The best thing happening right now are the grid scale batteries. They make the companies that build them rich through better arbitration of power prices at the same time they vastly lower power prices for everyone.
No more peaks of power costing ridiculous amounts (and troughs of negative power prices).
You can be anti green for all it matters on this one. The batteries are massively profitable. They are coming on mass everywhere and there’s no stopping them.
My understanding was that the companies aren't getting rich because competition has saturated the market and revenues from energy arbitrage have plummeted in 2025 because everyone needs to discharge during the same limited window.
"Vermillion said, adding that most battery operators in Texas earn the bulk of their revenue during a handful of extreme weather days, so “there might be 15 days over the year that matter for capturing revenue.”
That specific article is talking about the transition from ancillary services which drove the early battery adoption to actually buying and selling power which was only part of the business case for the initial battery rollouts.
The same story is repeating everywhere, batteries will very quickly supply all the ancillary needs for a grid at a fifth of the cost of spinning gas turbines if you let them.
The article seems written to intentionally confuse the saturation of that market with the wider abitrage market.
The high prices in a few days is likely more to do with Texas using those high prices to incentivize peaker plants rather than contract separately for capacity which some other markets do. They both still pay for it, just as different items on the total grid bill.
It would be strange if peaker style plants didn't make most of their money from peak times, whether they get paid via high market prices or capacity payments.
And when you enter a new market with batteries, it's shaving the peakiest peaks you've based your business model on. This also saves the most money (and carbon) for utility customers.
But all reporting on renewables needs to act like the whole thing is about to collapse into mad max for some reason.
jl6 · 4h ago
There’s still a fortune to be made by whoever can crack seasonal storage. This is the ur-problem of humanity: to pay for the winter using the summer.
ZeroGravitas · 3h ago
In Europe wind power peaks in the winter so with batteries and hydro to smooth out the gaps you can get a combination of solar and wind to match your demand with relative ease. This does depend on location though, Texas wind peaks in Spring apparently.
A parallel and necessary step (one that has, suspiciously, suddenly become a culture war for the far right in europe) is electrification of heating with heat pumps, which lets you use your existing gas infrastructure to meet winter generation needs.
While related insofar some electricity inevitably gets converted back into heating, I don't think its really relevant to this discussion which is explicitly about electricity.
ZeroGravitas · 3h ago
The winter peaks in gas and electricity are driven by heating demand. Electrification of heat combines the two and will make winter electricity peaks even peakier.
So anything that reduces that heat demand at a lower cost is a relevant fix, this includes heat storage, district heating, general efficiency and insulation improvements etc.
SideburnsOfDoom · 4h ago
> the companies aren't getting rich ... revenues from energy arbitrage have plummeted
To be fair, there is an upside for such a company no longer being able to extract huge amounts of money from the general public on a regular basis. An upside to the public.
Enron was in this business and in this state.
SlowTao · 6h ago
It was about 15 years back, I remember some reasonably smart but partially anti-renewables folk talking about this. By anti-renewable I would say they were just skeptical with a much higher bar to get over than others. Weren't saying it was impossible but where much more cynically inclined.
They argued there would be issues with renewables unless there was a big uptake in storage. That was the key to making it all happen. Well now we have a big uptake in storage and it is starting to look like the future in that sense is very bright.
Scale is funny like that, it looks like it won't happen for the longest time and then it suddenly become ubiquitous. There is still a long way to go but improvements are happening fast.
padjo · 5h ago
We’re still a long way from figuring out storage for renewables. Here in Ireland in winter we get weeks long periods of calm, cold, overcast weather where renewables generate almost nothing. There’s no known energy storage mechanism that can handle this, so we still have to burn fossil fuels. I don’t doubt we’ll figure it out, but I think skeptics still have a valid point on storage.
sharemywin · 8m ago
to me this is all % based. 15% natural gas is way better than 90% coal or something like that.
adrianN · 5h ago
You can always produce hydrogen or methane and use ordinary gas turbines to turn it back to electricity.
padjo · 38m ago
In theory yes, but in practice we haven’t done it yet and until we have it’s reasonable to be skeptical about it.
space_firmware · 5h ago
Yeah, it's a struggle. The upshot is most of the cost of combined cycle natural gas peaker plants are the fuel costs, so while storage solutions get figured out, or the renewable get massively overbuilt, you can maintain the FF infra for fairly cheap for the these days.
robocat · 3h ago
Incorrect.
most of the cost of peaker plants is the capital cost. The fixed costs are high and spread over few hours (peaker) or even no hours at all (just providing ready capacity if required e.g. ready in case of faults with generators or transmission).
The variable costs (fuel) are normally quite irrelevant.
ZeroGravitas · 3h ago
Ireland already has the gas capacity built though. It provides about 50% of their power today, so they just need to phase it down and then out, not build it from scratch.
This is broadly true of most developed nations.
benrutter · 7h ago
I work for a UK company that manages grid scale batteries - they're awesome!
I wonder how they look in a US landscape that's hostile to renewables. Arbitrage works because solar and wind and very cheap and very indeterminate. The more gas, coal and biofuel (all much more expensive but more flexible) in the grid, the less opportunity for arbitrage.
AnotherGoodName · 7h ago
Yeah in South Australia where it’s over 70% renewables the batteries have been reported to have profit of $46million in a year on a $90million capital cost project.
No doubt the profits will come down (as long as the free market can do its thing) but for now it’s a crazy market. There’s a reason graphs of battery installations are a hockey stick right now.
