Dramatic things are happening in power generation around the world. As I laid out in Carbon Note 13, in terms of sheer scale, China leads the world in the push for green electricity. But it is not only in China that the world is changing. Even in presumably hostile geographies, renewable power generation is gaining ground, fast. You might think that nowhere was less likely to see a green energy boom than Texas. But, in the last few years, as John Burn-Murdoch pointed out in a recent piece in the
In reality, battery capacity is tiny. For every wind or solar facility, another source - most often natural gas - is needed to assure power to the grid.
I think you'd expect battery capacity to be tiny at this point, battery storage is just getting started. But look at the plummeting prices for batteries, it's pretty clear where this is headed, all the models cited are predicting huge growth in grid-level battery storage.
Battery capacity is now well able to handle the daily "duck curve" management, it's too small to handle multi-day wind/solar outages.
And the iron-air battery factory in Virginia is hiring, expects to open this summer. Those batteries run for 5 days, pretty much enough to close the gap.
Their problem is the market - you have to find customers that are willing to plan for an all-green solution even if they have to buy batteries they really only fully need every few years.
And their other problem may be that the frackers reinventing geothermal have found you can pump in water and store energy for long periods that way; if we can frack enough geothermal power that's also storage, then "clean firm" starts to look much easier.
Did you miss the chart showing over a TW of storage currently in the queue? This is a solved problem from both a technological and financial perspective. We’re just waiting on the bureaucracy now.
Excellent breakdown of strong and weak areas of power generation around the world. Good to see that the US is strongly in the mix. Organizing in the states appears crucial to drive solar and wind momentum. What about national incentives for Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, etc. ?
To give some clarity, Texas, under Rick Perry no less, first agreed to massively upgrade transmission infrastructure to bring west Texas wind to urban areas, which caused even more investment in wind generation.
That kind of state level initiative/investment empowers the grid-level installation of new renewables.
Because it is literally a true false binary, with top down or bottom works better. Crony capitalism which is what you seem to be advocating for combines all the disadvantages of capitalism with the further disadvantages of top down government control.
Adam. I like your work. There is, however an enormous gap in some of the terms used in this article. The term “renewables” includes the wood pellets that are harvested in very poor regions of Mississippi &l Louisiana, processed into wood pellets there and then shipped to the UK to be used for renewable credits by a company named Drax. Please make appropriate clarification soon. Thank
Grow a tree, harvest it, then burn it. That’s a net zero process. Fully renewable. The tricky part is correctly accounting for the time offset between the quick release vs very slow intake of C02. Lots of fuckery possible there.
It's not that better. One way or another, the tree dies and releases C02. Sometimes it makes sense to take advantage of this process. It's really not some crazy idea like the original commenter implied.
In many areas of the world forest coverage is quickly increasing because of this industry.
Excellent overview of the clean energy transition, but you missed the mark on your unsubstantiated comment regarding the “inefficiency of rooftop solar” in California. As a historian, you should know that the clean energy revolution would likely have taken a lot longer and perhaps never would have happened but for the early adopters of rooftop solar in the California market. Second, but for obstacles put in place by California regulators, the distributed generation and storage infrastructure in California (2 million of the 5 million sites nation wide) through the use of virtual power plants and other non/wire alternatives, could provide massively more efficient grid services than the traditional models.
Asking California Democrats to get out of the way of efficient virtual power plants is a bridge too far. Most of them aren’t smart enough to understand the concept.
Two comments: Differences in solar power between the states is highly relevant: climate, latitude, elevation. And - in what sense is the progress "Bidenomics? It has little to do with Biden. In California it was well underway eight years ago. Words are POWERFUL (get that?) tools, use them carefully.
"Differences in solar power between the states is highly relevant: climate, latitude, elevation."
This is addressed in the article:
"The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. "
I think your framing of the act as an accelerant is right. The goal of the act, as stated, was to crowd-in private investment by providing government funds and political support to take some of the risk out of renewable investment. The act presumes a trend already underway, which is what the charts show. How much private dollar we get per public dollar for each incentive is going to be difficult to measure and model economically.
