Why Trump and big oil won't win

 This is my chart using data from Our World In Data of the price of PV panels in US$ per watt, in constant 2024 dollars.  In other words, a 5000 kW system, ignoring inverter, grid connections, land, and installation would cost 5000x30 cents, or $1500.  (Of course, this pricing is for wholesale systems with economies of scale; a rooftop solar system would be more expensive.)   This is a 99.8% fall from 1975.

Note logarithmic scale

On its own, this is not enough to show that solar will provide most of our power, inevitably, eventually.  After all, the denialists will gleefully tell you the sun doesn't shine at night (goodness me, who knew?) 

So you've got to add the cost of storage.  And the fact is, battery prices are falling even faster than PV prices. 

This chart shows BNEF's battery costs survey data, also in constant dollars, with my estimates for 2025 and 2026.  If you do the numbers, it turns out that adding 4 hours of storage to a solar farm will add just $12/MWh of electricity generated to the cost.  Adding 8 hours storage would cost $24/MWh, which is still cheaper than new coal, or (outside the US) new gas.

Note log scale

But, I hear the denialists wail, what about dunkeflaute, those periods in high latitudes when there is no wind, and little solar, and it's cold?  Well, until we get long-term storage, we will need gas peaking.  We can make the gas using electrolysis of water, and using the hydrogen produced to make methane via the Sabatier system, which would in effect be long-term storage.  Or we can go on using fossil gas.  But even if we do the latter, we will still have cut emissions from electricity generation by 95%.  

A final chart from Our World in Data.  It shows a classic "learning curve".  A new technology starts.  It's expensive, and has only a few uses out in the wild.   But usage increases.  Manufacturers get a bit better at making it.  Demand increases, costs fall.  Falling costs lead to still more demand, which in turn leads to still lower prices, and so on, until the technology has gained a 100% market share. 

The chart uses a double log scale.  On the vertical axis, each tick mark shows a halving of PV module prices.   On the horizontal axis, each tick mark shows a 10-fold increase in cumulative installations.  So each 10-fold increase in installations leads to a halving of module prices --- and vice versa.

There is probably another 10-fold increase in solar installations in prospect over the next 10 years.  Which will be associated with another halving of the cost of solar.  Meanwhile, the rapid progress of EVS and the need for stationary storage will drive down battery costs, which will continue to halve every four years.

This is irresistible.  The learning curve is being driven by fierce competition, which in turn drives rapid technological advance.  There is nothing Trump or Big Oil or coal miners or the rabid Right can do about this.  They can delay the technological advances in the USA, which will just retard the US economy, but in the rest of the world, the advance of solar plus storage to market dominance in inevitable.  Except in high latitudes.

Dunkelflaute

When I first heard about this phenomenon, I explained it to myself as occurring when there was a cold, cloudy, windless winter's day.  Which isn't too bad a quick descriptor.  But here is a more informative Wikipedia article: 

 

In the renewable energy sector, a dunkelflaute (German: [ˈdʊŋkəlˌflaʊtə] ⓘ, lit. 'dark doldrums' or 'dark wind lull', plural dunkelflauten)[1] is a period of time in which little or no energy can be generated with wind and solar power, because there is neither wind nor sunlight.[2][3][4] In meteorology, this is known as anticyclonic gloom.[5]

Meteorology

Unlike a typical anticyclone, dunkelflauten are associated not with clear skies, but with very dense cloud cover (0.7–0.9), consisting of stratus, stratocumulus, and fog.[6] As of 2022 there is no agreed quantitative definition of dunkelflaute.[7] Li et al. define it as wind and solar both below 20% of capacity during a particular 60-minute period.[8] High albedo of low-level stratocumulus clouds in particular – sometimes the cloud base height is just 400 meters – can reduce solar irradiation by half.[6]

In the north of Europe, dunkelflauten originate from a static high-pressure system that causes an extremely weak wind combined with overcast weather with stratus or stratocumulus clouds.[9] There are 2–10 dunkelflaute events per year.[10] Most of these events occur from October to February; typically 50 to 150 hours per year, a single event usually lasts up to 24 hours.[11]

In Japan, on the other hand, dunkelflauten are seen in summer and winter. The former is caused by stationary fronts in early summer and autumn rainy seasons (called Baiu and Akisame, respectively),[12] while the latter is caused by arrivals of south-coast cyclones.[13]

