If renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, why do poor countries keep building coal and gas fired power stations?
If it is truly cheaper, surely the regions least able to afford development would choose renewables every time?
I know there’s lots of measures that show renewables are cheaper, but I suspect a lot of these estimates ignore the huge cost of storage in most places. Most countries don’t have things like fjords to make energy storage cheap.
Planning cycles take 5-10 years and are often based on out of date information when the plans are made. Couple that with it being far easier for corrupt officials to skim off approvals of a few large projects than many small ones, and you will find that what has been happening 5 years ago is going to be completed different than what will happen 5 years from now.
Renewable energy and battery storage are on tech curves like semiconductors or DNA sequencing. Fossil fuels are not.
I think this theory has merit, but I don't think you can necessarily say that battery tech is on a similar tech curve to renewables. We simply haven't built many utility scale batteries so it's unclear how much improvements can be made.
Add to that that batteries have been around for centuries, but renewables are decades old, so it makes sense that they are improving in cost so quickly: they are a newer tech.
Batteries are completely on a similar curve, continuously improving at an exponential rate, and as they get scaled up to TWh/year production there is a chance of acceleration of this trend. There is a proliferation of new chemistry and tech in all parts of the battery. We are just at the very beginning.
I’ll believe they are on a similar curve when I see a similar curve using data from utility scales.
Of course stuff like Lithium batteries are accelerating, but these aren’t economical for utility scale batteries yet. There’s a good chance they will never be.
I have been following the industry from a distance; construction is accelerating but the prices are still well beyond economical for the scale required for grid stability. And projects are still relatively tiny (<10 GW).
Based on the latest projects such as this one in Australia [0], building a grid-scale system will result in energy prices increasing by many multiples. Of course it will get cheaper, but I don't see it being cheap enough that it won't have massive impact on costs (I hope I'm wrong btw).
> Renewable energy technology was once seen as unaffordable for developing countries. However, since 2015, investment in non-hydro renewable energy has been higher in developing countries than in developed countries, and comprised 54% of global renewable energy investment in 2019. The International Energy Agency forecasts that renewable energy will provide the majority of energy supply growth through 2030 in Africa and Central and South America, and 42% of supply growth in China.
I suspect this is because many poor countries are used to intermittent power, and so renewables are acceptable. In developed countries, continuous power is expected. It may be luxurious, but if power is interrupted too often the populace will reject renewables.
That has nothing to do with it, as renewable power is being deployed extremely quickly in developing countries too.
Intermittent generators does not mean an intermittent grid, and in fact by having fewer single points of failure, and ensuring that grid operators are used to dynamic dispatch from intermittent generators, grids like Germany's have become more reliable with the addition of intermittent generators.
It's like ~10 years ago when web apps went from large architectures with a few boxes to cloud-scale operators where random failure was expected. By planning for lots of small, less reliable components, overall reliability increased.
It's been years since I followed the translations of documents, but a web search will turn up lots of documentation, like this top hit from a source that I haven't used before, but which matches what I have found in the past:
> The indicator most often used to describe grid reliability is the average power outage duration experienced by each customer in a year, a metric known by the tongue-tying name of “System Average Interruption Duration Index” (SAIDI). Based on this metric, Germany — where renewables supply nearly half of the country’s electricity — boasts a grid that is one of the most reliable in Europe and the world. In 2020, SAIDI was just 0.25 hours in Germany. Only Liechtenstein (0.08 hours), and Finland and Switzerland (0.2 hours), did better in Europe, where 2020 electricity generation was 38 percent renewable (ahead of the world’s 29 percent). Countries like France (0.35 hours) and Sweden (0.61 hours) — both far more reliant on nuclear power — did worse, for various reasons.
Nuclear is typically not a good thing for reliability. They are big single points of failure, and France was less reliable than Germany. Similarly, Texas relied on nuclear during their massive cold snaps and that foolishness killed people. It takes better planning than "nuclear is baseload" to build a reliable grid.
This comparison really exaggerates the differences, the measures are basically the same. If you look at the ranges over 2015-2020, France ranged from 0.17:0.25 and Germany ranged from 0.14:0.46. Top 11% in 2020 vs top 14% of countries with data.
