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Energy in 2030; 15 year prediction

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nwdiver

Well-Known Member
Feb 17, 2013
9,398
14,603
United States
So... I thought this might be kind of fun. Plus I'll get to look back (This forum will still be searchable... right?) and see how right or wrong we were...

Energy PRODUCTION;
- Nuclear power will only exist in tightly regulated markets. ~1/3 of the current fleet will be shut down. Vogtle and Summer will be the last fission plants ever built.
- Wind will continue to expand but will be largely overshadowed (no pun intended) by solar; The primary benefit to wind will be to decrease storage requirements.

SOLAR;
- Module ~$0.20/w; Inverter ~$0.10/w; Racking ~$0.20/w. Labor ~$1/w residential; ~$0.30 utility.
- Average module efficiency ~25% with ~30% for premium modules.
- Daytime electricity costs will be NEGATIVE (fee for exporting) for >1hr/day for >10% of the US.
- Solar Installs will begin to level off at ~200GW/yr. >1TW of installed solar. Solar PV >30% of total generation.

Generation Breakdown...
Solar ~40%
Wind ~25%
Nuclear ~10%
Coal ~5%
Natural Gas + Hydro ~20%


Energy CONSUMPTION;
- Supercharger BAYS outnumber gas stations ~2:1.
- EV cheaper than ICE counterpart (~2025 parity).
- ~75% of car (not truck) sales are EVs
- Light Duty trucks & SUVS <25%. Mostly PHEVs.
- Most public chargers are free 10am - 2pm
- PHEV semi-trucks make their appearance (<5% of fleet)
- Toyota continues to say Hydrogen is the future... :wink:
 
Wow. Good stuff. I don't think I can strongly disagree with any of it. I might slightly disagree with the 2025 parity. I think it'll be sooner than that. And, because of this, I think the 75% EV will be higher as well.

Question: when you say "Supercharger bays outnumber gas stations", are you just talking about Tesla SuperChargers or EV charging stations in general?
 
Question: when you say "Supercharger bays outnumber gas stations", are you just talking about Tesla SuperChargers or EV charging stations in general?

Specifically Superchargers... I really have no idea how other L3 protocols will do... that largely depends on wether other OEMs adopt the Tesla standard and hubris is hard to predict...

Yeah... bit of an apples/bushel comparison... BAYS vs Gas STATIONS...

To further elaborate on coal and nuclear; I suspect that most plants in 2030 will be zombie plants... kept alive by pure political will, not economics.
 
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Here's an interesting article on a bill for renewable standards which contains some interesting predictions for energy mix in 2030:
New Bill Would Ensure The U.S. Gets No More Than 70 Percent Of Its Energy From Non-Renewable Sources | ThinkProgress

This graph is from a UCS report:
National-RES-Fig.-2-638x403.jpg


Looks like nuclear and natural gas and coal decrease slowly while solar and wind have large increases. A renewable energy standard would accelerate the shift to solar and wind.
 
Looks like nuclear and natural gas and coal decrease slowly while solar and wind have large increases. A renewable energy standard would accelerate the shift to solar and wind.

Funny thing about predictions... if you look back at EIA stuff from ~10 years ago, they ALWAYS underestimate solar growth. I suspect because they use a full 12 months to get cost data so their predictions are usually based in information that's ~2 years old. A report published in 2014 is based on data collected in 2012, the cost of PV has fallen >30% in that time.
 
This, I imagine, will largely depend on jurisdiction. Ontario, Canada, for instance has already phased out all coal, but has made a longer term commitment to nuclear. Here is the breakdown of our current generation fleet:

5-14-2015 1-59-53 PM.jpg


Solar isn't shown because it is primarily distribution-connected here at the utilization level and is considered more of a load displacement technology, just like conservation initiatives are. If/When large scale transmission-connected solar farms come, then they would start to show up on this graph. We do have a fair amount of large commercial wind here.

Here's a snap of Ontario's current utilization as I write this:

5-14-2015 2-03-48 PM.jpg
 
Here's a snap of Ontario's current utilization as I write this:

View attachment 81040

Fascinating, thanks for sharing.

I'm curious... I see 2,640 MW being exported, and 944 MW of natural gas production. If it weren't for the exporting, Ontario would be almost completely carbon free at that point in time. I've been looking, but I can't find it... the overnight, super off peak production mix is very different from the daytime mix. Almost all research papers I have read use an annual production mix when discussing EV pollution and carbon footprint and I have not found one that examines only super off peak. I'm wondering if anyone, CAISO, EIA, or anyone else has reports on the hourly production mix? I'm most interesting in both the actual usage/production mix at super-off peak and the idle level of coal plants. I've read that most coal plants can only idle down to 40%. I'm trying to sort out just how many EVs can charge off nuclear, wind, and hydro in various areas at super off peak which is very different than the footprint from charging at say, 5pm.
 
