This time I disagree. The EV are storage, and storage always help to buffer differences between demand and Supply. What is quite unlikely is “Net Zero”, but intelligent EVs match well with renewable:
I do not get the impression that you actually read the article.
An EV can only be used for storage if it is stationary, so during that time, it is not useful.
If the electricity in the EV is being used for storage, then it cannot be used for other purposes. Once the EV is used, it will rapidly deplete the storage. And the electricity being used for other purposes cannot be used by an EV for transportation.
Since the vast majority of the usage is during the day and the recharging is at night, I am not sure where all this excess electricity comes from. The system might work with massive deployment of wind turbines, but as I mentioned in the article, this is very vulnerable to no wind at night. This is a huge risk to the entire transportation network.
If I am not mistaken, the article that you linked to includes nuclear, hydro and fossil fuels in the electrical grid, so it only reinforces my case. You only mentioned EVs for storage as a hypothetical at the end of the article without any supporting data.
Are you also proposing that electric trucks, airplanes and other electric transportation are stored during the day? If so, what is the point of having them?
I think what you are really proposing are glorified utility-scale batteries.
Plus Spain is very different from the rest of the world, particularly in access to solar radiance.
Let’s go by parts: the need of “more electricity” for additional EVs does not matter, because we are making the analysis for an steady state situation. This is I think the main reason of our disagreement. I say that for a total demand, EV by providing storage, always are stabilizing. I don’t consider the transitional dynamics, while I understand the enormous capital cost.
In the case we move towards a sun based system, if the cars are connected and charging from 10-17 and then return home at 17, when industrial demand contracts, I don’t see the problem. You use mid day sun peak for charging and use the car in the evening.
Of course, all of this depends on cars charging in an intelligent fashion. Ideally, you plug the car, and it knows when shall charge depending on your driving patterns and the electricity price.
Now, I agree, the transitional dynamics can be destabilizing and will be expensive for sure.
I do not understand your logic. Massively expanding wind and solar power is not a “steady state situation.” Nor is massively expanding usage of EVs. They are each massive discontinuities from our current situation. And the Greens want to do both for the entire world.
Near 100% adoption of EV requires a massive increase in electricity production. And, yes, that matters a great deal. This can be mitigated by charging at night, so you can take advantage of lower demand. This nicely complements baseload nuclear and fossil fuels, but clearly not solar.
Your assumption that vehicles do not need to be used between 10-17 is obviously a fallacy. All you have to do is look at the traffic in any urban area during those hours. Vehicles are not just for commuting. That is a common, yet incorrect, assumption.
In your scenario, you still have to recharge in the evening in many cases. Your scenario is particularly unlikely for delivery trucks, buses,taxis, and long-haul trucking which are in constant use during the day.
Any energy system that assumes a lack of transportation use for 7 hours during daylight is a big step backwards.
You also assume that industrial demand is at the same time as EV charging, which is not necessary with fossil fuels/nuclear/hydro. That adds on more demand for electricity.
You also need to remember that the vast majority of the world has far less solar radiance than Spain. Wind has the same problem. Asia, where the majority of humanity lives, has very limited solar and wind resources (outside the very sparsely populated Gobi desert).
A critical (but true!) hypothesis is that solar is a backstop technology, that is, you can expand it a fixed cost as much as you want. In my view solar is a clear (more or less expensive) a backstop technology.
I don’t think a financial expert should assume unlimited financial resources. And in most regions even unlimited financial resources will not solve the problem. What may theoretically work in Spain is a non-starter in the vast majority of the world.
I think if you calculated the cost for the world to get where you are proposing, even you would reject it as a viable option.
> Most people recharge during the night when they do not need to drive. This makes solar power irrelevant for most electric vehicle owners
Stable electricity prices are not a necessary pre-condition for EV uptick. In fact because passenger vehicles are inactive for 90% of the day they're uniquely effective at taking advantage of variable electricity prices. Consumers will shift car charging to times of the day when electricity is cheapest and thus help balance the grid. That's what you see in a country like Australia where we have a free market electricity system and a huge amount of solar power - most of the EV charging happens during the afternoon. I would expect a similar phenomenon in Texas which has similar free market policies and new innovative energy retailers coming up like Australia.
Also when you buy an EV you'll be supporting penal colonies like Australia which account for the majority of lithium production. While every time you buy oil you're supporting theocratic monarchies in the Gulf and Russia. Good luck with that.
I never claimed that “Stable electricity prices are a necessary pre-condition for EV uptick.”