It's a moot point anyway, since renewables don't stabilize Germany's grid: coal and gas power plants (and imported electricity) do. Renewables are cheap if they are a small proportion of sources or the grid is stabilized by another source. If you need storage the cost simply explodes.
regarding you question: In large scale projects there is a lot of inertia, especially in less developed areas. Many of these places have just build a conventional grid, and are in no situation to upgrade to renewables.
That being said: some non-industrial countries are actually moving fast towards adopting renewables (compared to developed countries). e.g. Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Brazil.
Worth noting that is initial capital costs of building the plant. Maintenance, fuel etc are not included, even before considering external costs such as poor health outcomes from pollution.
I didn't even notice that. I think I got blind sighted by the fact that the parent commenter went to the effort of googling the Wikipedia page for a source and it didn't even support their point.
The more confident an online commenter is of their assertion, the lower the chances it is true.
Because your comment is slightly ambiguous and who knows what LCOE is:
> On average the levelized cost of electricity from utility scale solar power and onshore wind power is less than from coal and gas-fired power stations,[1]: TS-25 but this varies a lot depending on location.
>The first German Offshore Wind Park Alpha Ventus Offshore Wind Farm with a nameplate capacity of 60 MW cost €250 million (after an initial estimate of €190 million).[21] In 2012 it produced 268 Gigawatt-hours of electricity, achieving a capacity factor of just over 50%.[22] If the overnight cost is calculated for the nameplate capacity, it works out to €4167 per Kilowatt whereas if one takes into account the capacity factor, the figure needs to be roughly doubled.
You also can't just plug capacity factor in and call it a day either: it is very difficult to black start the power grid if all your intermittents happen to be under producing at the same time and you can't shed load fast enough. In the case of most renewables, this fall off can happen very quickly.
On a mixed grid this is fine because you just ask your gas plants to up their load contribution and they can do it because they can overbuild fairly cheaply - they just increase their moment to the moment fuel burn. On a theoretical grid which is carbon neutral, you've got a real problem answering that question (in fact on any grid with >30% intermittent renewables you've got a big problem). Storage doesn't save you here either - i.e. the cheapest, largest storage you can build is pumped hydro, but pumped hydro can only be "charged" at about half the rate it discharges. Catching up when you have an outage is not trivial (i.e. you have to overbuild by an enormous amount).
You start adding all those problems together, and solar and wind stop looking "cheap" - they get away with being cheap because very much like coal, oil and gas, they avoid pricing in their own externalities (and no, you can't just ignore power grid outages - you lose the grid you lose water and sanitation in cities, and they "die" within a week).
Batteries can save the grid in the short term (all those unused EVs standing around) and more and more loads are designed to be controllable by power grid operators. You're making this a bigger problem than it is. In Germany, many households are currently replacing their old fossil heating with heatpumps, and many of the heatpumps are equipped with technology that allows the grid operators to switch them off remotely within seconds.
No one is going to build a power plant they "mostly" can't run and make revenue from. So you're going to be subsidizing the full build and expense of a gas plant that you plan to never actually sell power from.
Which means you get to add that cost onto the cost of whatever renewables you're building - both capital, maintenance, and support infrastructure - which you can't offset. Basically just a flat set of costs on top of whatever building your renewables cost, and not insignificant ones (can't run a gas a plant you don't use without gas, therefore you also need gas infrastructure...)
Running them almost never (predictions assume around 3 days per year for Germany) means we can use cheaper plants with lower efficiency. These plants will be operated by the grid operators, not by power generation companies. Their cost will be factored into the grid fees since they provide "grid stability". It's going to cost a bit, but not nearly as much as the difference between nuclear or coal power and renewables.
Most of these plants already exist. We just have to pay their upkeep and see how the future unfolds. It isn't necessary to build many additional plants.
Cost estimates of attaining net zero are on the order of 100-200% of global GDP. To get this done by 2050 we would need to spend 3-6% of global GDP on the energy transition. This includes all these contingency costs.