I'm curious... I see 2,640 MW being exported, and 944 MW of natural gas production. If it weren't for the exporting, Ontario would be almost completely carbon free at that point in time.

Gas is relatively new to Ontario and is primarily required to address the wild variability in wind power. (Battery storage may address this in the future). We have interconnects with New York, Michigan, Minnesota and Quebec and quite often you'll see a mix of imports and exports throughout the day. In fact, I can't recall ever seeing zero imports like this before. Unfortunately it's not as simple as just shutting down the exports and turning off the gas.
 
Gas is relatively new to Ontario and is primarily required to address the wild variability in wind power. (Battery storage may address this in the future). We have interconnects with New York, Michigan, Minnesota and Quebec and quite often you'll see a mix of imports and exports throughout the day. In fact, I can't recall ever seeing zero imports like this before. Unfortunately it's not as simple as just shutting down the exports and turning off the gas.

Why isn't aren't the reserve requirements being carried on the hydro? My guess is that NG exports were simply economic.
 
I doubt you'll see module costs that low. $50 panels? Who is making any money at that price point?
Solar will be at 25% of total, well over 100% at peak hours in all areas where it makes sense.
Close to 40-50% of new car sales will be pure EVs/fuel cell.
Can't wait for free midday "fuel ups"! That's pretty much a lock to happen.
 
Why isn't aren't the reserve requirements being carried on the hydro? My guess is that NG exports were simply economic.

Ontario is a bit of a mess. The wind contracts are all at a guaranteed price (significantly higher than the average market price) and are structured such that the system operator has to purchase the wind power whether needed at the moment or not. One of the nuclear operators also has a fixed price contract as do some of the so-called "legacy" hydro assets that are still owned by the government of Ontario. Others bid in. Since we have a lot of wind at night and the base-load generation is not easy to throttle, we get crazy low market prices at certain times... even below zero for some hours. I've always thought an interuptable super off peak rate would make sense here and could benefit EV owners who typically charge overnight anyway.
 
You mentioned that we should quickly install 200 GW of solar. Do you understand what that actually does. The average daily output is 5 hours per day of production. There is also a 20% loss in converting between DC and AC. So 200 GW ends up producing 200x5x365x.8 = 292 Twh of electricity per year. Unfortunately it does not produce that on a consistent basis. In general Solar produces about 6 times more in the highest summer month than the lowest winter month. For air conditioning use this works great but for heating and operating cars not so well. To convert all cars (does not include diesel trucks) to electric operation would require about 1,100 Twh per year. This assumes electric cars are 4 times more efficient than ICE cars. So you would need about 750 GW additional Solar to replace the average use of all cars.

Please click the 'Reply With Quote' to respond so the response can be in context... that provides a link to the discussion;

Seriously... we need >50% of new vehicle sales in 10 years to be electric and we've got to install ~200GW of solar... what's the plan? I'm at a loss... More time is exponentially more risk. What's your proposal?

If you look at the first post on this thread you'll notice that we need to ramp up to 200GW per YEAR by ~2030. 200GW is a ~10 year goal... not an end goal... AND 50% of NEW vehicles... not ALL vehicles. I also don't know where you get this 20% conversion loss stat from... most grid-tie inverters are ~98% efficient... even the poor ones are >95%.... A 6:1 summer:winter ratio is also not the US average... My home in Bremerton WA is closer to 5:1 and in NM it's ~5:3. It's also important to remember that ~300TWh is <10% of production... even during periods of peak production storage won't be necessary for most areas. At those levels intermittence is largely irrelevant.


So I think we will continue to need fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. By the way the current price of oil is already reducing the capital outlay of the oil companies. This will eventually dry up the overcapacity and drive up the price of oil. This is good for those of you that want to reduce the use of fossil fuels but will be costly for those that still depend on it. I know my viewpoint on this issue is not very popular on this forum but it's what I believe using the available data. Have a nice day.

What's your definition of 'the foreseeable future'? As I posted in my prediction I think we'll still need fossil fuels in 15 years... I'd be interested to see YOUR prediction for energy in 2030...
 
