]

Grid reliability is FAR less of an issue with local generation and minor storage.

I strongly disagree, although the details matter and each locality is its own puzzle. My state of NM has both excellent PV and wind so it can overbuild, disperse over a large area, and reach high VRE penetration without having to spend immense sums on storage. Other states are not so well endowed and they will need DC transmission lines to resource rich areas.

 

[ladysbff]

‘A Slap in the Face’: The Pandemic Disrupts Young Oil Careers ‘A Slap in the Face’: The Pandemic Disrupts Young Oil Careers

Okay I got curious and clicked

I'm laughing cause your location says Ft Worth. I know folks who have worked in oil and gas in TX for years and it seems like they really thought the fossil fuel gravy train would never end. Money is a powerful blinding agent. So not surprised especially if Sabrina is from TX herself, could be cultural, maybe other people in her family have benefited from the TX energy industry?

Ms. Burns was enticed into an oil and gas career by stories her father, a helicopter pilot. Ms. Burns said, she had some doubts about her chosen industry... Her parents persuaded her to stick with her program.

Next interviewee:

Stephen Zagurski, a graduate student in geology at Rice University, said the timing of his coming graduation was “not perfect, far from it.”... “Demand is going to come back,” he said. “Let’s be honest here, how many things in our daily lives have some kind of a petroleum-based product in them.” Mr. Zagurski has an internship with Roxanna Oil, a small company with managers who are his second cousins, and he has steadily been given greater responsibility.

Next interviewee:

Myles Hampton Arvie, a senior at the University of Houston who is studying finance and accounting, wanted to follow his father into the oil and gas industry.

Next interviewee:

Clayton Brown, a graduate student at the University of Houston who is studying petroleum geology, remembers finding an article online four years ago that asserted that the future couldn’t look brighter for geologists investigating underground oil and gas reserves. “I saw the salary that petroleum geologists make and I got immediately interested,” Mr. Brown said. Now 23, Mr. Brown has $55,000 in student debt. By the time he graduates next fall, he will owe about $70,000. To make matters worse, the small oil company where he was interning stopped paying him recently as it cut costs to manage the downturn.



Unfortunately for these young folks, seems like not much has changed in Texas in 4 years. Meanwhile, much has changed in the world outside of it.

 

[DigAdrenaline]

I strongly disagree, although the details matter and each locality is its own puzzle. My state of NM has both excellent PV and wind so it can overbuild, disperse over a large area, and reach high VRE penetration without having to spend immense sums on storage. Other states are not so well endowed and they will need DC transmission lines to resource rich areas.

I mean the grid will become virtualized. Rather than a huge wind/solar farm outside the city, the house roofs will mean that the city itself becomes the grid. Storage will be only what you need for your own use, often provided by the battery in your EV. Any supplement needed would be small.

Outages would be very localized. Load fluctuations disappear because peaks and valleys are handled by the on-site battery,

Long distance runs like the ones in Cali would disappear, as would the fire hazard inherent with them.

Other than existing load needs, which will decline, I fail to see any need for a large centralized generating station. It will clearly be a transition, over many years, but it coming.

There are plenty of threads on here where homes are already running at net zero. Much like EVs, that will lose its novelty over time. Commercial/manufacturing/etc will be longer, but will follow as we are starting to see now in the EV space with police departments, taxis and rentals beginning to incorporate EVs as well. Expect geothermal to play in this space too.

 

[PazzoPower]

It just boils down to economics. What is your assumed cost per watt for nuclear? A Gas Turbine running green H2 can be just as clean and reliable as a nuclear power plant. Jesse Jenkins assumed ~$6/w for nuclear. I mean... if we're just going to invent numbers from fantasy land I raise you a Gas Turbine that cost $0.50/w and burns green H2 produced from surplus wind and solar for ~$0.01/kWh. Checkmate

You want to know where all the oil production has gone? Has anyone one taken into account that air travel has declined 96% according to the TSA since the pandemic and they are scraping jumbo jets, just look at Mojave Bone yard. No cars going to Disney parks, closures have lost 8 billion. People are working from home via Zoom not driving to an office. No cars driving Schools that are closed. Cruise ships are being chopped up for scrap metal. California has lost 80 billion in tourism. Now think how much fuel that equates to. . Also think about how much tax revenue that is. All these things require travel.

 

[nwdiver]

You want to know where all the oil production has gone? Has anyone one taken into account that air travel has declined 96% according to the TSA since the pandemic and they are scraping jumbo jets, just look at Mojave Bone yard. No cars going to Disney parks, closures have lost 8 billion. People are working from home via Zoom not driving to an office. No cars driving Schools that are closed. Cruise ships are being chopped up for scrap metal. California has lost 80 billion in tourism. Now think how much fuel that equates to. . Also think about how much tax revenue that is. All these things require travel.

.... did you quote the wrong post? .... not really sure what any of that has to do with the economics of nuclear power....

 

[SageBrush]

I mean the grid will become virtualized.

What does that mean ?

I understand the allure of rooftop PV: No extra use of land. The argument for distributed battery is a lot less obvious to me except as a desperation measure when faced with a fossil utility.

 

[nwdiver]

What does that mean ?

I understand the allure of rooftop PV: No extra use of land. The argument for distributed battery is a lot less obvious to me except as a desperation measure when faced with a fossil utility.

Demand Response has often been referred to as a 'virtual' power plant. I think essentially anything that allows you to balance supply and demand with software instead of a physical asset. (though you're using physical assets to meet a secondary purpose)

 

[eevee-fan]

Coal falling out of favor in Wisconsin.

Here's why Wisconsin is rapidly switching from coal to solar - Electrek

 

[Dave EV]

Coal falling out of favor in Wisconsin.