I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs. You guys don’t have lots or lobbying from legacy power providers wanting to maintain the ridiculously high peak prices by any chance?
As in everywhere in the world except europe has a hockey stick of battery build out growth happening right now. (Not a criticism just an Australian confused at why europe as a whole has fewer battaries than australia).
pjc50 · 6h ago
Planning rules are just really onerous and inefficient. I've seen a number of reports of battery facilities denied planning permission in Scotland over concerns like "noise" and (slightly more reasonable) fire service access roads.
sveme · 6h ago
Cannot find a graph of battery capacity growth for Germany right away, but anecdotally (stories in the news and number of startups I‘m aware of), that market is super hot right now.
Edit: according to [1], numbers predict a coming tsunami of battery installations for Germany
Battery capacity in Germany is growing exponentially, but most batteries being installed right now are home systems that don't help much to stabilize the grid.
baq · 7h ago
Less renewables in the mix and useless politicians mean they aren’t as needed, or perceived as needed. Spain could use some ASAP, no idea why they haven’t built them.
danielscrubs · 6h ago
Why do you think we go to Australia for sun?
And our wind turbines seems to have crazy maintenance costs…
Don’t give our politicians more ideas, let the market just solve this please. They are already taxing energy to death because of ”fairness”.
sofixa · 6h ago
> I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs. You guys don’t have lots or lobbying from legacy power providers wanting to maintain the ridiculously high peak prices by any chance?
The European power grid has multiple interconnections between the various countries, and some of those counties already have their grid scale storage (mostly pumped hydro). So it's much less needed.
So why would the countries heavy on renewables in their mix invest a lot in batteries? For instance the UK can rely on French nuclear and Norwegian hydro as a grid scale alternative source. While sometimes there are continent wide issues (we've had twice a month of low winds + overcast which impacted negatively wind and solar), the grid is sufficiently diverse and dispersed that it works pretty well.
As the recent outage in Iberia showed, it's slightly more complicated than that and batteries could still have a part to play to smooth demand ups and downs. And there are still a bunch of battery projects, even in France that doesn't have that much renewables in its energy mix, being heavy on nuclear.
tonyedgecombe · 5h ago
>For instance the UK can rely on French nuclear and Norwegian hydro as a grid scale alternative source.
The plan in the UK is to build gas peaker plants to bridge the gaps where there is no wind nor sun. They are going to be contracted to work for no more than two weeks a year.
petesergeant · 6h ago
> I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs
If I had to pull reasons out of my ass for this, I'd suggest South Australia and Texas both have a great deal of land with shitty agricultural output (as compared to Europe) and a lot more sunlight. I suspect building batteries is obviously very profitable today in Australia and Texas today, and companies will target Europe when the tech is a bit cheaper and the most profitable markets have been saturated.
protocolture · 5h ago
IIRC Musk was trying to get AEMO to reduce the time increment for trading power so they can do even higher frequency trading.
ggm · 7h ago
I'd love to know if the decision to burn other economies wood pellets in Drax could be ended, and if Batteries can do the job!
benrutter · 7h ago
Yeah me too! Drax seem to share not just the name, but the morals of a certain Bond villain.
Probably not yet though, the UK government seems fairly keen for Biofuel in their net zero policy.
Banning Drax from using woodpellets from important nature (ancient forests, rainforests etc) is probably a route that'll be more likely to havesuccess.
No comments yet
dismalaf · 5h ago
Is there anywhere that's truly hostile to renewables? I live in Alberta, the oil producing region of Canada with a reputation for hating renewables, and we have the most solar and wind power in the country. We just have unfortunately topography that doesn't allow hydro and the powers that be never gave us a nuclear plant so we also use natural gas and a few legacy coal plants...
No one here is against solar panels on their home and few are against wind farms, there's just also the realisation that for many applications, oil will remain for the time being. Aircraft, boats, tractors, and cars in many regions of the world are simply unsuitable for electric power with the current state of electric storage (batteries are heavy relative to energy stored).
benrutter · 1h ago
By "hostile" I mean a market set up such that it's not possible for renewables to meaningfully participate, rather than that people are actively anti-renewables and campaigning against them etc.
I think the US is moving this way, by removing grants for green energy, continuing grants for oil, placing targetted tariffs on solar panel manufacturing countries, and blocking planning permission for wind.
dismalaf · 44m ago
> continuing grants for oil
Oil isn't used for grid energy generation in most parts of the world... We shut down our last diesel plant many years ago. It's way too expensive, relatively speaking. Like, here we're using renewables to power oil extraction lol. For the most part, renewables don't compete with oil since renewables power the grid and oil doesn't. Electric vehicles can reduce oil demand somewhat, but there will still be massive demand for oil for shipping, air travel, construction vehicles and farming vehicles, for the forseeable future.
WaxProlix · 8h ago
ERCOT has done a great job of setting up incentives, getting out of the way, and letting markets solve their problems. Working with CAISO and then going to set up batteries in ERCOT was such a breath of fresh air for an old team of mine.
whatever1 · 8h ago
And tax payers pay for their F ups and then some additional bonuses to the gas traders of BP when Texas freezes.
Aside from shutting down some compressor stations that gas companies failed to properly register as essential equipment, ERCOT had almost nothing to do with NG prices.
Gas and power are intertwined but still very separate markets.
Natural gas would have gone even higher had ERCOT not shed load, so if you want to make reductionist statements about complex issues, you could say that ERCOT actually took away from the bonuses of BP gas traders who were long.
whatever1 · 7h ago
They did not do their job to regulate the market. Set aside their failure to check for winterization and the complete failure of demand forecasting or execution of rolling blackouts (that ended up being uncontrolled week long power losses that literally killed people).
