All: In our work, we no longer will do a renewable energy project unless it has a 24/7 fully dispatchable capability. Energy storage systems are evolving rapidly, and the price per KW or kWh of storage is plummeting. As a result, we can uniformly offer renewable energy done building by building, or at grid scale at a price that is easily below the price of any fossil fuel option. The ability to offer dispatchable renewable energy will make the utilities more likely to move to renewables and avoid the kind of issues noted in the question.

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Question
At what point do intermittent renewables compromise supply security and lose price competitiveness?
- Aug 17, 2020 12:34 pm GMT
There has been much made in the press of the increased output of US electricity generation by renewables in the first half of 2020. Over this period around 14% of total generation came from intermittent wind and solar compared to 16% for coal. At the same time, several recent reviews indicate that these intermittent sources are also price competitive and can even undercut base-load fossil fuel and nuclear prices. The obvious path therefore is to invest principally in the cheap low-carbon generation sources.
However, it appears inevitable that for each unit of generation provided by intermittent sources at the expense of base-load power the security of supply will be compromised and compensatory battery or stand-by combined-cycle gas will also have to be built, consequently impacting the price.
This raises the question of whether these costs are currently being built into the life-time costs of intermittent sources, and what risk analyses have been carried out to evaluate supply security and price competitiveness as intermittent sources contribute a greater percentage of generation?
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Jamie, thanks for the post. While you frame the issue as a choice between power security and onboarding intermittent clean energy, I think this is a false choice.If a utility is having to sacrifice security it needs for the grid in order to have clean energy, then the utility is not considering the right options. One must consider renewables plus storage so that critical baseloaded power remains. The more critical question becomes, how much fossil fuel base load power can you shed before having to bring on storage with renewables? I am not sure there is a general answer for this question, as it may be specific to each grid, their load demand, and power mix. Fortunately, the cost of solar, wind and storage is becoming cheaper by the month!
Regards,
Bill Buchan, P.E.
Jamie,
to my knowledge variable renewables are not competitive without subsidy. The subsidies are often direct feed-in tariffs, and indirect i.e. tax rebates, guaranteed off-take, system services as necessary to stabilize the grid + extensive grid upgrades supplied at no charge to the variable RE producer. There may be exceptions such as low very electricity consumption and extremely remote & sunny locations with where solar cells are the best option. However, in today’s world reducing CO2 emissions is a greater concern than lowest cost electricity; that, and the fear of nuclear are the reasons we see massive and almost universal promotion of variable renewable energy.
By the way, adapting a grid to accept 14% variable renewable penetration is not a great technical challenge, the island of Ireland grid can today remain stable with up to 70% system non-synchronous penetration (consisting of wind generation and power supplied via HVDC interconnectors). Its just a question of money; Irish domestic electricity costs approximately 30C/kWh.
Jim, the smart folks at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) don't offer levelized marginal cost figures for just solar, or just wind, for the very reasons you mention. Instead, they cite a marginal cost for "Gas Turbine and Small Scale Renewable" generation combined, to take into account how renewables can't function as a source of grid energy without gas. Together, they're slightly cheaper than coal, but a full 36% more expensive than nuclear and three times as expensive as hydro.
Though they do cite a Levelized Cost of Energy for various sources independently, it's useless for comparison purposes. Claiming "solar is cheaper than nuclear", for example, is about as useful as claiming "fresh bananas are cheaper than nuclear." That doesn't stop Lazard and other investment banks from disingenuously using the comparison as a marketing tool.
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