Renewable energy effects

These periods are a big issue in energy infrastructure if a significant amount of electricity is generated by variable renewable energy (VRE) sources, mainly solar and wind power.[14][1][15] Dunkelflauten can occur simultaneously over a very large region, but are less correlated between geographically distant regions, so multi-national power grid schemes can be helpful.[16] Events that last more than two days over most of Europe happen about once every five years.[17] To ensure power during such periods flexible energy sources may be used, energy may be imported, and demand may be adjusted.[18][19]

For alternative energy sources, countries use fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), hydroelectricity or nuclear power and, less often, energy storage to prevent power outages.[20][21][8][22] Long-term solutions include designing electricity markets to incentivise clean power which is available when needed.[19] A group of countries is following on from Mission Innovation to work together to solve the problem in a clean, low-carbon way by 2030, including looking into carbon capture and storage and the hydrogen economy as possible parts of the solution.[23]

Renewables naysayers say that because of dunkelflauten, we can't use wind and solar to power our economies.  But let's have a look at how often they happen:  a maximum of 150 hours a year, or, about 1.7% of the time.  

Because battery storage is getting so cheap, we soon won't need to use gas peaking plants.  The problem with dunkelflauten is that they last much longer than the 4 to 6 hours when electricity demand exceeds supply, the sort of shortage that can easily be covered by batteries.  For now, until cost-effective long-term storage is invented, we will need to use gas to make sure the lights don't go out.  However, we can make synthetic natural gas from green hydrogen using the Sabatier process, or we may store hydrogen, which we can burn in gas plants for the 150 hours a year when we need it.  These won't add net CO2 to the atmosphere. 

Even if we used fossil gas to provide 100% of the power during dunkelflaute events, and renewables/nuclear the rest of the time, we could still cut emissions from power generation by 98%.  

Because we won't be using dunkelflaute gas plants for most of the year, the cost of their electricity per MWh will be high, because the cost of interest payments and depreciation will be spread over only a few hours of usage.  But, by the same token, taken over the whole year, the occasional high cost per MWh will be spread over thousands of hours of electricity generation.

Dunkelflaute is not an insoluble problem.  We can fix it, and still switch to renewables and cut our emissions.

Pan-Europe wind & solar = stable output

 A most interesting thread from Sarastro on Bluesky.

The past two days we [have] seen something interesting in the European power market: continent wide balancing that is providing security of supply at the lowest prices driven by commercial incentives…

We know that solar and wind and inverse output characteristics. A system that contains both is more secure than one or other alone. This chart from @ember-energy.org makes the point on a European wide scale

 

You can see that on a European wide scale the combined output of wind and solar is less intermittent than solar and wind alone. These charts do not show the risk of hourly balancing though so you still need a source of flexible generation. [Or storage]

This morning we can see that in action. The French grid is importing power from Spain and exporting it to other markets across the French grid in Northern Europe. That’s how you get solar from southern Europe to Northern Europe and wind from the north to the south

 

But take a look at the output of the French nukes: the French have reduced nuclear output in response: they are not just wheeling power across the French system they are managing the French system for cost and using the nukes as a battery

It’s a revelation for those (like me) who have thought of nuclear has inflexible. EDF is showing us that at the heart of the European grid is a huge battery, its nuclear park, capable of firming both south solar and northern wind.

Yesterday we saw something similar with wind from the uk being imported into France and French exports to other European countries

But critically the nukes modulating output…

A couple of points:

1.  I've talked before about how wind and solar tend to balance each other, not just daily, but also seasonally.  It's not perfect, but on a continent-wide grid (as in Europe) the necessary storage/dispatchable power needed (such as gas) is significantly reduced from what would be needed if just wind or just solar was used.
2. Like Sarastro, I also did not know that nuclear could be ramped up and down.  Notice that the percentage moves are small --- roughly 20% --- but because nuclear is so large in European generation, that's enough to go a long way to balancing total grid output.  From the top chart, I estimate the seasonal variability of wind and solar together as ~10% of total output.
3. New nuclear is still much more expensive than new wind+solar combined with 5 hours of storage.  In Australia (without nuclear), 5 hours of storage with 20% overcapacity of wind and solar is enough to provide a stable grid for 99% of the time.    The tricky period seems to occur in July (mid-winter in Australia), when periods of little wind combine with low insolation and high demand for heating, a situation which is called dunkelflaute.  Even though this is a problem only 1% of the time, it would be unacceptable to close down the grid.
4. The solution, until we get better methods of long-term storage, is gas.  Currently, natural gas, but plausibly, in future, synthetic natural gas via the Sabatier process, produced using surplus green electricity.  
5. Alternatively, concentrated solar power (CSP) may do the trick.  Vast Solar, an Australian company, is busy constructing a CSP plant at Port Augusta in South Australia (on the edge of the desert, with lots of sunshine and heat --- CSP doesn't just use light, as solar panels do, it also uses infra-red, otherwise known as heat.)  CSP provides much more storage than batteries (1 hours compared with 4), so is much cheaper for long duration storage.  (Now called Vast Energy, the 30 MW CSP plant is yet to be started, with start-up now planned for Q2/2025.  However, they will now be co-producing green methanol at the plant as well)

Westinghouse's new SMR

 From Reuters

U.S. company Westinghouse unveiled plans on Thursday for a small modular reactor to generate virtually emissions-free electricity.

Rita Baranwal, the Westinghouse Electricity Co's top technology officer, said the reactor, dubbed AP300 for its planned 300 Megawatt capacity, will not use special fuels or liquid metal coolants unlike some other next-generation reactors.

It will be a smaller version of its AP1000 reactor, several of which are operating in China, and which are ramping up in Georgia at the Vogtle plant, after years of delay and billions of dollars over budget.

Despite hurdles for new nuclear, Baranwal was confident. "We've kept it simple, designed it on demonstrated and licensed technology, and I think that's one of the advantages that we have with this concept," she told Reuters in an interview. Westinghouse, owned by Brookfield Business Partners, plans to start constructing the reactor by 2030 and have it running by 2033.

Small modular reactors (SMR) are meant to fit new applications such as replacing shut coal plants and being located in more remote communities. President Joe Biden's administration believes that maintaining existing nuclear plants and developing next-generation reactors is crucial for its goal of decarbonizing the economy by 2050.

So far the design for only one SMR, planned by NuScale Power Corp, has been approved by U.S. regulators and it still needs permits.

Westinghouse did not reveal how much the first reactor would cost, but said later units would cost about $1 billion. The company, based in western Pennsylvania, has had informal talks with parties in neighboring states Ohio and West Virginia about the potential building of AP300s at former coal plants.

Westinghouse also hopes to sell reactors to countries in eastern Europe, even though nuclear power critics have expressed concerns that developers and governments should think carefully before building new nuclear plants anywhere near the region. They noted that Russia took the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the site of repeated shelling.

Baranwal said Russia's actions have made countries motivated to become more energy independent and the AP300 will be passively safe because it does not need power supply or human intervention for 72 hours in the event of an incident.

Westinghouse also sees potential customers in sub-Saharan Africa, which could bring electricity for the first time to some areas.

The company is not sure yet whether the technology can be exported to China, where the first AP1000s began operations in 2018. That year, former President Donald Trump's administration issued restrictions on exports of nuclear technology newer than the AP1000 due to nuclear proliferation concerns.

Baranwal said if the U.S. government deems AP300 to be a subset of the earlier reactor technology "then we can start entertaining the possibilities" of exporting it to China.

It sounds good, except ......

For 1billion, we'll get 300 MW of electricity.  So, let's assume a 90% capacity factor, a 30-year life, zero fuel and maintenance costs, and an interest rate of zero.   Cost per MWh of output would be 1 billion/(300*365*30*0.9), or a breath-taking 338/MWh, more than ten times the cost of wind or solar.  

In addition, it won't be available until 2033.  And we need to have mostly switched over to zero carbon electricity generation by then.   

So, too late and too expensive.

Society might be willing to pay for nuclear for the last 10% of generation after we have replaced coal with wind, solar, hydro, tide and wave power, but this is very expensive.  Using gas for 'dunkelflaute' periods (when it's dark and cold and still) will produce emissions, but synthetic natural gas (which won't) made by the Sabatier (or some other) process will be cheaper than this SMR.   One rather gets the feeling that this project has been concocted to attract subsidies from the government, rather than a real commercial enterprise.