Here's why Wisconsin is rapidly switching from coal to solar - Electrek

When solar is undercutting coal in price above the 42nd latitude where electricity retails for less than $0.11 / kWh, that really shows you just how far solar has come and how much trouble fossil fuels are in.

 

[PazzoPower]

.... did you quote the wrong post? .... not really sure what any of that has to do with the economics of nuclear power....

haha. yes, this was for ‘A Slap in the Face’: The Pandemic Disrupts Young Oil Careers

 

[PazzoPower]

‘A Slap in the Face’: The Pandemic Disrupts Young Oil Careers ‘A Slap in the Face’: The Pandemic Disrupts Young Oil Careers

. Nehikhuere, 24, did not want to identify his employer, but he said it is laying off workers and is debating how aggressively it should pivot away from oil and gas toward renewable energy. If the company does move rapidly toward cleaner energy, he said, he is not sure if there will be a place in it for him. “How much are my skills going to transfer?”

Oil Production is down. Air travel has declined 96% according to the TSA since the pandemic and they are scraping jumbo jets, just look at Mojave Bone yard. No cars going to Disney parks, closures have lost 8 billion. People are working from home via Zoom not driving to an office. No cars driving Schools that are closed. Cruise ships are being chopped up for scrap metal. California has lost 80 billion in tourism. Now think how much fuel that equates to. . Also think about how much tax revenue that is. All these things require travel.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

When solar is undercutting coal in price above the 42nd latitude where electricity retails for less than $0.11 / kWh, that really shows you just how far solar has come and how much trouble fossil fuels are in.

What the article fails to mention (as many do) is that Wisconsin has also significantly increased natural gas generation.

Wisconsin - State Energy Profile Overview - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

In 2019, for the first time in more than three decades, coal-fired power plants provided less than half (42%) of Wisconsin's electricity net generation.
Natural gas fueled 34% of Wisconsin's electricity generation in 2019, almost four times more than its share a decade earlier.
In 2019, 8% of Wisconsin's utility-scale net electricity generation came from renewable energy resources, including hydroelectric power, wind, biomass, and solar.

The rapid trend across the USA has been replacement of coal generation with natural gas, with a separate trend of growth of renewables.

Although solar production is significantly lower in winter, any substitution of natural gas is useful because natural gas prices are highest in winter. Here in New England the natural gas grid itself has capacity constraints that force up prices.

 

[SageBrush]

What the article fails to mention (as many do) is that Wisconsin has also significantly increased natural gas generation.

I wonder if WS has heard of wind power

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

I wonder if WS has heard of wind power

WI has about 1GW of wind power, but any expansion may depend on improved transmission capacity.
There is planned connection that would open them up to more wind from Iowa.

The EIA only lists 4 solar projects as planned in Wisconsin at the moment.

 

[SmartElectric]

I mean the grid will become virtualized. Rather than a huge wind/solar farm outside the city, the house roofs will mean that the city itself becomes the grid. Storage will be only what you need for your own use, often provided by the battery in your EV. Any supplement needed would be small

As a fellow Canadian, this is very much not the case for me. Our 3.3kW array produced 72 kWh in the month of December 2020, lots of snow days. With two EV's, one of which is a 2013 Tesla which uses 3 kWh daily standing still ("fantom drain"), our daily use is 30 kWh with everyone working or schooling from home. Our home battery is 11 kWh, not nearly enough storage to weather 3 months (Dec, Jan, Feb) where there is practically little solar available.

The good news, wind and water/hydro has been strong in Ontario, so a lot of our overnight electricity charging cars and battery is renewable.

Summary : 3.3 kW of solar in Ontario Canada barely covers the fantom drain of a Tesla sitting idle plus a bit more. Solar is NOT the year round solution for where I live. I love solar (and have solar heated pool), but winter months here are different than California...

 

[DwightKSchrute]

Grid reliability is FAR less of an issue with local generation and minor storage. As planned by (as only one example) Tesla's Solar roof and Powerwall. Adding in lower consumption via things like LED lighting and vastly more efficient cooling (hopefully heating, eventually) makes this continually easier.

Kev.

You are contradicting yourself. Local generation and storage in a grid must be at least as reliable as the current grid for this to work. I think we can all agree that if we can't use air conditioning, lights, or charge our cars, the electrical distribution system is not a utility.

 

[nwdiver]

You are contradicting yourself. Local generation and storage in a grid must be at least as reliable as the current grid for this to work. I think we can all agree that if we can't use air conditioning, lights, or charge our cars, the electrical distribution system is not a utility.

It's not a contradiction... it's about the grid becoming smarter and more dynamic. Instead of blindly matching supply with demand as we've done since the first light bulb technology is making it possible to increasingly match demand with supply. If you can reduce the charge rate of an EV when air conditioning ramps up you can cope with a less stable grid. Instead of increasing supply to match a 3kW increase in demand you can simply reduce flexible loads like EV charging by 3kW.

 

[S'toon]

Then there's the desperation of RW governments who don't give a flying f about the world, and companies who don't give a flying f except about making a quick buck. "Hey, let's build MORE coal mines, and ignore the fact that there's no market for the coal." Let's pretend the few jobs will be a HUGE boon.
Plans for the UK's first deep coal mine in 30 years can progress after the government decided not to intervene.

 

[ReddyLeaf]

I didn’t see this posted:
Huge drop in Chinese coal imports from Australia and power outages.
https://www.iea-coal.org/china-power-shortage-sparks-debate-over-ban-on-australian-coal-imports/
https://www.ft.com/content/e83fffeb-3ef2-4b67-8989-6d17f153d8d4
Some historical context for the trade tensions:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/In...ralia-clash-How-it-started-and-how-it-s-going