They had almost uncapped max wholesale prices for energy during the blackouts. At some point it had reached 10k per megawatthour! Of course companies went bankrupt, and of course BP traders held bonus parties. The taxpayers apart from these they also had to bail out the bankrupt retailers.
bz_bz_bz · 6h ago
You haven't explained what any of that has to do with gas trading profits. HSC didn't go to $400/MMBtu because of ERCOT.
whatever1 · 5h ago
If I was one of the last standing gas fueled energy producer / gas distributor with an energy price of $9k/MWhr I would take any gas price to ensure that I have the last available drop of gas.
The sky high energy price and the collapse of gas supply were the fundamental price drivers. The alternative scenario is that the gas market players were just price gouging. Pick what you want.
bz_bz_bz · 4h ago
> I would take any gas price to ensure that I have the last available drop of gas.
This is true of any ISO in the country during extreme conditions and you wouldn’t want it to not be.
postpawl · 7h ago
You're technically right about ERCOT's limited role in gas pricing and the regulatory distinctions. But ERCOT did have some direct failures beyond just being a scapegoat, like ignoring federal winterization warnings, the $16 billion overcharging scandal where they kept prices at maximum for two days after outages mostly ended, and poor crisis communication. Even if PUCT and the Railroad Commission should have mandated better reserves and winterization, ERCOT still mismanaged what was within their control.
bz_bz_bz · 6h ago
I never said ERCOT did not have failures. I'm in the industry and have been massively critical of ERCOT for caving to politics rather than following market rules when they arbitrarily decided to keep the market at the cap. PUCT actually had final say on repricing those hours and chose not to.
ERCOT also didn't have the authority to implement winterization recommendations from the 2011 report outside of the already existing NERC standards. You can blame the PUCT for that or blame FERC for not actually updating those standards until 2023.
However, you still seem to have missed (and demonstrated) my point by referencing Energy Transfer -- they are a midstream company who made 99% of their profits off of NG not power. Conflating their profit with ERCOT's power prices is the problem. People refuse to educate themselves on the difference between gas and power markets, so the TRC and its massively influential O&G lobbyists have made zero changes to the intrastate gas network since the winter storm. Why? Because every layman who has read a few articles and thinks they're an expert is solely focused on ERCOT.
postpawl · 5h ago
I'm not sure why you're focusing on PUCT having “final say”. This Texas Tribune article shows ERCOT kept market prices too high for nearly two days after outages ended when their own market monitor said they should have reset prices the following day. It was clearly within ERCOT's control to fix.
I'm not sure how you decided what I'm "focused" on. Read the first two sentences of my previous post again.
WaxProlix · 8h ago
That's largely true, but on the flipside at least some of the rush of batteries into Texas to do ancillary services and provide redundancy are a result of greedy capitalists seeing the profits a few hundred MWh can get you in Texas (at taxpayer expense!) and rushing in to get a piece of the pie. So, markets!
bee_rider · 7h ago
Wait, how does it work? If the government is using taxpayer money to buy services… that’s not really a free market solution in the conventional sense, right?
Of course if we have to pretend it is to get Texas to do it… fine I guess.
WaxProlix · 7h ago
Na, the utility payers actually pay it, though taxpayers pay for some of the infrastructure and administration, and given to some service providers in the form of tax breaks I think. The circles of that venn diagram are close to an overlap though.
bob1029 · 5h ago
I moved from ERCOT to MISO/Entergy (still in Texas) and my electricity costs have dropped by nearly 50%.
The part that is really shocking to me is the cost to maintain transmission infrastructure is dramatically higher in this area too (power lines in the forest).
I think it's hard to compete with a certain combination of fuel mix and fully amortized 20th century plants.
ProllyInfamous · 8h ago
Texas needs more (any?) pumped-storage hydro (a non-chemical, gravity-fed battery) to store all this renewable energy.
TVA (similar in size to ERCOT, mostly within Tennessee) is about to begin its second such facility, after Raccoon Mountain [0]. Run-of-the-river facilities exist (including two in TVA's jurisdiction), which are capable of pumping water "up" the dam (for later use during peak loads) — perhaps LCRA might explore the feasibility of this?
Regardless of how the energy is stored, it might also (eventually) make sense to join Eastern/Western interconnects (and thereby "store" the energy outside of Texas). But I know ego/"Texus"/pride mentality exists (having grown up in Austin), so I won't hold my breath on accepting Federal regulations...
Why would pumped storage be better than the massive amounts of batteries being added right now? Batteries scale small, scale big, can be put where there's already transmission, can be put at either sides of grid congestion to lower that congestion, can regulate frequency, deliver reactive power, and be moved to new locations if the grid changes and they could be better deployed elsewhere. Literally a Swiss Army knife that can grow to whatever size is needed, and they can be thrown up in months as opposed to years.
I'm not sure if hydro could compete on price any more, either. Batteries are so cheap.
typewithrhythm · 7h ago
I don't really know if there is somewhere in Texas that works geographically; but the idea is if you have a good spot you essentially get an arbitrarily large store for the price of one dam.
At some point you get limited by fill/discharge rate, but the cost of storage in a big pumped hydro is still pretty cheap.
