Doggydogworld
Active Member
Cash and loan sales have been pretty flat at ~50 MW/quarter since the acquisition.
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jhm
Well-Known Member
US Wind & Solar Cost Less Than 74% Of Existing Coal Fleet | CleanTechnica
Three quarters of US coal capacity could be replaced at a savings with new wind and solar within 35 miles of the coal plant. That's 211 GW of coal to scrap. We need to do this. Also why not add 53 GW / 211 GWh of battery capacity to firm this out and replace about 50 GW of gas peakers while we're at it? Note the battery stations could use the coal plant interconnections and ground or be integrated with the new solar and wind resources.
Am I dreaming at this scale? No, it is only about 22 times the size of this project in Hawaii with full stored solar at 8 to 10 c/kWh. This is cheaper than gas peakers.
Hawaii’s new reality of solar plus storage: under 10 cents
We can do this. We can save money. We can ditch coal and gas peakers.
Three quarters of US coal capacity could be replaced at a savings with new wind and solar within 35 miles of the coal plant. That's 211 GW of coal to scrap. We need to do this. Also why not add 53 GW / 211 GWh of battery capacity to firm this out and replace about 50 GW of gas peakers while we're at it? Note the battery stations could use the coal plant interconnections and ground or be integrated with the new solar and wind resources.
Am I dreaming at this scale? No, it is only about 22 times the size of this project in Hawaii with full stored solar at 8 to 10 c/kWh. This is cheaper than gas peakers.
Hawaii’s new reality of solar plus storage: under 10 cents
We can do this. We can save money. We can ditch coal and gas peakers.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Off Shore
Off Topic Member
A concrete example from Idaho — a new solar installation will replace an existing coal plant at what appears to be a record low (for the US) price of only 2.175c/kWh. New record low solar power price? 2.175¢/kWh in Idaho
pv magazine thinks the low price is a result of the solar facility plugging into the existing grid/transmission lines from the coal plant that is being phased out, which reduces overall costs.
It's crazy not to swap coal for solar where it not only reduces CO2 but saves money.
Saudi Arabia has announced a 2.6GW solar project and upped its 2023 solar target to 20 GW from 4.9 GW. Will be worth watching to see how much of this gets matched with storage. Saudi Arabia announces 2.6GW solar project near Mecca
Doggydogworld
Active Member
None of these bids are unsubsidized. The recent AEC installation was 11 cents (or 11.9, don't recall exactly). The latest set of bids, which will be built over the next few years, have headline prices as low as 8 cents/kWh. But that's misleading, as the lowest bids are $/month instead of $/kWh. So it's 8 cents per theoretical kWh, not per actual kWh. Curtailment is common on the islands, and when curtailed AES can avoid battery cycles. Since battery cycles are the most expensive part of these installations, avoided cycles reduce AES's all-in monthly cost leading to a lower bid.
HECO could screw AES by massively promoting EVs and mid-day (i.e. workplace) charging. That would eliminate curtailment and drive AES's costs up without changing the monthly price. At least in theory. Real contracts have tons of fine print which contain escalators and similar to keep prices in line with costs.
Federal government pays 30% of these deals upfront via ITC (plus MACRS and such which we'll ignore). I have no problem with that, but the cost is the cost no matter who pays. If the ITC was 100% AES would only charge HECO 0.1 cents/kWh. That's great for HECO and their customers, but it doesn't change the real cost. That subsidy change wouldn't mean we, as a country, could suddenly shut down all coal plants and enjoy free solar. We'd just pay for it out of a different pocket.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
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Off Shore
Off Topic Member
Interesting. So removing the $1T annual subsidy for fossil fuel would mean we'd be paying for it out of a much smaller pocket, right?
Doggydogworld
Active Member
And.... we've come full circle. That article is about wind/solar without storage. JHM extended the discussion to solar with storage. Completely different economics.
Grid-scale storage is an expensive, brute force way to try and make non-dispatchable renewable supplies pretend to be dispatchable. Moving to dispatchable demand is a much smarter approach. And EVs are by far the largest potential source of dispatchable demand.
Doggydogworld
Active Member
It's a made-up number. Fossil fuels are massive net tax contributors in the US, Europe, etc. It's the externalities that are the issue.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
Nobody pays the externalities directly but we all pay the health and welfare costs of dirty air and climate change and disasters.
It's the tax subsidies that are the issue. Tax subsidies make fossil fuels cheaper and fossil fuel profits greater and create more costs for everyone.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
Coal plants are non-dispatchable. They can't turn on and off like batteries. Coal plants must run continuously. They are literal dinosaurs. Useless for following load.
They have lots of sun of course but also it's hot. Do they do something to address PV heat degradation or just accept lower efficiency?
Coal plants are dispatchable.
Dispatchable generation - Wikipedia
It's not response time that makes it dispatchable, it's the ability to be deployed on demand.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
You really should read the Wikipedia article that you linked to:
Although theoretically dispatchable, certain thermal plants such as nuclear or coal are designed to run as base load power plants and may take hours or sometimes days to cycle off and then back on again.[5]
Do cash and loan sales offer the same opportunities to monetize the Solar Tax Credits using tax equity structures with non-controlling interests as the prior leases/PPAs did?
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Pardon me I thought you were taking about the AES deal in Tucson, not the AEC rates on an island in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
The one in Arizona was "significantly less than 4.5 cents", 8.5 unsubsidized. And that was two years ago.
How can Tucson Electric get solar + storage for 4.5¢/kWh?
jhm
Well-Known Member
I'd point out that the analysis which determined that 74% of coal could be replaced at lower cost with wind and solar, also finds the following:
I believe 2025 is out far enough that ICT (solar) and PTC (wind) are no longer in play. So this 246 GW of coal is "at risk" by 2025 even without current subsidization schemes. So the only real impact of these subsidies would be to hasten the replacement of some fraction of the 246GW. It about timing, not the end result.
What this study does not contemplate is a precise timetable for each plant to be replaced. To replace 246 GW of coal would require some 500 to 750 GW of wind and solar given the capacity factor differences. To put this into perspective, installments of 7 GW wind and 14 GW solar have been observed recently. For 2019, the EIA is expecting a mere 24 GW of total new capacity with 11 GW wind and 4.3 GW solar. Rates like 25 GW per year come nowhere close to replacing 246 GW of coal by 2025 or even by 2035.
So given the scope of what needs to be replaced and how incredibly slowly progress is being made on this replacement, complaining about ITC/PTC subsidies is little more than a red herring. We need to be cranking out more than 50 GW of solar and wind each year just to replace uneconomical coal plants by 2030. Current subsidies and policies are way too weak to avoid overpayment for energy. Whatever you think tax payers might save by cutting subsidies will be more than overpaid in aggregate by rate payers. Either way the whole economy winds up paying too much for electricity over the next two decades for moving too slowly to replace coal. And this is not even including the very real costs of pollution and climate change which could also be avoided.
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