Same is true for the oil and gas subsidies that have been in place for over a century
Discussion
Oil and gas industry started without any subsidy, unlike solar and wind.
I support removing all subsidies across the board, and letting people and businesses decide.
Not true
Solar panels were around in the late 1800s and started to commercialize in the 1950s when Bell labs came on the scene.
The first solar incentive wasn’t until the late 1970s and it wasn’t until the 90s when solar incentives started beefing up.
The oil and gas industry has been subsidized since 1916
Oil and gas subsidies have been in place for decades before solar.
Remove them all but championing to remove just solar is regarded
Solar the technology is great, which is different than solar pushed by the central planners at grid scale.
Spindletop is 1901.
Steam engine is a century+ older.
No subsidies or central planning to increase adoption for either was required.
Did oil cos lobby congress - sure - same as solar cos.
Sure, it's part of the problem, but how large of a part? Find the highest impact root cause and solve that problem first. Stack rank by impact and work down the list.
Charge customers for energy relative to how expensive that energy is to produce. Our current electrical pricing model completely ignores these price signals and forces everyone on the grid to subsidize insanely expensive peak load generation capacity. Then we charge everyone a flat rate for their electrical usage. It's completely insane! Incentives are radically misaligned.
IMO we should fix the pricing first, then take a look at subsidies.
Electricity price is a function of %from unreliable, low density sources like solar and wind.
Shut down reliable base load at your own peril.
Opt out and become your own power plant
🤝
I love this for off grid, and backup to the grid
well...that function has many inputs and electrical generation reliability is only one of them
electrical load is at least as important. many tools at our disposal to manage load. most of these tools are ignored or sidelined in policy debates. this is the alpha
This chart is independent of demand. The signal is quite clear what is the independent variable!
Unreliable grid scale energy generation increase prices because:
1) it is low density
2) it is intermittent
3) new transmission lines are required to go where there is solar, wind
4) cannot entirely shut off reliable baseload as blackouts are unacceptable
ok, now add significant battery storage and make a new chart
alternatively, go to cost based pricing instead of volumetric and make a new chart
Grid scale economic battery storage does not exist.
The chart reflects today tech, not future tech.
that's my point. this chart is a snapshot of the cost structure of last year's Canadian electrical grid along one dimension. it doesn't help to inform policy decisions in other dimensions that will reshape the cost structure in the future
in other words, looking only at solar and wind generation is too reductive
Batteries are an incomplete and therefore failed mitigation at the disaster of centrally planned grid scale solar and wind scheme.
Batteries can be awesome tech to help with moments of grid stress, peak demand, given this is an unmandated free market engineering and economic choice.
As it stands today solar, wind, batteries are subsidized on grid scale.
This fragilizes the grid, and increases electricity costs.
Nothing said here changes the fact unreliable energy generation systems make grid electricity more expensive.
if you shave peak load you don't need to build peaker plants. they cost a shitload of money. this reduces electricity costs for everyone. ergo batteries are the cheapest and most effective way to bring down the price of electricity. i don't know why you hate on wind and solar so much, but your ire is misplaced imo
I dont “hate” solar and wind.
These are great for small scale, off grid, non-subsidied applications.
My critique is one of central planning by way of subsidies, regulations, or otherwise.
I observe and share the downstream consequences of central planning.
Translated to energy:
- there is a lot grid scale solar, and wind than there would be without subsidies
- businesses have become less competitive, and families and individuals face increasing levels of energy poverty due to the consequence of increased electric rate for the reasons mentioned earlier
All of this is true. It doesn't mean that grid based solar and wind are bad.
Subsidies are examples of bad central planning at the hands of the government.
Look into volumetric pricing versus load based pricing. Load based is what you need to keep costs down in the long run. This is because load based pricing changes consumption patterns. Consumers hate it because they want a steady bill and they don't like to change their consumption patterns. Electricity billing has always been volumetric and people are resistant to change.
Volumetric pricing is an example of bad central planning at the hands of a monopoly. (A government mandated monopoly btw.) It means utilities need to match load to demand even when demand is sky high. That's really expensive in aggregate but the cost is socialized and nobody has to change consumption patterns or have inconsistent power bills, so it is the most popular choice. Tragedy of the commons.
Intermittent generation like wind and solar makes the problem worse. They get subsidized because they are popular with the public. Why does the voting public love all these terrible policies? Because the voting public is economically illiterate. They are, quite literally, a bunch of socialists.
Batteries solve the problems of pricing and intermittent generation by time shifting demand patterns. They also save a ton of money by reducing the need for transmission and distribution, the most wasteful part of our electrical grid.
Once you see the whole picture it's clear that batteries are the way forward.
woops
utilities need to match generation to load
no match load to demand, those are the same lol
Agreed. All elastic systems need buffer/caching. Butterfly effects can even happen then. But are rarer.
Wind and solar are demand independent generators, you need a lot of adapting feedback (like load-based pricing) to integrate that succesfully into an electricity system that is demand driven, and even then it is still a source of distortion, a challenge to the reliability.
Batteries are really lacking, lagging in capacity, compared to size and price to be a viable way forward for this problem. We need leaps forward in battery tech, but only seem to be getting small steps.
batteries 🤝 ASICs
demand response in every home