I said that they are dependent on stable electric supply 24/7/365, and cheap electricity prices give people a strong incentive to purchase EVs. No nation has achieved anything like either of those conditions with exclusive wind/solar electricity.
The energy systems of both Texas and Australia are both heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Australia also has very expensive electricity prices, which we should not be copying.
And charging during the day-time only increases the problem of high-priced peak electricity. As I mentioned in the article, charging at night has big benefits of smoothing out demand.
Utilility-scale batteries are just as able to take advantage of electricity prices and are much less expensive per KWh than EVs.
And the US does not import oil from Gulf or Russia. The US produces more than enough oil to meet domestic needs. Same with natural gas.
It doesn't quite work like that for oil. Oil is a globally traded commodity. Any oil you consume in America is oil that could not be exported to Asia who instead have to import Arab or Russian oil.
Please keep your comments on the topic of the article. I have given you quite a bit of leeway over the past year. This article is not about global oil markets.
There is the black pill opinion that different organisations have different interests,so we wont end up chosing the best option but each side is gonna advocate what benefits them,thus prolonging the problems
This is why I always use the terms Intermittent Wind and Intermittent Solar to clarify the respective impact(s) on grid stability.
The term "fossil fuel" is a misnomer that has unfortunately stuck, but the organic materials that make up “fossil fuels” are not fossils… they are hydrocarbons, thus hydrocarbon fuels.
Electric Vehicles (EV) are for the most part Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV), which are all-electric vehicles that use a battery pack to power an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine.
Good overview of very complex systems. You are totally correct with the tagline 'we need affordable and stable electricity 24/7/365'. You made a comment about VRE energy prices being low but dependent on location (true) I assume you are aware of how LCOE is abused and is in fact not an accurate metric for comparing power costs of different generation asset classes. I am involved in the industry-wide effort to define better metrics, if you are interested in learning more about alternatives to LCOE.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that LCOE can be very deceptive, especially when applied to solar and wind, which vary greatly in electricity output by geography. I think that LCOE is reasonably accurate for fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro. It also does not take into account system costs.
Yes, I am interested in better metrics than LCOE. What do you think is the best metric to compare solar/wind with other energy sources?
Sort of. The best type of generation asset is flexible not baseload. Most nuclear and coal power plants unfortunately are not flexible. Fortunately grid scale batteries will turn all generation assets into flexible assets.
For generation asset comparisons in a network, LCOE is only useful for generation types that are functionally equivalent (or similar). For comparing very different assets like baseload thermal (nuke or gas) against VRE, it is error prone. LCOE is still OK as an evaluation tool for the costs of energy for a stand-alone bounded power plant in a project finance model, from the point of view of an investor. LCOE only assesses costs but does not consider value of the generation asset.
It has been about 15 years that 'they' started to realize that LCOE was a bad metric for grid analysis, and since then orgs like DOE/EIA proposed alternatives like LACE and the IEA developed VALCOE in 2018, and while these are improvements over LCOE they require capacity expansion models, etc, so you can no longer do the analysis on the back of envelope like LCOE (which was why LCOE was so often used, it being simple [but wrong]).
It shows that to decarbonize, using only low carbon technology, you can only decarb to a certain penetration before you get exponential cost increases.
The problem with virtually every energy analysis online is that they start with a goal of rapid decarbonization and make it the only goal.
My goal is not decarbonization. My goal is to have affordable and secure electricity so we can have a solid foundation for economic growth. Then as long as we maintain that, we can mitigate the negative effects on the natural environment in a cost-effective way. But I do not want to increase the cost of electricity significantly while doing so.
My personal objective as this ‘transition’ advances is to make sure exaggerations are kept to a minimum and decisions are made with the correct engineering analysis in mind.
Total System Cost and SCORE is a fairly new approach and not being commonly done, but it is probably the best approach. The NETL paper is, frankly, very complicated. The basic concept it best explained in the infographic The Three Horse Race by the MEGS modelling people.
This article is the epitomy of Occam's Razor. I have now have plenty of good reading ahead of me.
LOL
Thanks for the compliment. I am also trying catch up on reading your articles as well.
My writing is fairly lazy, I do get inspired occasionally.
🙏
This time I disagree. The EV are storage, and storage always help to buffer differences between demand and Supply. What is quite unlikely is “Net Zero”, but intelligent EVs match well with renewable:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jJap6KhzFe3mgh32M/electric-vehicles-and-renewable-electricity
I do not get the impression that you actually read the article.
An EV can only be used for storage if it is stationary, so during that time, it is not useful.