The politics of the act are important too. It is evidence and proof that our future energy strategy as a country is renewables, so everybody better get thinking about it. Out here in San Francisco that looks like my friends going to work at eco-focused startups rather than e-commerce or social media, and friends researching materials sciences for battery tech or bioengineering kelp for cattle feed to reduce methane emissions. It's a major industrial ecosystem out here with lots of cross-pollination of ideas.
Yes, I don't know how to measure the effect you're describing, but it's real. The climate debate is over, climate change is real and desperately serious, major action is needed right now, renewables are practical and can meet the demand with sufficient support. Having the federal government deliver that message in the form of a trillion dollars is powerful.
Yes, the most important thing for growth in any industry is a stable and predictable environment in which to grow. Having as one of your major-party candidates a lunatic who threatens to yank out every offshore windfarm if elected sure as hell doesn't help, even if he doesn't get elected, even if he can't actually follow through on his threats if elected.
Fascinating to note how Australia has a very high generation per head figure...and appalling inflation of electricity costs as its remote gas is turned into LNG and exported.
Unless your interest went through a peak and then declined, the word you want is "piqued" your interest. OK, class dismissed.
Back to topic, the Alberta experience in Canada may be helpful. Alberta, uniquely, had this totally libertarian take on the grid: just hook anything up you want, your risk of going broke. If a player imagined they could sell electricity to the grid profitably, nobody could tell them "no" about building a solar or wind farm and demanding a connection. Like, today. No approvals process.
That alone brought massive growth - in the "oil province", our Texas, because everybody likes to make money.
Now, government is standing in the way, heavy-handedly, and the experiment is over. But the numbers from it remain.
Seriously? If I want to connect a 100MW solar farm to the grid, the correct answer is simply "Yes sir! Right way!" No need to check if there are some high-tension towers nearby that can handle the load?
I ask because I just bought one of those Home Fusion Reactor kits and want to know if it's OK to dump a GW or so into the grid through the 100 Amp service panel in my basement.
So if I'm reading that California supply/demand graph correctly, there was a moment on May 20 when ALL of California's electricity was supplied by solar? Seems like we should have had a celebration, maybe some balloons and party hats? Seriously, this is an amazing accomplishment, if you'd asked me even five years ago I wouldn't have believed it could happen so soon.
The build out is also significantly affected by buy American incentives and now buy the tariffs. Already developers were delaying projects because American production capacity isn't big enough to meet demand. I agree with the industrial policy. But it's slowing things down.
Writing about nameplate capacity without discussing capacity factors misleads the reader.
You buy watt-hours, not watts.
Using nameplate capacity for reliables (fossil fuels, nuclear), isn’t that misleading because they have capacity factors not far from 100%. But using nameplate capacity for Unreliables like solar and wind is absurd because their capacity factors are generally nearer 0% than 100%.
Solar in the rainy Netherlands isn’t the same as solar in the sunny Australian desert.
China “leads the world in the push for” coal-generated electricity. It added 44GW of net new coal gen capacity in 2023.
The US reduced its coal gen capacity by 9.7GW in 2023.
Question I have - as renewable green power increases, issue of scale of power storage to backstop green energy grid; & to what extent that & home storage for car EV storage could replace large scale power public storage❓; SO, discussion needed on scale of robust grid; which reduce scale of public investment in storage to other concerns about stranded assets across developed west like lithium, cobalt/nickel versus role of new, cheaper tech like sodium batteries (already being built by BYD in their low end Seagull) Cost $ 2 K, virs US $ 8 K for lithium battery.
In reality, battery capacity is tiny. For every wind or solar facility, another source - most often natural gas - is needed to assure power to the grid.
I think you'd expect battery capacity to be tiny at this point, battery storage is just getting started. But look at the plummeting prices for batteries, it's pretty clear where this is headed, all the models cited are predicting huge growth in grid-level battery storage.
Battery capacity is now well able to handle the daily "duck curve" management, it's too small to handle multi-day wind/solar outages.