No comments yet
MobiusHorizons · 7h ago
Pumped hydro is a pretty cool solution, but it requires very specific geography and water supply combinations that are unfortunately relatively rare. I'm not that familiar with Texas's water and elevation situation, but it seems less obviously a good candidate than the TVA. Don't get me wrong, pumped hydro is an awesome solution where it works, but it's not easily deployable in the way that batteries are.
dylan604 · 7h ago
What happens to your battery when you are in the middle of a drought and your "battery" doesn't have enough water in it to operate as a battery?
AndrewDucker · 4h ago
You don't need to use a river for pumped storage, you can even have a (mostly) closed-state solution that pumps water back and forth between two holding tanks.
bz_bz_bz · 7h ago
ERCOT is roughly 3x bigger than TVA in terms of both energy demand and service area.
dylan604 · 7h ago
They said similar. Similar in the same way a flat arid landscape that is the second largest in size in the union compares to a mid-sized state with mountains and more annual rain fall and is heavily forested with an average temp 20° lower. You know, not the same, but similar. Maybe they meant simile?
ZeroGravitas · 2h ago
As an aside: the blog author is using ChatGPT to asses the factual claims made by his commenters in a similar way to the Twitter trend of asking @grok to fact check tweets.
Interesting times.
gregwebs · 7h ago
Texas is one of the best climates in the US for renewables but in locations with less sun and wind the math will be different. That math includes batteries for load shifting of which Texas is installing a lot.
As renewable generation increases past a certain level grid stability does require additional effort and that’s a lot more difficult to price in. In Texas their grid is isolated from the rest of the US. This may create a lower ceiling on renewables since they can’t send excess generation anywhere other than their own batteries .
yieldcrv · 8h ago
I think people misunderstand the aggregate conservative position:
They just dont want the state to fund the cause and don’t consider it the state’s role or problem or the state as a solution to a problem that isnt wholly solved by the proposed expensive solution
People outside of that group attribute the disagreement to insanity
When in reality as soon as an economical and private sector solution is there, republicans are on board
I see a way to bridge consensus so maybe I’ll run for office eventually since this is still too abstract for most
standardUser · 8h ago
> When in reality as soon as an economical and private sector solution is there, republicans are on board
The leader of the conservative party has claimed that windmills kill whales, cause cancer, are "garbage" and pledged to prevent any being built in his second term.
eigen · 8h ago
> They just dont want the state to fund the cause and don’t consider it the state’s role or problem or the state as a solution to a problem that isnt wholly solved by the proposed expensive solution
Texas Senate Bill 819 "relating to renewable energy generation facilities; authorizing fees." would have made it the states role to create an expensive solution.
> (1) for a solar power facility, ensure that all facility equipment is located at least:
(A) 100 feet from any property line, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of property
located less than 100 feet from the facility; and
(B) 200 feet from any habitable structure, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of the habitable structure; and
> (2)for a wind power facility, ensure that all facility equipment is located at least 1,000 feet from the property line of each property that borders the property on which the facility is located, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of property located less than 1,000 feet from the facility
Texas Senate Bill 388 "relating to the legislature’s goals for electric generation capacity in this state." would have made it the states role to create an expensive solution.
> (a) It is the intent of the legislature that 50 percent of
the megawatts of generating capacity installed in the ERCOT power region [this state] after January 1, 2026 [2000], be sourced from dispatchable generation [use natural gas].
are the Texas bill sponsors not part of the aggregate conservative position?
benrutter · 7h ago
I think this seems at odds from what I hear from republicans using retoric that's anti-renewable, anti-climate change and pro-oil.
Ignoring that though, energy is a market defined by government policy.
To give an example, solar assets can't control when they output, so many countries have contracts where solar gets a fixed price. Without that, peak solar times might even have negative pricing.
Those are two seperate ways to frame a market, one making renewables profitable and one making them uneconomic.
We can shrug and say "make them profitable under the current conditions" but that ignores the fact that fixed prices for output makes energy cheaper and cleaner as a whole.
My point is, there is no "true market", its something governments define and control. The question should be what outcomes you want.
I'd argue for cheaper, cleaner and more diverse energy, but I'm not in the US.
brookst · 8h ago
Now do oil. How do Repubkicans feel about subsidies for oil?
yieldcrv · 8h ago
If it passes and they benefit from it then they wont avoid being beneficiaries of it and they’ll keep it
While if they dont know they are beneficiaries of a policy then they’ll proverbially eat their face by removing it
sremani · 8h ago
Without Oil is there is no modern civilization. I do not care about your politics.
Even if you replace Oil as source of energy the pervasive petrochemicals in the modern world are not easily replaceable.
America burns 12 calories of energy to transport 1 calorie of food. without Oil subsidies, everything will be expensive and especially food would take a large chunck of American household expenditure.
Quality of life is inversely proportional to the cost of food and energy. The lower the cost the better the life.
DarmokJalad1701 · 7h ago
> the pervasive petrochemicals in the modern world are not easily replaceable
Then let's use the finite amount of oil for that, instead of burning it.
sremani · 7h ago
sure, how many starvation deaths are acceptable to you 2 billion or 3 billion?
rwyinuse · 7h ago
Right now China is meeting all of its increasing energy demand by building more renewables (in fact more than rest of the world combined). Their citizen buy electric vehicles at a record rate. Yet I don't see Chinese people starving.
Climate change caused by burning fossil fuels is what has the potential to cause a mass starvation, not getting rid of oil where possible. It should be also noted that all fossil fuel is just sun's energy stored in another form, although I can understand some of you Americans may think it was magically created by a god. Why not use that sun's energy directly wherever possible?