All the same, it makes sense that governments should buy SMRs, from varying suppliers and of varying technologies, because they might work, and if they do they'll make our grid more stable, plus unlike the infamous Vogtle nuclear plant, the total cost will be limited.

A near 100% renewables grid is feasible.

From RenewEconomy

(I talked about this analyst's simulations here and here)

There have been many simulations of a 100% renewable electricity grid for Australia, including some ground-breaking studies from Beyond Zero Emissions, The University of New South Wales and the ANU.

Even the recently released Integrated System Plan from the Australian Energy Market Operator exceeds 97% renewable in the 2040s.

So, what is the point of another one?

Well, this simulation differs from the others in a couple of ways:It uses actual generation and demand data rather than relying on synthetic traces for those quantities
It is being conducted in near real-time

The benefit of using actual generation and demand data is that some people are sceptical of synthetic wind and solar traces. They may also be dubious when you start modifying demand.

The benefit of the near real-time modelling is that people tend to be more concerned about recent events. If a recent day had very little wind and solar generation, some will take that as proof that you cannot run an electricity grid on renewables. A study based on data from a few years ago is unlikely to change their minds.

Another aspect of near real-time modelling is that it is one thing to optimise a simulation when you have all the data in advance, it is another when you design the simulation before you get the data.

With that in mind, exactly one year ago I started running a simple simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with approximately five hours of storage (24GW/120GWh).

Each week, I would download demand and generation data from OpenNEM. I left demand unchanged.

The generation data for wind, rooftop and utility solar data was rescaled to supply ~60%, 25% and 20% of demand respectively over the year. For example, over the last year utility solar generation has met 5% of demand. The target for utility solar was 20%, so I rescaled the last 7 days of utility solar data by 4x (ie, 20% divided by 5%).

Note that the sum of 60%, 25% and 20% is greater than 100%. This is important. Any optimised model of a highly renewable grid will have significant amounts of over-generation.

It is better to over-generate and have some curtailment than to generate exactly what you need over the year with significant shortfalls during some months requiring huge amounts of storage or backup. As will be seen later in this article, this simulation ended up having 18% excess generation over the year.

The decision to use 60% wind, 45% solar was based on rough optimisation experiments. A mixture reasonably close to 50:50 takes advantage of the fact that wind and solar are negatively correlated with each other.

Wind tends to generate above average during the night and during winter, complementing the solar generation. I have a bias to wind as it requires less short-term storage, which is used primarily to shift solar generation from the day to the evening and night.

My simulation used the 24GW/120GWh of assumed storage and existing hydro to firm up the wind and solar and match demand.

Both the hydro and storage were assumed highly flexible. Note that I did not use the actual hydro generation data. I completely changed the dispatch of hydro so that it had minimal generation on days when it wasn’t needed, and elevated levels whenever there was a day with significant shortfalls of wind and solar relative to demand.

This is reasonable as most of the hydro capacity on the NEM is associated with large storage dams, making the hydro highly dispatchable. However, to maintain consistency with historical generation, hydro generation was also subject to the following constraints:

Hydro generation was kept between 200 MW and 6,000 MW
Weekly hydro generation was kept above 168 GWh
Annual hydro generation was targeted at between 6% and 9% of demand, though ideally closer to 15,000 GWh, or about 7.5% of demand.

If the wind, solar, storage and hydro was unable to meet demand, then the model supplements generation with ‘Other’. ‘Other’ was deliberately left undefined. It could be gas generation. Indeed, in the short to medium term it is likely to be existing gas peakers that will help firm renewables along with storage and hydro.

But longer term, ‘Other’ could be a highly flexible dispatchable generator running on renewable fuels such as biofuels or green hydrogen, or it could be long-term storage such as Snowy 2.0. When calculating the renewable percentage of the simulation, I have assumed ‘other’ is not renewable, even though it is hoped that in the future ‘other’ will become renewable.

Each week I posted the results of the simulation of the previous seven days to my Twitter account. On Wednesday of this week, I posted the 52nd week, marking a full year of simulations.