If the electricity in the EV is being used for storage, then it cannot be used for other purposes. Once the EV is used, it will rapidly deplete the storage. And the electricity being used for other purposes cannot be used by an EV for transportation.
Since the vast majority of the usage is during the day and the recharging is at night, I am not sure where all this excess electricity comes from. The system might work with massive deployment of wind turbines, but as I mentioned in the article, this is very vulnerable to no wind at night. This is a huge risk to the entire transportation network.
If I am not mistaken, the article that you linked to includes nuclear, hydro and fossil fuels in the electrical grid, so it only reinforces my case. You only mentioned EVs for storage as a hypothetical at the end of the article without any supporting data.
Are you also proposing that electric trucks, airplanes and other electric transportation are stored during the day? If so, what is the point of having them?
I think what you are really proposing are glorified utility-scale batteries.
Plus Spain is very different from the rest of the world, particularly in access to solar radiance.
Let’s go by parts: the need of “more electricity” for additional EVs does not matter, because we are making the analysis for an steady state situation. This is I think the main reason of our disagreement. I say that for a total demand, EV by providing storage, always are stabilizing. I don’t consider the transitional dynamics, while I understand the enormous capital cost.
In the case we move towards a sun based system, if the cars are connected and charging from 10-17 and then return home at 17, when industrial demand contracts, I don’t see the problem. You use mid day sun peak for charging and use the car in the evening.
Of course, all of this depends on cars charging in an intelligent fashion. Ideally, you plug the car, and it knows when shall charge depending on your driving patterns and the electricity price.
Now, I agree, the transitional dynamics can be destabilizing and will be expensive for sure.
I do not understand your logic. Massively expanding wind and solar power is not a “steady state situation.” Nor is massively expanding usage of EVs. They are each massive discontinuities from our current situation. And the Greens want to do both for the entire world.
Near 100% adoption of EV requires a massive increase in electricity production. And, yes, that matters a great deal. This can be mitigated by charging at night, so you can take advantage of lower demand. This nicely complements baseload nuclear and fossil fuels, but clearly not solar.
Your assumption that vehicles do not need to be used between 10-17 is obviously a fallacy. All you have to do is look at the traffic in any urban area during those hours. Vehicles are not just for commuting. That is a common, yet incorrect, assumption.
In your scenario, you still have to recharge in the evening in many cases. Your scenario is particularly unlikely for delivery trucks, buses,taxis, and long-haul trucking which are in constant use during the day.
Any energy system that assumes a lack of transportation use for 7 hours during daylight is a big step backwards.
You also assume that industrial demand is at the same time as EV charging, which is not necessary with fossil fuels/nuclear/hydro. That adds on more demand for electricity.
You also need to remember that the vast majority of the world has far less solar radiance than Spain. Wind has the same problem. Asia, where the majority of humanity lives, has very limited solar and wind resources (outside the very sparsely populated Gobi desert).
A critical (but true!) hypothesis is that solar is a backstop technology, that is, you can expand it a fixed cost as much as you want. In my view solar is a clear (more or less expensive) a backstop technology.
I don’t think a financial expert should assume unlimited financial resources. And in most regions even unlimited financial resources will not solve the problem. What may theoretically work in Spain is a non-starter in the vast majority of the world.
I think if you calculated the cost for the world to get where you are proposing, even you would reject it as a viable option.
> Most people recharge during the night when they do not need to drive. This makes solar power irrelevant for most electric vehicle owners
Stable electricity prices are not a necessary pre-condition for EV uptick. In fact because passenger vehicles are inactive for 90% of the day they're uniquely effective at taking advantage of variable electricity prices. Consumers will shift car charging to times of the day when electricity is cheapest and thus help balance the grid. That's what you see in a country like Australia where we have a free market electricity system and a huge amount of solar power - most of the EV charging happens during the afternoon. I would expect a similar phenomenon in Texas which has similar free market policies and new innovative energy retailers coming up like Australia.
Also when you buy an EV you'll be supporting penal colonies like Australia which account for the majority of lithium production. While every time you buy oil you're supporting theocratic monarchies in the Gulf and Russia. Good luck with that.
I never claimed that “Stable electricity prices are a necessary pre-condition for EV uptick.”
I said that they are dependent on stable electric supply 24/7/365, and cheap electricity prices give people a strong incentive to purchase EVs. No nation has achieved anything like either of those conditions with exclusive wind/solar electricity.
The energy systems of both Texas and Australia are both heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Australia also has very expensive electricity prices, which we should not be copying.
And charging during the day-time only increases the problem of high-priced peak electricity. As I mentioned in the article, charging at night has big benefits of smoothing out demand.
