All slides and edited transcript from my latest fortnightly seminar with India's utilities on the end game mix of electrical generation.
, the think tank founded as an umbrella organization over India’s 28 state utilities to provide thought leadership, share leading practices, and bring international insights to India, I’m delivering bi-weekly webinars framed by the. With the glories of online recordings and AI transcription tools, it’s relatively easy to share both the transcript, and also the slides that I used, so I’m making a habit of it.
Electricity is going to be the basis of all energy in the future. We won’t be burning stuff, we won’t be digging up fossil fuels. We’re probably not going to making a lot of biofuels, except for long haul aviation and long haul shipping. Everything else will just electrify. Then there’s co-benefits, such as the voltage and frequency regulation, which I mentioned, which tends to be on the high voltage, alternating current grid. But that’s replicable with electronics these days. We also get recreation, irrigation, we even get a fishing industry on some of the big hydro dams. But there are the constraints. Seasonality of it is one. It tends to be more robust as a form of generation in the springtime.
There are some advantages there and some disadvantages from a constraint. All thermal generation plants, the legacy ones, many of them are being challenged by the requirement for cooling water. The thermal design was required for the water to be a certain temperature, so that it would actually cool everything down appropriately. But now the water is a lot hotter, and they’re getting into challenges, and frequently the water is just not there, so they can’t cool at all.
As we move forward, the actual cost of gas generation is going to continue to be structurally volatile. As we model out the cost of that energy, it’s actually more expensive than we thought. But still, there’s a lot of scrap biomass out of the timber industry. We’re not going to turn all the scrap into biofuels, although that’s an entirely viable pathway. Some biomass for electricity will be on the grid somewhere. I think it’ll be smaller, it’ll be fairly small plants where there happens to be a big supply of timber or something like that, which is reasonably dry.
I just don’t think we’re going to have nearly as much of it as many people think. I think it’s going to be under 5% of the global energy supply, which is more than it is in terms of absolute numbers, but a lower percentage of electrical generation in relative numbers. And the reason for that is pretty simple. The graph on the left of the chart is a dataset I’ve been tracking of a natural experiment in China of nuclear generation deployments versus renewables deployments.
I still think it wouldn’t have scaled nearly as quickly as renewables did. That white line is additional terawatt hours of actual generation with capacity factor added each year. As you can see, that’s still an accelerating curve. It’s going to accelerate for the next ten or 15 years as well. Meanwhile, nuclear peaked in 2016 and 2018 with about seven gigawatts of capacity, and it’s been adding much less capacity since then. Last year, it only added 1.2 gigawatts of new capacity.
One of the things that’s in the short list is overbuild wind and solar. And the reason for that is that 85% and the roughly half of a day, on average, that solar is doing something. As we add up those 50% of some generation from solar, and 85% from wind from when those curves start overlapping. That co benefit comes with a reserve for voltage and frequency power management solutions that are on wind farms as well.
Logistics are easy because we can put them on ships. We don’t have to drive them along highways and get them under bridges and stuff like that. You can put them on ships where there’s many fewer logistical constraints. If they could put offshore wind off of New York state, they could be providing enormous amounts of electricity at times when it’s demanded for their biggest demand center of population. That’s why they keep trying despite the headwinds.
We can run solar farms suboptimally and turn on capacity if we’ve overbuilt solar or we can do things where we can actually load balance for putting heat into heat storage, and doing some industrial processes that require lots of electricity in the right time, when peak solar is done. That’s a big wedge and it’s an obvious one. I’ve dealt with a number of commercial solar developers who do very well for themselves because of this, and because of the the fall in solar panel prices these days, globally, it’s a no brainer.Residential solar is a different story, 2% to 3%. I’ve had this debate with Mark Zed Johnson Jacobson out of Stanford. He and his team since the early 2000s, have been developing a model for 100% renewables by 2050.
The constraints of geothermal, I think, are going to leave it at about 1% of global energy generation. There are places like Japan, which should be leveraging their geothermal, and British Columbia, where I live, that should be leveraging geothermal where different preconditions means we aren’t. In Japan, the onsen culture means hot springs are sacrosanct in their culture, and you can’t touch them for a geothermal generation. In British Columbia, we have very few people.
There’s a completely unreasonable conversation where people say, well, you have to get rid of the utilities. I just kind of scratch my head and think, have you ever actually looked at the way that electricity gets around? All grids are going to have a lot of different types of generation, and this isn’t a reliability issue. The grids in the world with the highest penetration of renewables, like Germany and Denmark, for example, are more reliable, with around 13 minutes of average outages per customer per year. Germany is an industrialized nation, it’s a high demand nation, and it gets 60% of its electricity from renewables.
And that’s why when I talk about China and coal, I say, well, they have replaced a lot of their brown coal plants that were running in just crappy ways. They’ve replaced them with supercritical plants, with low sulfur, washed coal that are running very efficiently. But still, that’s taking, from a climate perspective, 1,400 kilograms, 1.4 tons per megawatt hour of carbon dioxide from the worst coal plants, only down to about 800 tons from one of the new supercritical coal plants.
It was a very big drain. The carbon capture and sequestration community claimed that was a success. They managed to get up to 93% capture for one month, but mostly, like Boundary Dam, it failed miserably to achieve its carbon capture objectives. It made the electricity incredibly expensive and they had to build a natural gas plant to provide the power with the right characteristics to run carbon capture. It doesn’t make any sense.
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