I’ve copied the simulation below. It is fitting that the renewable penetration of 99% for the final week of the simulation very closely matched the renewable penetration over the entire 52-week period, 98.8%

Key results from the 52 weeks of simulations are summarised as follows:

• Renewables met 98.8% of demand over the year, with the remaining 1.2% met by ‘Other’
• ‘Other’ generation peaked at 6.59 GW on the night of July 12. Over the year its average capacity factor was 4.3%.
• Hydro met 6.9% of demand. This was lower than my target of 7.5%, and also less than actual hydro generation of 8%. This means that dam storage levels in my simulation would have ended the year higher than they did in the real world.
• 17% of the wind and solar generation was in excess of requirements and ended up being curtailed.
• 11% of wind and solar generation went into storage. Storage discharge met 10% of demand.
• 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed

The wind and solar generation ended up slightly exceeding the targets of 60%, 20% and 25% for wind, utility solar and rooftop solar respectively.

It is impossible to know in advance if the year would be above or below average, so it is not surprising that they did not exactly hit their target. However, the methodology used to rescale the wind and solar data meant that there was a high probability that they would exceed their targets.

The graph above shows the weekly fraction of demand that was met by ‘Other’. Levels of ‘Other’ were essentially zero for almost seven months from September to late March. However, by late April, the simulation started to become more ‘interesting’.

Most weeks from late April through to the present required some levels of ‘Other’, due to the inability of wind, solar, storage and hydro to entirely meet demand throughout the week. The week starting on June 29 proved to be the most difficult week of the simulation, with ‘Other’ having to provide 8.1% of demand that week.

The graph illustrates clearly that late autumn and winter will prove to be the most challenging periods for a mostly renewable grid in Australia. Solar generation in late June and early August can often be as low half the annual average.

And while wind tends to be above average during winter, there are often stretches of two or three days in a row that have significantly below average wind. This can leave a significant shortfall in generation that cannot be entirely filled by existing hydro.

The challenge of matching supply and demand during winter will be even more difficult as we start to electrify much more of the gas heating that is present in the southern states, particularly Victoria. Doing so will elevate winter demand much more than summer demand.

It is important to note that wind in Queensland is not well correlated with wind in the southern states. That means that when it is calm in South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and NSW, it is often windier than average in Queensland. For this reason, it is unfortunate that wind only makes up 3% of Queensland demand, or about one-quarter of the NEM average of 12%.

More wind in QLD will greatly help to improve the geographic diversity of renewable generation, making it easier to match supply and demand over the year. However, it will not completely solve the problem. There will remain many days with poor renewable supply in both the southern states and in Queensland. Increases in Queensland wind generation will make it easier to get closer to 100% renewable electricity, but is unlikely to significantly reduce the peak requirements of ‘Other’.

It is interesting to note that the ISP is predicting that approximately 9GW of peaking gas or liquids will need to be retained in the NEM’s generation mix out to 2050. This is more than the 6.6GW required so far in this study.

However, the ISP is a much more sophisticated model than the simulation I have done here, with increased demand due to increased electrification. It has modelled many years of generation, ensuring that supply stays secure and reliable. It is quite likely that some winters may prove more challenging in a high renewable world than the winter of 2022 simulated here.

For countries without hydro, the results of this simulation for Australia suggest that to cover winter demand, "other" (natural gas, for now; SNG later) would need to be ±15% of the generation mix.  Of course, this would only be for part of the year.  The average over the year would still be modest, so even if we have to use gas, we would still cut emissions substantially.  But the simulation highlights the need for gas peaking/back-up.  If we use surplus green electricity to create synthetic natural gas (SNG) then we could in principle run a 100% green grid.

US LNG exports are booming

 An interesting video from the FT (Financial Times, of London) about the boom in LNG exports from the US, mostly to Europe to substitute for the losses of gas from Russia.  It explains the process of creating LNG from natural gas, and shows how the US is now the world's largest exporter, with further increases likely.

Is the world locking in gas?  Prolly not, or at least not in the quantities implied in the question.  A grid powered by wind and solar will still need gas for cold, gloomy, windless periods  ("Dunkelflaute").    In countries with enough hydro, gas may not be needed, but even then gas will be necessary as back-up.  Until power-to-gas, i.e., converting surplus electricity to methane, becomes widespread, we will still need natural gas.  Producing surplus green electricity will require overcapacity in wind and solar, and we are a long way away from that now.  But by 2030, the need to curtail renewable output will be frequent, and in order not to waste it, we'll use it to make synthetic natural gas via the Sabatier process.  At that point, natural gas production will start to fall, and its place in the grid will be replaced by SNG.