“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.”
–Walter Elliot
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What Everyone Needs to Understand About the Power Grid
If you're following energy, here's the constraints
And a follow-on question. On the PUC's present path, with the enthusiastice support of the CEO, we're headed for a doubling of our electric bills (after inflation), a less reliable grid, and likely still be emitting a fair amount of CO₂ from backup generation.
How do I get a critical mass of Colorado voters to look at this? Is my best bet to try and get a critical mass of state legislators to look at where we're headed?
Now that the 2025 Legislature is completed, you might be able to ask that question and get an answer from legislative leaders (or your local representative/senator).
Might also direct the question to all those who have announced for the 2026 Colorado Governor's race, and see what the candidates want to say about it.
Seems like the Chamber of Commerce types and League of Women Voters might also be willing to consider a longer-range problem such as this.
Thank you! I hadn't thought of the Chamber or League. Good ideas.
I'll have to think about how to hit the Governor candidates on this – I don't want my notmal interview of them to be 1/2 energy.
I do have a number of legislators who have promised me I can interview them once session is over. I'm going to wait a week to let them catch their breath first.
The high cost you describe is due to your assumption of replacing 100% of carbon electricity. This is due to ensuring the last 10% and last 1% of replacement under worst-case scenarios. I could agree that nuclear might be the best and cheapest way to cover the last 10% or 1%, but also we don’t really NEED a 100% non-carbon grid – Let gas-plants cover the last 10%.
What are the real costs if you relax your 100% requirement?
Also, your costs are driven by some assumptions that I question:
The first 90% is not expensive because utilization averages around the clock are much lower than the grid capacity. My electrical usage behavior is already “smartish-metered”: I charge my EV during the day because my city utility sends me price “signal” called 7cents/KWhr. In some places (Finland?) they actually pay you to charge during low-utilization times.
Here is a really good podcast/article on smart meters.
Arch Rao:
How smart grids or micro grids work. Example for a single house.
Yes & no.
Our water heater is the heat on use type. So no pausing that. Charging the EV in the middle of the day (usually I charge at 1:45am) – I just drove some distance, got home, and in an hour have to take someone to the airport. So no pausing that. Slow down the AC when I got home and the huse is way hot, and at full speed I'm looking at 45 minutes to get it cooled down. You want angry voters?
What we've had with power to date is inexpensive, reliable, and abundant. You now want to make it expensive, unreliable, and limited. Why would voters go for that? Voters aren't even in favor of $100.00/year to address global warming.
There's some good points in there but…
Peak power is like fire stations. 95% of the time the peopel at the firestation aren't doing anything. But we don't reduce the number of fire stations because when there's something like the Marshall Fire, all that sit around time just paid for itself.
Peak power is due to human activity. At present (gas heat, ICE cars) there's a smaller peak in the morning as people get up make breakfast, head to work and a larger peak in the early evening as people get home, crank up the AC, make dinner, etc. The steady-ish load during the day is higher than the steady load overnight. During the day you have solar, less when it's overcast or a blizard. During the night no solar but wind tends to be stronger.
When we go all electric (heat pumps, EVs, etc) that moves everything up during the winter. So peak peak (highest peak values) which are presently in the summer (more solar) will now be in the winter (less solar). Right now solar is great because the hotter the day, the higher the peak peak, the more generated by solar. We need 4 hour batters but the peak demand maps to the peak generation. With winter becoming the peak peak, solar is not going to be that helpful.
I don't think there's much of a way around that power usage curve over daily use. Yes you can set when to charge your car (I set mine to 1:45am) without much inconvience. But how do you shift when you heat or cool the house? Do you tell people to stagger when they cook meals? Do you tell working parents to only run the dryer overnight so one load of laundry/day?
As to solar & battery costs, those cost curves have leveled out. Moore's Law is for semiconductors only (and it's becoming even more difficult there as we run up against quantum limits). Mining & refining minerals can only be optimized so far. Manufacturing physical goods, once automated, are at their optimum. Improvements due to growing volume level out and then tend to inch back up as the large manufacturers become complacent in their monopoly.
We'll still see advances. But we can't count on any of them.
As to getting to just 80% with gas the final 20%, even that is expensive. Aside from countries blessed with abundant hydro (or neighbors blessed in the case of Denmark), no one has pulled this off yet. Because it is so prohibitively expensive to buy that many batteries.
The solution, which a lot of other countries are implementing (China & India are not stupid) is nuclear for baseload and a combination of everything else for peak.
Nuclear power is your religion, David. You have all of the evangelism of the newly converted.
But the facts don't back your faith up, as Parkhill pointed out above.
Nuclear power is not cheaper. The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from new nuclear power plants in the United States is $7,442–7,989 per kilowatt. Onshore wind, by contrast, is $2,275–5,803 / kilowatt when it is distributed ( think many separate clusters of windmills, rather than one gigantic installation). Solar with storage comes in at $2,044 / kilowatt.