And the iron-air battery factory in Virginia is hiring, expects to open this summer. Those batteries run for 5 days, pretty much enough to close the gap.
Their problem is the market - you have to find customers that are willing to plan for an all-green solution even if they have to buy batteries they really only fully need every few years.
And their other problem may be that the frackers reinventing geothermal have found you can pump in water and store energy for long periods that way; if we can frack enough geothermal power that's also storage, then "clean firm" starts to look much easier.
Interesting about fracking and geothermal. Gives me a new rabbit hole to dive down. Thanks
Did you miss the chart showing over a TW of storage currently in the queue? This is a solved problem from both a technological and financial perspective. We’re just waiting on the bureaucracy now.
It’s “piqued” not “peaked.”
I was going to say the same thing, but I have to admit "peaked my interest" isn't wrong.
Excellent breakdown of strong and weak areas of power generation around the world. Good to see that the US is strongly in the mix. Organizing in the states appears crucial to drive solar and wind momentum. What about national incentives for Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, etc. ?
To give some clarity, Texas, under Rick Perry no less, first agreed to massively upgrade transmission infrastructure to bring west Texas wind to urban areas, which caused even more investment in wind generation.
That kind of state level initiative/investment empowers the grid-level installation of new renewables.
And you expect top down to work better than bottom up, exactly why?
Why such an either or question? Organizing, support and funding work both ways.
"Why such an either or question?"
Dude's just trolling, look at his other comments.
SteveB, exactly, my hunch as well.
Yes how dare someone have opinions that don't support crony capitalist oligarchy?
Waah, you're being canceled, maybe you can go on Fox News and cry about it.
Because it is literally a true false binary, with top down or bottom works better. Crony capitalism which is what you seem to be advocating for combines all the disadvantages of capitalism with the further disadvantages of top down government control.
Adam. I like your work. There is, however an enormous gap in some of the terms used in this article. The term “renewables” includes the wood pellets that are harvested in very poor regions of Mississippi &l Louisiana, processed into wood pellets there and then shipped to the UK to be used for renewable credits by a company named Drax. Please make appropriate clarification soon. Thank
You’re exactly right about wood pellets. How can chopping down trees (that btw eat CO2) and burning them be anything close to renewable?
Grow a tree, harvest it, then burn it. That’s a net zero process. Fully renewable. The tricky part is correctly accounting for the time offset between the quick release vs very slow intake of C02. Lots of fuckery possible there.
Grow a tree and not burn it is way better my friend. Plus wood has very low energy density
It's not that better. One way or another, the tree dies and releases C02. Sometimes it makes sense to take advantage of this process. It's really not some crazy idea like the original commenter implied.
In many areas of the world forest coverage is quickly increasing because of this industry.
Because bureaucrats in Brussels declare it to be so. Renewable means what they say it means, neither more nor less.
Excellent overview of the clean energy transition, but you missed the mark on your unsubstantiated comment regarding the “inefficiency of rooftop solar” in California. As a historian, you should know that the clean energy revolution would likely have taken a lot longer and perhaps never would have happened but for the early adopters of rooftop solar in the California market. Second, but for obstacles put in place by California regulators, the distributed generation and storage infrastructure in California (2 million of the 5 million sites nation wide) through the use of virtual power plants and other non/wire alternatives, could provide massively more efficient grid services than the traditional models.
Asking California Democrats to get out of the way of efficient virtual power plants is a bridge too far. Most of them aren’t smart enough to understand the concept.
Beyond impressive work, but what stocks do I buy or sell as a result?
Two comments: Differences in solar power between the states is highly relevant: climate, latitude, elevation. And - in what sense is the progress "Bidenomics? It has little to do with Biden. In California it was well underway eight years ago. Words are POWERFUL (get that?) tools, use them carefully.
"Differences in solar power between the states is highly relevant: climate, latitude, elevation."
This is addressed in the article:
"The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. "
I think your framing of the act as an accelerant is right. The goal of the act, as stated, was to crowd-in private investment by providing government funds and political support to take some of the risk out of renewable investment. The act presumes a trend already underway, which is what the charts show. How much private dollar we get per public dollar for each incentive is going to be difficult to measure and model economically.