There will be no need for fossil fuels in energy generation and transporting stuff. Whatever use cases remain are fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and many of those have alternatives too.
ben_w · 1h ago
The point being made is that nobody needs to starve.
Pesticides and fertiliser may be derived from fossil oils and methane, that doesn't mean a single drop has to be burned in the engine of the combine harvester or the tractor.
MrJohz · 6h ago
I feel like a teacher saying this, but please show your working!
pjc50 · 6h ago
Global warming also affects the feasible latitudes for food production.
Teever · 5h ago
The US throws away between 30–40% of its food supply.
The US has policies that are outright hostile to mass-transit.
The US has policies that produce some of the ugliest and grossly inefficient suburban environments that have ever existed.
Sure, oil is a critical part of modern civilization, but we could still have modern civilization, and a hell of a better one at that with better policies that end up using far less oil.
johnisgood · 3h ago
> The US throws away between 30–40% of its food supply.
Not just the US, sadly. One of the reasons they do it is: transportation costs, and to avoid the attraction of the homeless as it is "bad for business" ("makes us look bad").
ben_w · 1h ago
Beyond that, there is also a good reason: farm output is variable, so a systematic policy of aiming for over-production means people don't starve in the years with bad harvests.
Teever · 40m ago
buffers in the supply chain don't account for the wastage that goes on in western countries where people let food go bad in their fridge, or farms / grocers throw away cosmetically imperfect food.
This doesn't even get into the gross inefficiency of overweight/obesity where people consume extra calories that make them gain weight which requires them to consume extra calories to carry their surplus weight around, or the amount of energy that is expended just to move them around in automobiles because they can't walk or bike even moderately short distances.
There's a lot of wastage in how we produce and consume food.
johnisgood · 24m ago
I agree, and I think this is something we should definitely focus our attention on.
energy123 · 8h ago
One of the roles of the state in a mixed economy is to cautiously intervene when there's market failure. Whether through tax policy or industrial policy. Republicans don't want to stop the market failure because they don't believe there is market failure. It's not only a disagreement in values it's a disagreement about basic scientific and economic facts.
ec109685 · 8h ago
How is this getting out of the way:
“In markets like Texas, the wholesale price of electricity is set equal to the price of electricity from the most expensive generator needed to meet demand, often referred to as the marginal generator.”
moooo99 · 7h ago
I‘m not sure why people are often confused about this. Electricity is at a basic level a commodity. A kWh from solar isn‘t any different than 1 kWh obtained by burning coal.
If the current market situation allows for a price of 12ct/kWh, why should I - just because I have the more effective technology - get less than the fossil guy?
Generally this is even beneficial because it could increase margins for renewable and grid scale batteries
adgjlsfhk1 · 7h ago
This is great for renewable energy. It means that solar plants and batteries can get payed at coal/nuclear rates, and during the middle of the day, fossil fuel plants have to turn off since they can't compete with solar prices.
bpodgursky · 8h ago
Texas is only ahead in renewables by certain biased metrics.
If you instead measure how much people talk about renewable energy, California comes out far ahead.
reillyse · 6h ago
Why the hate on California apparently it’s 11th in the country with 43% renewable
Lot of others that could be complained about (like Florida and Arizona)
envoked · 8h ago
I feel like Washington state doesn’t get enough credit. 72%+ from renewables and water reservoirs are the original grid scale battery.
masklinn · 7h ago
That’s because hydro does not deserve credit: if you can do hydro you already do because it’s cheap and reliable, and if you can’t do hydro that’s it. It is thus of next to no interest. Same with geothermal heating.
kortilla · 6h ago
No, they deserve credit. Otherwise protestors get the upper hand and get the dams decommissioned.
If you downplay the right thing, the wrong thing for energy gets selected for other reasons.
envoked · 7h ago
Valid point.
bpodgursky · 7h ago
Washington is actively tearing down dams for salmon runs.
All their hydro was built 60 years ago, by the federal government. The state deserves absolutely no credit.
yieldcrv · 8h ago
It’s not a contest if the deployments are occurring
No comments yet
readthenotes1 · 8h ago
"how much people talk"
Is hot air a useful commodity?
steveklabnik · 7h ago
I believe your parent was making a sarcastic comment, and you two agree.
skippyboxedhero · 7h ago
Wrong because the underlying assumption is that we are moving from a system where energy can be brought on as required to an equivalent system.
One of the big issues with renewables that the author is, I can only assume, is deliberately eliding is that energy cannot be brought on as required. Even in Texas, you still need non-renewables to fill the gap and you still need to recover the costs of running those assets in the price...Texas is the absolute best case scenario, and it isn't working (as the comments show, it is quite easy to see why: people are obsessed with politics and reality matters less than your political enemies being wrong, companies have also realized that the subsidies in this area are incredible if you tell politicians they are right). The same thing is happening with battery operators.
You also see the same thing in other countries that invested heavily in renewables (UK is one example, they are mothballed a lot of non-renewable sources ten years ago, the government had to introduce massive subsidies for retail consumers because electricity prices are so high due to the need to recover costs of the remaining non-renewable sources when the wind happens to stop blowing): it has to increase the cost of energy because you have to pay for renewables and pay for the battery operators to do nothing and pay for the gas operators to do nothing.
Dylan16807 · 4h ago
> it has to increase the cost of energy because you have to pay for renewables and pay for the battery operators to do nothing and pay for the gas operators to do nothing.
No, it doesn't have to increase the cost.
