How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
They paid to decommission fossils early, and amortized it over the future. So it's going to drop like a rock once those debts are paid and the last plants shut down, with fewer remaining customers and lighter load on the grid. But until then, consumers will be paying higher bills.
Perhaps they did not mean point 18, but I found it interesting anyway.
The existing gas infrastructure represents a large amount of taxpayer investment, not due to be paid off until 2070. But it’s estimated that there won’t be any users of that infrastructure beyond 2050.
LCOE is a terrible metric for the power grid because it does not capture the cost of balancing the power grid.
Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem.
What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero.
The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.
Edit - the response below is also incomplete. The trouble with modelling the cost of balancing the power grid is that it depends on many variables, many of which are difficult to forecast. The primary challenge with depending on the weather for power generation is that the climate is changing. What that change looks like in 20 years is impossible to forecast. A great example is from the winter o 2023, during the "dunkelflaute" in europe. Both wind and solar power generation were low for three days.
The estimates for solar plus battery storage typically only account for eight or twelve hours of storage.
I am an electrical engineer based in Ontario, Canada. I'm very interested in the energy transition, especially the shift to electric vehicles, electric heat and the opportunities this creates in the electricity sector.
Looking for contract, part-time or volunteer work, specifically in renewable energy or smart grid consulting. I can also help write/review grant applications for Canadian federal/provincial support, but outside my areas of direct work.
Preferably smart grid technology, wind energy, solar PV, energy policy. Happy to chat about the long term revenue streams on the electricity grid, especially opportunities on the distribution system.
Location: Remote, prefer opportunities in US/Canada
Experience - Fifteen years total. Wind energy design background (Netherlands), Power systems degrees, experience working with the Canadian Federal government.
this is the exact kind of misinformation that prevents progress.
Brazil does not "fuel" cars on sugarcane any more than the US fuels its cars with corn. No one is missing any forests or trees. What you are missing is that the cost savings in fuel are so large with any EV that by itself, the money saved is an extremely compelling incentive to many people.
Wrong because Brazil DOES fuel cars on sugarcane alcohol. Most petrol stations in the country have pumps for sugarcane alcohol, nearly all the ICE cars sold in the last two decades have a flex engine (in the past you had to chose when buying the car if you wanted a alcohol engine or a gasoline engine, now the engines just takes whichever you trow at it and adjusts the injection accordingly), and roughly half the personal vehicles in the country run daily on alcohol. That fact has softened this oil crisis a tiny tiny bit in the country (when oil is expensive many people just pump alcohol instead of gasoline).
And right that electricity is much cheaper than gasoline or alcohol, so people are changing to EVs because of the cost savings in fuel. In fact electricity was already much cheaper even when the price of oil was down, what was holding back EV adoption in the country was never the price of oil, but the relatively high purchase prices of EV vehicles (the average upper-middle-class Brazilian can't afford a Tesla like an American or European can), but the latest batch of basic EVs (like the BYD Dolphin-mini/Seagul) started to break that barrier about one or two years ago, and are now on the top sales charts.
> Brazil does not "fuel" cars on sugarcane any more than the US fuels its cars with corn.
In Brazil "ethanol" is sold separately from normal gasoline, and as far as I know it's entirely made from sugar cane, without fossil fuels. It's why flex cars are so popular there, since they can use either fuel depending on what's cheaper.
Meanwhile, you can't buy 100% corn-based fuel in the US.
> this is the exact kind of misinformation that prevents progress.
lol
> Brazil does not "fuel" cars on sugarcane any more than the US fuels its cars with corn.
Brazil has been building cars which can run on 100% ethanol since the 1970s.
These are not obscure facts; this is common knowledge the US teaches to schoolchildren.
In the US gasoline is a 10% ethanol blend, sometimes 15%. E85 is available only in some midwestern states (I've NEVER seen it for sale anywhere on the west coast) and it's only good for flex-fuel vehicles, which most manufacturers stopped building ~ 10 years ago when the free money from the government shifted towards EV incentives.
Ethanol is not a good fuel source for something like a personal vehicle. Corn and rice based ethanol are barely energy positive and can be slightly carbon positive.
Sugarcane-based ethanol does have a strongly negative carbon footprint and positive energy but ICE engines are notably less efficient overall that large utility scale cogen plants, even after you factor in transmission and distribution losses.