The politics of the act are important too. It is evidence and proof that our future energy strategy as a country is renewables, so everybody better get thinking about it. Out here in San Francisco that looks like my friends going to work at eco-focused startups rather than e-commerce or social media, and friends researching materials sciences for battery tech or bioengineering kelp for cattle feed to reduce methane emissions. It's a major industrial ecosystem out here with lots of cross-pollination of ideas.
Yes, I don't know how to measure the effect you're describing, but it's real. The climate debate is over, climate change is real and desperately serious, major action is needed right now, renewables are practical and can meet the demand with sufficient support. Having the federal government deliver that message in the form of a trillion dollars is powerful.
I think the next question is how vulnerable are these projections to a Trump administration
Given Texas renewables have happened under exclusively Republican control, that’s a silly question.
Yes, the most important thing for growth in any industry is a stable and predictable environment in which to grow. Having as one of your major-party candidates a lunatic who threatens to yank out every offshore windfarm if elected sure as hell doesn't help, even if he doesn't get elected, even if he can't actually follow through on his threats if elected.
He’s like this because a windmill killed his parents when he was young. Such a tragedy.
I am old enough to remember when the left was funny, sadly that time has long passed.
LOL. If only.
Fascinating to note how Australia has a very high generation per head figure...and appalling inflation of electricity costs as its remote gas is turned into LNG and exported.
Well, it is called "the Lucky Country" not "the Smart Country" isn't it?
;-D
Unless your interest went through a peak and then declined, the word you want is "piqued" your interest. OK, class dismissed.
Back to topic, the Alberta experience in Canada may be helpful. Alberta, uniquely, had this totally libertarian take on the grid: just hook anything up you want, your risk of going broke. If a player imagined they could sell electricity to the grid profitably, nobody could tell them "no" about building a solar or wind farm and demanding a connection. Like, today. No approvals process.
That alone brought massive growth - in the "oil province", our Texas, because everybody likes to make money.
Now, government is standing in the way, heavy-handedly, and the experiment is over. But the numbers from it remain.
"just hook up anything you want"
Seriously? If I want to connect a 100MW solar farm to the grid, the correct answer is simply "Yes sir! Right way!" No need to check if there are some high-tension towers nearby that can handle the load?
I ask because I just bought one of those Home Fusion Reactor kits and want to know if it's OK to dump a GW or so into the grid through the 100 Amp service panel in my basement.
So if I'm reading that California supply/demand graph correctly, there was a moment on May 20 when ALL of California's electricity was supplied by solar? Seems like we should have had a celebration, maybe some balloons and party hats? Seriously, this is an amazing accomplishment, if you'd asked me even five years ago I wouldn't have believed it could happen so soon.
The build out is also significantly affected by buy American incentives and now buy the tariffs. Already developers were delaying projects because American production capacity isn't big enough to meet demand. I agree with the industrial policy. But it's slowing things down.
Writing about nameplate capacity without discussing capacity factors misleads the reader.
You buy watt-hours, not watts.
Using nameplate capacity for reliables (fossil fuels, nuclear), isn’t that misleading because they have capacity factors not far from 100%. But using nameplate capacity for Unreliables like solar and wind is absurd because their capacity factors are generally nearer 0% than 100%.
Solar in the rainy Netherlands isn’t the same as solar in the sunny Australian desert.
China “leads the world in the push for” coal-generated electricity. It added 44GW of net new coal gen capacity in 2023.
The US reduced its coal gen capacity by 9.7GW in 2023.
The only thing Bidenomics shapes is higher inflation.
Question I have - as renewable green power increases, issue of scale of power storage to backstop green energy grid; & to what extent that & home storage for car EV storage could replace large scale power public storage❓; SO, discussion needed on scale of robust grid; which reduce scale of public investment in storage to other concerns about stranded assets across developed west like lithium, cobalt/nickel versus role of new, cheaper tech like sodium batteries (already being built by BYD in their low end Seagull) Cost $ 2 K, virs US $ 8 K for lithium battery.