If you have a town powered by gas, the cost of maintaining and staffing the gas plant is locked in.
But most of the cost of that gas plant is the fuel.
If the total cost per kWh of a solar or solar+battery installation is lower than the fuel cost of the gas plant, then you build it. It saves you money even though you're paying the gas operators to do nothing part of the time.
If it's not cheaper than fuel, you don't build it. No harm no foul.
Follow that strategy and you'll end up with lots of renewables without wasting a penny.
Though honestly some idle gas plants don't cost that much. How many kilowatts do you need? 4? Okay, the fixed costs for 4 kilowatts of combined cycle gas power are $50 per year. That's all it takes to have backup production for the entire grid, even with no base load plants anywhere.
SlowTao · 6h ago
This has been a reasonable point to bring up. Renewables when they are first coming into the system represent only a small part of the energy supply. But as they get bigger, the swings in availability end up swinging the entire system around to a larger degree. This is usually where Gas plants take up the slack trying to balance out the system. Storage is the key.
I suspect this is an issue that looks worse in 'intuitive' foresight but not so bad in educated retrospective but we will not know until we pass through that point. I am but an armchair "expert" on this. Usually when something like this comes up, 15 people who know better than me will highlight something I was not aware of.
antupis · 6h ago
The issues with Texas and the UK are that their grids are relatively isolated. Like here in Finland, we have a bigger share of renewables than the UK or Texas, but electricity is still cheaper than UK and pretty much the same as in Texas.
defrost · 7h ago
> Texas is the absolute best case scenario,
Better examples around the globe and within North America are non isolated grids - Texas is in a weak position to share it's excess and to get back energy from wind blowing in other states.
No more peaks of power costing ridiculous amounts (and troughs of negative power prices).
You can be anti green for all it matters on this one. The batteries are massively profitable. They are coming on mass everywhere and there’s no stopping them.
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/infrastru...
"Vermillion said, adding that most battery operators in Texas earn the bulk of their revenue during a handful of extreme weather days, so “there might be 15 days over the year that matter for capturing revenue.”
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/05/15/is-texas-battery-landsca...
The same story is repeating everywhere, batteries will very quickly supply all the ancillary needs for a grid at a fifth of the cost of spinning gas turbines if you let them.
The article seems written to intentionally confuse the saturation of that market with the wider abitrage market.
The high prices in a few days is likely more to do with Texas using those high prices to incentivize peaker plants rather than contract separately for capacity which some other markets do. They both still pay for it, just as different items on the total grid bill.
It would be strange if peaker style plants didn't make most of their money from peak times, whether they get paid via high market prices or capacity payments.
And when you enter a new market with batteries, it's shaving the peakiest peaks you've based your business model on. This also saves the most money (and carbon) for utility customers.
But all reporting on renewables needs to act like the whole thing is about to collapse into mad max for some reason.
A parallel and necessary step (one that has, suspiciously, suddenly become a culture war for the far right in europe) is electrification of heating with heat pumps, which lets you use your existing gas infrastructure to meet winter generation needs.
While related insofar some electricity inevitably gets converted back into heating, I don't think its really relevant to this discussion which is explicitly about electricity.
So anything that reduces that heat demand at a lower cost is a relevant fix, this includes heat storage, district heating, general efficiency and insulation improvements etc.
To be fair, there is an upside for such a company no longer being able to extract huge amounts of money from the general public on a regular basis. An upside to the public.
Enron was in this business and in this state.
They argued there would be issues with renewables unless there was a big uptake in storage. That was the key to making it all happen. Well now we have a big uptake in storage and it is starting to look like the future in that sense is very bright.
Scale is funny like that, it looks like it won't happen for the longest time and then it suddenly become ubiquitous. There is still a long way to go but improvements are happening fast.
most of the cost of peaker plants is the capital cost. The fixed costs are high and spread over few hours (peaker) or even no hours at all (just providing ready capacity if required e.g. ready in case of faults with generators or transmission).
The variable costs (fuel) are normally quite irrelevant.
This is broadly true of most developed nations.
I wonder how they look in a US landscape that's hostile to renewables. Arbitrage works because solar and wind and very cheap and very indeterminate. The more gas, coal and biofuel (all much more expensive but more flexible) in the grid, the less opportunity for arbitrage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
No doubt the profits will come down (as long as the free market can do its thing) but for now it’s a crazy market. There’s a reason graphs of battery installations are a hockey stick right now.
I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs. You guys don’t have lots or lobbying from legacy power providers wanting to maintain the ridiculously high peak prices by any chance?
As in everywhere in the world except europe has a hockey stick of battery build out growth happening right now. (Not a criticism just an Australian confused at why europe as a whole has fewer battaries than australia).
Edit: according to [1], numbers predict a coming tsunami of battery installations for Germany
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.de/2025/01/13/uebertragungsnetzbetre...
And our wind turbines seems to have crazy maintenance costs…
Don’t give our politicians more ideas, let the market just solve this please. They are already taxing energy to death because of ”fairness”.
The European power grid has multiple interconnections between the various countries, and some of those counties already have their grid scale storage (mostly pumped hydro). So it's much less needed.
So why would the countries heavy on renewables in their mix invest a lot in batteries? For instance the UK can rely on French nuclear and Norwegian hydro as a grid scale alternative source. While sometimes there are continent wide issues (we've had twice a month of low winds + overcast which impacted negatively wind and solar), the grid is sufficiently diverse and dispersed that it works pretty well.