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nwdiver,

The estimates I was looking at can be downloaded in the eia website shown below:

Download the AEO2015 Report

in the eia 2015 energy report (Annual Energy Outlook 2015 - Energy Information Administration). In their reference case it projects solar at about 100GW and Wind about 300 GW in 2040. They do have several cases. From reading the charts the highest for wind and solar are about 500GW for wind and about 200GW for solar in 2040. They also have cases with lower renewable numbers.
 
nwdiver,

The estimates I was looking at can be downloaded in the eia website shown below:

Download the AEO2015 Report

in the eia 2015 energy report (Annual Energy Outlook 2015 - Energy Information Administration). In their reference case it projects solar at about 100GW and Wind about 300 GW in 2040. They do have several cases. From reading the charts the highest for wind and solar are about 500GW for wind and about 200GW for solar in 2040. They also have cases with lower renewable numbers.

The EIA is NOTORIOUS for under predicting renewable growth. The GREAT thing is that you can actually dig up past predictions and see how close they were... most are HILARIOUSLY BAD. We've got ~10x more solar than the EIA was predicting ~10 years ago.

EIA Forecasts Consistently Underestimate RE and EE Compared to Market Realities

figureA.jpg


If the EIA is your sole source I can see how you would be under the mistaken impression that we need fossil fuels for 'the foreseeable future' :wink:

There is no technical or economic reason we can't reduce our dependency by ~90% by 2040. Only cultural.
 
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Thought provoking predictions to be sure, and interesting discussion. Thanks for posting.

"- ~75% of car (not truck) sales are EVs" will require about 150 gigafactories to make the batteries (100 M cars and light trucks will be built, 75 M with BEV powertrains, with each Gigafactory able to supply 0.5 M vehicles). It is unlikely that 150 Gigafactories can be built in only 15 years.

I will predict one Gigafactory per year, enough to supply about 8 M cars for 8% of total production to be BEVs by 2030.

I also will predict we will both be wrong! :biggrin:

GSP
 
Thought provoking predictions to be sure, and interesting discussion. Thanks for posting.

"- ~75% of car (not truck) sales are EVs" will require about 150 gigafactories to make the batteries (100 M cars and light trucks will be built, 75 M with BEV powertrains, with each Gigafactory able to supply 0.5 M vehicles). It is unlikely that 150 Gigafactories can be built in only 15 years.

I will predict one Gigafactory per year, enough to supply about 8 M cars for 8% of total production to be BEVs by 2030.

I also will predict we will both be wrong! :biggrin:

GSP

The thing about big numbers is that while 1 GF / year from where we sit today sounds big, in 10 years at that pace when we have 10 GFs in the world, it starts sounding like an anemic growth rate, especially next to the demand that built the first 10 GF's - 1 per year does a great job of satisfying demand for a few years, and becomes an artificial constraint on growth given the levels of demand we're already seeing, and not counting increasing levels of demand associated with prices coming down.

I predict we see initial production from GF2 in '18, from 2 more GFs in '20, and doubling every three years from there. That'd be 4 more in 23, 8 in 26, 16 in 29 (the doubling every 3 years will start getting really hard - finding sites if nothing else), 32 in 32, 64 in 35.


I also predict that each 50Gwh of annual production won't actually require a new GF site - bigger buildings, changing battery chemistry, and other technological and process changes will enable each site to produce larger and larger quantities of batteries. So I don't know how many actual GFs will be built or needed, but it will be something less than I've listed with their total capacity at 50Gwh per GF-increment.
 
I doubt you'll see module costs that low. $50 panels? Who is making any money at that price point?

Modules are a technology product - there can be both conversion efficiency gains and "balance of module" gains. A couple places needing work: There are still a lot of assembly and intra-module interconnection costs to be driven out. China does it with cheap labor, but automation is going to be key to driving those costs lower (and expanding production). Silicon slicing waste is becoming a significant cost as well, cell slices are thin enough now that saw kerf is eating up nearly 50% of each ingot. Some innovation is needed there too - maybe continuous wafer casting? Or some innovative and conversion-efficient thin-film technology may yet arise (Perskovite, dye-sensitized, etc.)?

Re: Ontario - my parents live there so I'm somewhat familiar with the mess. Ontario's electricity prices are so high that they run the risk of a significant rate of grid defection in the next few years. Solar panels & battery storage in the summer, and maybe natural-gas fuel cells for combined heat & power in winter (in a few more years)?

For the US: Some coal producers are already flirting with bankruptcy (Peabody?), the new court-upheld EPA rules are going to keep pushing the plants to retire early, and there is no seaborne export business to get into - that market is crashing as well as China and India are making big moves into renewables. US Natural Gas prices are going to stabilize vs. world prices as we get some LNG export terminals built and as frackers aren't able to punch new wells fast enough to keep up with well decline rates.