Making sugarcane into ethanol is good. It's less clear that distributing that chemical feedstock to a zillion people is a net benefit. Just send the electrons and keep the fuel at the plant.
> Ethanol is not a good fuel source for something like a personal vehicle.
It is about as good as gasoline (or better), Brazil has been running a good chunk of its personal car fleet on sugarcane alcohol for decades. Yes, EVs are better than ICVs, but there is nothing uniquely bad about ethanol that makes it worse as a fuel source for a personal vehicle than any other combustive fuel.
A low cost 120v charged EV is a wildly practical thing for everything other than very long distance travel. They are simple to maintain, require fewer spare parts, and have fewer parts to fail in general. Don't think Tesla, think golf cart and trailer.
There may be places where grid access is impractical, in which case chemical fuels are a decent alternative, but as africa has shown solar microgrids are also quite effective and enable a ton of additional economic activity.
EV utility vehicles match quite well to the second and third world, when they benefit from sufficient economy of scale. I don't know if we're there yet but we're very close. These things are getting quite cheap.
Too many folks here do not understand or care to appreciate the constraints of the real world. Heat pumps are excellent and relatively cheap but have limitations. One of the biggest limitations is that a heat pump's efficiency drops as ambient temperature drops. This is the worst possible situation for heating as the conditions when the risks of losing heat are the highest, are precisely the conditions when these devices are least efficient.
As long as they remain more efficient than resistive heaters down to the lowest temperatures you experience, it's a win. Heat pump efficiency is still improving. You can get heat pumps that can handle down to -35°C now with even better ones in the works.
I'm not questioning the merit of heat pumps. I should know because i have two in Ontario, Canada, one rated to -35 C and the other rated to - 25 C.
What i remain opposed to is this persistent idea that heat pumps work in all situations, for all people and for all time. They do not, and heat pumps create a unique set of problems that we might not be fully prepared for.
I will offer you a realistic answer - the uncertainty and need for planning are the killers.
An EV dropped my transportation fuel bills by 90% but even i will admit that an EV is a hassle. On any trip that exceeds the range of the car, we must identify EV chargers, then determine whether they are working and only then can we start counting the additional minutes.
In the winter, seeing the range of you car drop by 26% and not knowing where the next working charger is, is the #1 reason why we still have two cars. If i could eliminate one with access to better transit, it would be the EV, not the combustion car.
Legit question (and one that I need to answer for myself as well):
Would it be cheaper to keep the EV and rent a car for when you need to do longer trips? (also taking into account the additional hassle of renting a petrol/diesel car)
Only speaking for myself, I'd seriously consider renting a (combustion) car for an interstate driving holiday if it's a rare occurrence, like once a year or once every two years. It will become an exercise in accounting[0].
My silly-ish analogy is: I don't own a plane because I fly rarely enough that it's not worth buying a plane to allow me to fly wherever, whenever I want.
Chevy Volt. Perfect car. I can consistently squeeze about 60 miles electric city driving, and 400+ on a trip. Soooo disappointed GM canceled the program. No one ever understood how great this car was…
I did the maths on my situation and it did not work out. It is currently cheaper to pay the $120 / month or so on insurance and maintenance for the second car as opposed to renting a car for the once a month that we actually use the second car.
The trouble is that renting a car is expensive and public transit is an even bigger hassle.
Sure, but this is just a temporary infrastructure issue that will be solved thoroughly as EVs become more popular. If you take long trips often, maybe it's not for you, but I personally only take trips longer than 200km or so once a year, if that, so I absolutely adore my EV and would never go back to ICE.
The reality is that operating an EV is a hassle unless you can deal with the hassle or have sufficient privilege (e.g. live in a detached home) to be able to offset some of the hassle.
And an ICE isn't a hassle just because you've gotten used to it? They're loud, they smell bad, their torque is terrible and uneven, they're inefficient, they have tons of moving parts that are liable to break and are hard to service, and they're expensive and susceptible to fuel price hikes, like now.
How that gets turned into "yeah but EVs can't drive for 500km on one charge, so they're a hassle", I don't know.
Plastic is great, until your laptop falls and the plastic shell shatters. That's the weakness of plastic - it's brittle. I have a ten year old macbook with a dinged aluminium chassis. The structure of the shell is still intact despite a few falls.
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
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