Utilility-scale batteries are just as able to take advantage of electricity prices and are much less expensive per KWh than EVs.
And the US does not import oil from Gulf or Russia. The US produces more than enough oil to meet domestic needs. Same with natural gas.
It doesn't quite work like that for oil. Oil is a globally traded commodity. Any oil you consume in America is oil that could not be exported to Asia who instead have to import Arab or Russian oil.
Please keep your comments on the topic of the article. I have given you quite a bit of leeway over the past year. This article is not about global oil markets.
There is the black pill opinion that different organisations have different interests,so we wont end up chosing the best option but each side is gonna advocate what benefits them,thus prolonging the problems
This is why I always use the terms Intermittent Wind and Intermittent Solar to clarify the respective impact(s) on grid stability.
The term "fossil fuel" is a misnomer that has unfortunately stuck, but the organic materials that make up “fossil fuels” are not fossils… they are hydrocarbons, thus hydrocarbon fuels.
Electric Vehicles (EV) are for the most part Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV), which are all-electric vehicles that use a battery pack to power an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine.
Good overview of very complex systems. You are totally correct with the tagline 'we need affordable and stable electricity 24/7/365'. You made a comment about VRE energy prices being low but dependent on location (true) I assume you are aware of how LCOE is abused and is in fact not an accurate metric for comparing power costs of different generation asset classes. I am involved in the industry-wide effort to define better metrics, if you are interested in learning more about alternatives to LCOE.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that LCOE can be very deceptive, especially when applied to solar and wind, which vary greatly in electricity output by geography. I think that LCOE is reasonably accurate for fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro. It also does not take into account system costs.
Yes, I am interested in better metrics than LCOE. What do you think is the best metric to compare solar/wind with other energy sources?
Sort of. The best type of generation asset is flexible not baseload. Most nuclear and coal power plants unfortunately are not flexible. Fortunately grid scale batteries will turn all generation assets into flexible assets.
For generation asset comparisons in a network, LCOE is only useful for generation types that are functionally equivalent (or similar). For comparing very different assets like baseload thermal (nuke or gas) against VRE, it is error prone. LCOE is still OK as an evaluation tool for the costs of energy for a stand-alone bounded power plant in a project finance model, from the point of view of an investor. LCOE only assesses costs but does not consider value of the generation asset.
It has been about 15 years that 'they' started to realize that LCOE was a bad metric for grid analysis, and since then orgs like DOE/EIA proposed alternatives like LACE and the IEA developed VALCOE in 2018, and while these are improvements over LCOE they require capacity expansion models, etc, so you can no longer do the analysis on the back of envelope like LCOE (which was why LCOE was so often used, it being simple [but wrong]).
This paper, which for the subject matter is 'easy' to read, gives an outline of LCOE, its weaknesses, explains some proposed alternatives like LACE/VALCOE, gives the pros and cons of each method, and proposes a better (though more complex) method called Total System Cost and System Cost Of Replacement Energy (TSC/SCORE): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351103952_Total_Systems_Cost_A_Better_Metric_for_Valuing_Electricity_in_Supply_Network_Planning_and_Decision-Making
This website gives more info on the TSC/SCORE model which is co-developed by Australian and UK energy analysts: https://modelling.energy/
The short infographic titles The Three Horse Race is easy to understand.
Cheers.
Thanks for the links. I have been reading the article.
Are there any articles that actually apply those new metrics to each of the possible energy generators?
It shows that to decarbonize, using only low carbon technology, you can only decarb to a certain penetration before you get exponential cost increases.
Yes, that tracks with my thoughts as well.
The problem with virtually every energy analysis online is that they start with a goal of rapid decarbonization and make it the only goal.
My goal is not decarbonization. My goal is to have affordable and secure electricity so we can have a solid foundation for economic growth. Then as long as we maintain that, we can mitigate the negative effects on the natural environment in a cost-effective way. But I do not want to increase the cost of electricity significantly while doing so.
I agree with your approach.
My personal objective as this ‘transition’ advances is to make sure exaggerations are kept to a minimum and decisions are made with the correct engineering analysis in mind.
Regarding the Total System Cost approach, NETL actually did a real study on ERCOT: https://www.netl.doe.gov/projects/files/DevelopmentofaTooltoCalculatetheSystemCostofReplacementEnergySCoRE_081722.pdf
Total System Cost and SCORE is a fairly new approach and not being commonly done, but it is probably the best approach. The NETL paper is, frankly, very complicated. The basic concept it best explained in the infographic The Three Horse Race by the MEGS modelling people.
This is the actual paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544223007880