As the recent outage in Iberia showed, it's slightly more complicated than that and batteries could still have a part to play to smooth demand ups and downs. And there are still a bunch of battery projects, even in France that doesn't have that much renewables in its energy mix, being heavy on nuclear.
The plan in the UK is to build gas peaker plants to bridge the gaps where there is no wind nor sun. They are going to be contracted to work for no more than two weeks a year.
If I had to pull reasons out of my ass for this, I'd suggest South Australia and Texas both have a great deal of land with shitty agricultural output (as compared to Europe) and a lot more sunlight. I suspect building batteries is obviously very profitable today in Australia and Texas today, and companies will target Europe when the tech is a bit cheaper and the most profitable markets have been saturated.
Probably not yet though, the UK government seems fairly keen for Biofuel in their net zero policy.
Banning Drax from using woodpellets from important nature (ancient forests, rainforests etc) is probably a route that'll be more likely to havesuccess.
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No one here is against solar panels on their home and few are against wind farms, there's just also the realisation that for many applications, oil will remain for the time being. Aircraft, boats, tractors, and cars in many regions of the world are simply unsuitable for electric power with the current state of electric storage (batteries are heavy relative to energy stored).
I think the US is moving this way, by removing grants for green energy, continuing grants for oil, placing targetted tariffs on solar panel manufacturing countries, and blocking planning permission for wind.
Oil isn't used for grid energy generation in most parts of the world... We shut down our last diesel plant many years ago. It's way too expensive, relatively speaking. Like, here we're using renewables to power oil extraction lol. For the most part, renewables don't compete with oil since renewables power the grid and oil doesn't. Electric vehicles can reduce oil demand somewhat, but there will still be massive demand for oil for shipping, air travel, construction vehicles and farming vehicles, for the forseeable future.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/bp-emerge...
Gas and power are intertwined but still very separate markets.
Natural gas would have gone even higher had ERCOT not shed load, so if you want to make reductionist statements about complex issues, you could say that ERCOT actually took away from the bonuses of BP gas traders who were long.
They had almost uncapped max wholesale prices for energy during the blackouts. At some point it had reached 10k per megawatthour! Of course companies went bankrupt, and of course BP traders held bonus parties. The taxpayers apart from these they also had to bail out the bankrupt retailers.
The sky high energy price and the collapse of gas supply were the fundamental price drivers. The alternative scenario is that the gas market players were just price gouging. Pick what you want.
This is true of any ISO in the country during extreme conditions and you wouldn’t want it to not be.
ERCOT also didn't have the authority to implement winterization recommendations from the 2011 report outside of the already existing NERC standards. You can blame the PUCT for that or blame FERC for not actually updating those standards until 2023.
However, you still seem to have missed (and demonstrated) my point by referencing Energy Transfer -- they are a midstream company who made 99% of their profits off of NG not power. Conflating their profit with ERCOT's power prices is the problem. People refuse to educate themselves on the difference between gas and power markets, so the TRC and its massively influential O&G lobbyists have made zero changes to the intrastate gas network since the winter storm. Why? Because every layman who has read a few articles and thinks they're an expert is solely focused on ERCOT.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/04/ercot-texas-electric...
I'm not sure how you decided what I'm "focused" on. Read the first two sentences of my previous post again.
Of course if we have to pretend it is to get Texas to do it… fine I guess.
The part that is really shocking to me is the cost to maintain transmission infrastructure is dramatically higher in this area too (power lines in the forest).
I think it's hard to compete with a certain combination of fuel mix and fully amortized 20th century plants.
TVA (similar in size to ERCOT, mostly within Tennessee) is about to begin its second such facility, after Raccoon Mountain [0]. Run-of-the-river facilities exist (including two in TVA's jurisdiction), which are capable of pumping water "up" the dam (for later use during peak loads) — perhaps LCRA might explore the feasibility of this?
Regardless of how the energy is stored, it might also (eventually) make sense to join Eastern/Western interconnects (and thereby "store" the energy outside of Texas). But I know ego/"Texus"/pride mentality exists (having grown up in Austin), so I won't hold my breath on accepting Federal regulations...
[0] wikipedia.org/wiki/Raccoon_Mountain_Pumped-Storage_Plant
I'm not sure if hydro could compete on price any more, either. Batteries are so cheap.
At some point you get limited by fill/discharge rate, but the cost of storage in a big pumped hydro is still pretty cheap.
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Interesting times.
As renewable generation increases past a certain level grid stability does require additional effort and that’s a lot more difficult to price in. In Texas their grid is isolated from the rest of the US. This may create a lower ceiling on renewables since they can’t send excess generation anywhere other than their own batteries .
They just dont want the state to fund the cause and don’t consider it the state’s role or problem or the state as a solution to a problem that isnt wholly solved by the proposed expensive solution
People outside of that group attribute the disagreement to insanity
When in reality as soon as an economical and private sector solution is there, republicans are on board
I see a way to bridge consensus so maybe I’ll run for office eventually since this is still too abstract for most
The leader of the conservative party has claimed that windmills kill whales, cause cancer, are "garbage" and pledged to prevent any being built in his second term.
Texas Senate Bill 819 "relating to renewable energy generation facilities; authorizing fees." would have made it the states role to create an expensive solution.
> (1) for a solar power facility, ensure that all facility equipment is located at least: (A) 100 feet from any property line, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of property located less than 100 feet from the facility; and (B) 200 feet from any habitable structure, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of the habitable structure; and
> (2)for a wind power facility, ensure that all facility equipment is located at least 1,000 feet from the property line of each property that borders the property on which the facility is located, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of property located less than 1,000 feet from the facility
Texas Senate Bill 388 "relating to the legislature’s goals for electric generation capacity in this state." would have made it the states role to create an expensive solution.