I think the following are certainties by 2030:
George & David Koch are out of the oil business. Well, they'll be dead by then anyway, but with any luck they'll have served prison time for their environmental crimes prior to that.
Storage will be cheap, driving oil-combusion and natural gas Peakers out of business.
A LOT of buildings will have solar panels
Onshore wind will be cheap and we'll have several new HVDC interconnects from the wind corridors in the center of the country to the population centers.
Floating offshore wind will finally be being built-out with HVDC links to coastal cities. Excellent capacity factors for offshore - 50%-60%+
Low-temperature geothermal generation will be being built where it makes sense for overnight fill-in.
Retail electricity prices will be declining rather than increasing. Anything else risks customers defecting from the grid.
Many new homes will be net-zero energy (required by code in some states).
Many new commercial properties will be net-zero energy.
Net grid demand will be lower.
EVs will be at minimum grid-interactive (interruptable/dispatchable load), and many will be V2G-capable.
On weekends large chunks of the US will be entirely powered by renewables/storage.
Uber, Apple and Google's self-driving taxi services have put GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy yet again, and Ford is circling the drain. Private vehicle sales are down 75%.

And taxpayers will still be paying to decommission bankrupt nuclear plants.
 
Thought provoking predictions to be sure, and interesting discussion. Thanks for posting.

"- ~75% of car (not truck) sales are EVs" will require about 150 gigafactories to make the batteries (100 M cars and light trucks will be built, 75 M with BEV powertrains, with each Gigafactory able to supply 0.5 M vehicles). It is unlikely that 150 Gigafactories can be built in only 15 years.

I will predict one Gigafactory per year, enough to supply about 8 M cars for 8% of total production to be BEVs by 2030.

I also will predict we will both be wrong! :biggrin:

GSP

Where does the 100 million cars number come from?

The best answer I was able to come up with a few months ago was that for the last few years the US has pretty consistently sold about 17 million new cars and light trucks combined per year, with ~217 million on the road. Is the 100 million a worldwide figure? I thought this was a US prediction discussion, but I've been confused before.

To build 12.75 million long range EVs will require on the order of 25x the current gigafactory plan (not necessarily 25 sites, though - AFAIK there's no particular benefit to the size Tesla picked - it was just what they could afford and expected to need soon.)

Tesla's planning on spending $5 billion on the original Gigafactory, so we're talking about an investment of ~$125 Billion over 15 years. Not trivial - but since the auto industry in the US presumably makes around $527 billion annually in sales (17 million cars at ~$31k per,) it hardly seems a massive investment compared to the $8 trillion in revenue they'll make over the same period (I know, not $8 trillion in profit. But if they make the ~25% gross margin Tesla has, the total Gigafactory needs would make up less than 10% of the profit...)

It's completely doable. It might even happen. Hopefully Tesla won't be doing it all by themselves.
Walter
 
"- ~75% of car (not truck) sales are EVs" will require about 150 gigafactories to make the batteries (100 M cars and light trucks will be built, 75 M with BEV powertrains, with each Gigafactory able to supply 0.5 M vehicles). It is unlikely that 150 Gigafactories can be built in only 15 years.

I will predict one Gigafactory per year, enough to supply about 8 M cars for 8% of total production to be BEVs by 2030.

GSP

15 years is an ETERNITY... think of all the things we didn't have just 15 years ago... no iPhones, really no smart phones at all; Solar PV was <1% of what it is now... and of course Tesla didn't even exist :wink:

I agree ~150 GFs in ~15 years sounds daunting but that's LESS growth than solar has experienced over the last 15 years. Also, 50GWh is based on cell count... I can't imagine that they would produce fewer cells simply since the capacity is higher... the GF output should increase ~3-5%/yr as cell chemistry improves. No doubt a lot of that ~75% will also be PHEVs... but... once you add utility demand back into the mix we probably will need ~100-150 GFs by 2030...

The longer service life of an EV vs ICE should also help reduce the ICE fleet...

Where does the 100 million cars number come from?

The best answer I was able to come up with a few months ago was that for the last few years the US has pretty consistently sold about 17 million new cars and light trucks combined per year, with ~217 million on the road. Is the 100 million a worldwide figure? I thought this was a US prediction discussion, but I've been confused before.
Walter

If I'm not mistaken I believe that's a global prediction for 2030... globally ~60M cars were sold last year but that trend is flattening. I think it's possible we see a downward trend as new cars (ESPECIALLY EVs) last longer and more people migrate into cities.

Anyone want to predict where storage will be? Quantify it? I'll throw an arbitrary number....how about 50% of homes/businesses will have some sort of storage installed.

I'm gonna say ~90% of homes with PV have at least 4kWh of storage... I agree with your ~50% of total prediction...
 
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