No, you have to buy them. They have owners - they're private infrastructure. The owners intend to sell power from them. If they can't do that, then they're going to either try to sell the asset, or demolish the asset and use the land for something else.
The only way to stop gas plants from running would be to ban them from doing so, or charge them a carbon price which means they can't. But, in both cases, the owners then have no reason to hold onto that infrastructure - that's all capital they can't make money off of anymore.
So you are talking about an expensive nationalization of a huge amount of existing infrastructure...or a pretty serious correction to the price of power in the national markets to make it plausible to run these plants in "mostly shutdown" condition while still being ready to go.
Which seems unlikely: if I can make money selling renewable energy, why would I leave cash locked up in an asset which I can't?
Since the writing is on the wall that these power plants are mostly worthless in the foreseeable future most energy companies had to reduce the asset worth of the power plants already considerably. Who would want to buy such legacy tech?
Rather, the price to keep those power plants available as a contingency reserve will have to be negotiated and the price will be somewhere which is more than the cost of keeping them operational but less than building new plants and keeping them operational. I guess it is a good way for existing operators to squeeze some little bit from a doomed tech but it won't cost society very much.
Doesn't sound very doomed if your entire energy strategy is completely dependent on it.
Oh and you know... They're a lot cheaper per reliable kWh then any other option (green methane would require solar power to be an order of magnitude cheaper then it currently is - not impossible but it also hasn't happened yet and may not).
They will be paid not for the energy they produce but for the ability to produce energy on demand. It's a grid operation cost and is already financed as such in Europe. Companies can sell the guarantee to produce a certain amount of energy within X seconds and they are compensated for that. In combination with the low LCOE of renewables, it is way cheaper than nuclear power for example.
The current bid for demand response though is still higher then for conventional operation, and piggybacks off the infrastructure for gas supply which runs constantly
If you don't have regularly operating gas power stations any more, then the cost for underproduction protection is going to be a lot higher - because rather then running an extra turbine or increasing fuel burn, you have to justify the whole powerplant and it's sort infrastructure existing.
Do you have a source for the world cost estimate? The only ones I can find have pretty absurd assumptions about expected future costs and expected savings.
> If renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, why do poor countries keep building coal
If rich countries open sourced all tech related to renewables and made -publicly avable designs for solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and factories that produce them, then it would be a valid question.
Oh, also provide loans because renewables have higher cap-ex and lower op-ex. This factor alone can account for massive difference, as -or countries don’t have cash on hand and can’t access credit.
Instead US tells them not to take loans from China but offers no alternative
In all of the places I have worked both for pay and voluntarily money has very rarely been the problem, but it has always been the excuse.
E.g. how many billions of euros were collected within a week after the Notre Dame burned? At the risk of offending a lot of french I will say that the Notre Dame is just a building. In the big scheme of things it is not important. Nobody will starve if it is not re-built.
The problem is 'mental inertia', convenience and (perceived) risk aversion.
At least in Germany, fossil fuels are gifted to power companies (they don't pay per ton of coal extracted), while the resulting costs due to fueling the climate crisis are carried by society (and mostly by poor countries around the globe). That's why it is profitable.
There is a lot of fossil fuel development going on that doesn't make sense if renewables are cheaper. Especially in China where panels are actually made. I'm open to an alternative explanation, but I don't think it's inertia. Most industries switch to cheaper tech pretty soon after it becomes available.
Social and political considerations can be components of inertia too. Consider China's fairly recent decision to stop funding new fossil fuel generation development outside its own borders, where social and political considerations should have minimal impact to Chinese citizens.
China is starting to move in the right direction, but there's a ton of planning lag. China is by far the largest single consumer of solar panels. It also deploys more wind turbines than any other country.
Two limiting factors are China's insatiable need for ever greater power generating capacity of any kind, and the surprisingly rapid uptake of renewables globally which has constrained new production.
If it is truly cheaper, surely the regions least able to afford development would choose renewables every time?
I know there’s lots of measures that show renewables are cheaper, but I suspect a lot of these estimates ignore the huge cost of storage in most places. Most countries don’t have things like fjords to make energy storage cheap.