> (a) It is the intent of the legislature that 50 percent of the megawatts of generating capacity installed in the ERCOT power region [this state] after January 1, 2026 [2000], be sourced from dispatchable generation [use natural gas].
are the Texas bill sponsors not part of the aggregate conservative position?
Ignoring that though, energy is a market defined by government policy.
To give an example, solar assets can't control when they output, so many countries have contracts where solar gets a fixed price. Without that, peak solar times might even have negative pricing.
Those are two seperate ways to frame a market, one making renewables profitable and one making them uneconomic.
We can shrug and say "make them profitable under the current conditions" but that ignores the fact that fixed prices for output makes energy cheaper and cleaner as a whole.
My point is, there is no "true market", its something governments define and control. The question should be what outcomes you want.
I'd argue for cheaper, cleaner and more diverse energy, but I'm not in the US.
While if they dont know they are beneficiaries of a policy then they’ll proverbially eat their face by removing it
Even if you replace Oil as source of energy the pervasive petrochemicals in the modern world are not easily replaceable.
America burns 12 calories of energy to transport 1 calorie of food. without Oil subsidies, everything will be expensive and especially food would take a large chunck of American household expenditure.
Quality of life is inversely proportional to the cost of food and energy. The lower the cost the better the life.
Then let's use the finite amount of oil for that, instead of burning it.
Climate change caused by burning fossil fuels is what has the potential to cause a mass starvation, not getting rid of oil where possible. It should be also noted that all fossil fuel is just sun's energy stored in another form, although I can understand some of you Americans may think it was magically created by a god. Why not use that sun's energy directly wherever possible?
There will be no need for fossil fuels in energy generation and transporting stuff. Whatever use cases remain are fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and many of those have alternatives too.
Pesticides and fertiliser may be derived from fossil oils and methane, that doesn't mean a single drop has to be burned in the engine of the combine harvester or the tractor.
The US has policies that are outright hostile to mass-transit.
The US has policies that produce some of the ugliest and grossly inefficient suburban environments that have ever existed.
Sure, oil is a critical part of modern civilization, but we could still have modern civilization, and a hell of a better one at that with better policies that end up using far less oil.
Not just the US, sadly. One of the reasons they do it is: transportation costs, and to avoid the attraction of the homeless as it is "bad for business" ("makes us look bad").
This doesn't even get into the gross inefficiency of overweight/obesity where people consume extra calories that make them gain weight which requires them to consume extra calories to carry their surplus weight around, or the amount of energy that is expended just to move them around in automobiles because they can't walk or bike even moderately short distances.
There's a lot of wastage in how we produce and consume food.
“In markets like Texas, the wholesale price of electricity is set equal to the price of electricity from the most expensive generator needed to meet demand, often referred to as the marginal generator.”
If the current market situation allows for a price of 12ct/kWh, why should I - just because I have the more effective technology - get less than the fossil guy?
Generally this is even beneficial because it could increase margins for renewable and grid scale batteries
If you instead measure how much people talk about renewable energy, California comes out far ahead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renew...
Lot of others that could be complained about (like Florida and Arizona)
If you downplay the right thing, the wrong thing for energy gets selected for other reasons.
All their hydro was built 60 years ago, by the federal government. The state deserves absolutely no credit.
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Is hot air a useful commodity?
One of the big issues with renewables that the author is, I can only assume, is deliberately eliding is that energy cannot be brought on as required. Even in Texas, you still need non-renewables to fill the gap and you still need to recover the costs of running those assets in the price...Texas is the absolute best case scenario, and it isn't working (as the comments show, it is quite easy to see why: people are obsessed with politics and reality matters less than your political enemies being wrong, companies have also realized that the subsidies in this area are incredible if you tell politicians they are right). The same thing is happening with battery operators.
You also see the same thing in other countries that invested heavily in renewables (UK is one example, they are mothballed a lot of non-renewable sources ten years ago, the government had to introduce massive subsidies for retail consumers because electricity prices are so high due to the need to recover costs of the remaining non-renewable sources when the wind happens to stop blowing): it has to increase the cost of energy because you have to pay for renewables and pay for the battery operators to do nothing and pay for the gas operators to do nothing.
No, it doesn't have to increase the cost.
If you have a town powered by gas, the cost of maintaining and staffing the gas plant is locked in.
But most of the cost of that gas plant is the fuel.
If the total cost per kWh of a solar or solar+battery installation is lower than the fuel cost of the gas plant, then you build it. It saves you money even though you're paying the gas operators to do nothing part of the time.
If it's not cheaper than fuel, you don't build it. No harm no foul.
Follow that strategy and you'll end up with lots of renewables without wasting a penny.
Though honestly some idle gas plants don't cost that much. How many kilowatts do you need? 4? Okay, the fixed costs for 4 kilowatts of combined cycle gas power are $50 per year. That's all it takes to have backup production for the entire grid, even with no base load plants anywhere.
I suspect this is an issue that looks worse in 'intuitive' foresight but not so bad in educated retrospective but we will not know until we pass through that point. I am but an armchair "expert" on this. Usually when something like this comes up, 15 people who know better than me will highlight something I was not aware of.
Better examples around the globe and within North America are non isolated grids - Texas is in a weak position to share it's excess and to get back energy from wind blowing in other states.