This well-sourced Wikipedia article "Cost of Electricity by Source" draws on research from 146 authors over a period of ~50 years. It also cites research more favorable to your religious beliefs – Bank of America likes nuclear power, because solar "doesn't have backup" ?
The article does contain a section on "External costs". Solar has little to none. Wind turbine blades are hard to recycle. Wind turbines do not kill eagles, contrary to $rump's imaginings.
But nuclear power has huge external costs in the mining of the fuel, and storage of radioactive waste, which other sources do not. You choose to ignore or minimize these. Navajo miners, (former) residents of Harrisburg, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl would disagree.
Past mining, of many materials, caused a lot of damage and has left runined areas. Chernobyl was a disaster. Three Mile Island & Fukushima showed that nuclear is safe even with the worst happeining at a Western designed & built plant.
As to costs, if solar + batteries is so much cheaper, why are so many countries going with nuclear for baseload? It's that + batteries that makes it expensive.
I'm in favor of nukes because they're our best way to zero carbon. Wind & solar means gas backup and SCGT emit a lot of CO2.
Oh and LCOE is worthless to compare nuclear/gas/coal/hydro vs wind/solar. Because it assigns no cost to variability.
Anyways, once we get sufficient energy density at an affordable price for batteries I'll switch and be all-in on solar.
Saw several articles recently suggesting
Maybe there are some abandoned or soon to be abandoned coal mines in Colorado?
They need a straight down shaft that's reasonably wide. So there will be a couple but likely not that many. And then there's the issue of running HVAC lines to the mine. It presently takes 7 years to get permitting for those lines and they cost $1M/mile over level ground and god knows how much to go up the mountains to the mine.
I think it's unfair to claim nuclear power is David's religion.
I think he's an engineer/scientist (and perhaps accountant :-), so it would be more fair to say his religion is math and science, meaning that wrt nuclear power, his positioin is that it can be safe and cost-effective with proper design and construction.
Obviously there are trade-offs and there are cost comparisons. And if a carbon economy is destroying the climate, and we require a sufficient and resilient electrical grid, then nuclear (plus renewables) will probably need to be an important component of our energy future.
To argue that we don't need nuclear, you need to find ways to make renewables and energy storage cheaper, or to accept some carbon generation as backup.
I'm a techno optimist, in that I believe the cost of solar, wind & storage will continue to decrease.
Boy I've been insulted before but… "perhaps accountant" – OW!
Yes, what you said. And even when batteries get cheap enough, it's not clear we can have them provide inertia the way a giant physical turbine does. We can probably figure that out but until we do, we need that 20% of power coming from the big honking turbines (nuclear, coal, & large hydro).
ps – My degrees are in Physics & Math – Go Buffs and my career has been programming & management. But as CEO I looked at the cash flow monthly but mostly judged our financial situation by how big an expense had to be before my CFO started pushing back. So never even a little accounting.
David have you done any study on reservoir batteries? At least in Colorado given the number of reservoirs we have hanging around we could implement that pretty well I would think.
And a search is telling me we already do that to some extent. I don't know the capacity that exists. I'm curious what you think.
Pumped hydro remains the most efficient storage system and is great. Unfortunately, like hydro itself, there's limited places where it makes sense. But a couple more pumped hydro stations are under consideration for here in Colorado.
And a good thing about pumped hydro, usually the base is somewhat close to transmission lines so not that expensive to connect them up.
Rep Caraveo is impressive. Just finished interviewing her (tomorrow's post) and she is going to be very competitive. And will, if elected, be a good rep for her district.
I would be interested to read your interview. Although, there is a lot to admire about her. There are a few things that give me pause.
Every politicians have a few things that give me pause (even my mom).
I guess that is why when we vote we don’t vote for every politician? Usually just those one(s) who give us the least pause; no more than one per ballot race.
Cost/Value of an Imported Nike Shoe. Brad DeLong.
…
Brad Continues:
And…
IT'S NOT JUST SHOES:
Have we heard from the failed Pope candidate yet? He must be devastated that he is not the first American pontiff. The bio of Pope Leo XIV is encouraging.
AP says:
Worth noting:
Prevost ministered to the "poor and marginalized" people in Peru. He really is going to follow in Francis' footsteps, in terms of setting the tone of the Catholic church to be more liberal, tolerant, humble, and inclusive.
Steve Bannon is not going to like that at all. And that makes me happy.
I read somewhere today that Francis did a little campaigning for Leo before he passed.
What a fascinating dynamic shaping up here. The first post on daily kos was a photo of the new pontiff with his hand upraised. It was captioned…" Donald Trump loses another election!"
And, oh those crowd sizes! Donald must be seething.
I don't think they are going to be friends.
If any of you want to hear a good discussion on energy, PowerGab (yes it’s i2i) has an end of session panel.
It’s 3:00 today – you can view it here.