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Power United States

Solar and Wind To Top Coal Power In US For First Time In 2024 (evwind.es) 67

Posted by BeauHD from the future-is-now dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from REVE News: The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects, for the first year on record, combined electricity generation from wind and solar to surpass generation from coal in 2024. EIA expects solar generation in 2024 to increase 39% (228 kilowatthours) from 2023, driven by continued increases in solar capacity. "Renewables, particularly solar photovoltaics, are growing rapidly and making large contributions to electricity generation," DeCarolis said.

EIA expects natural gas prices to be $2.77 per million British thermal units this winter, about 23% lower than previously forecast. The winter season is off to a warmer-than-expected start, so U.S. households are consuming less natural gas for heat than expected. The lower natural gas consumption is also contributing to rising U.S. natural gas inventories, which typically results in lower prices. "We're seeing record domestic natural gas production paired with lower-than-expected natural gas demand, and we expect that is going to push prices lower this winter season," DeCarolis said. EIA will publish its next STEO on January 9, 2024, including the agency's first forecasts for the energy sector through 2025. The full report is available on the EIA website.
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Solar and Wind To Top Coal Power In US For First Time In 2024 More

Solar and Wind To Top Coal Power In US For First Time In 2024

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    • Re: (Score:2)

      by whitroth ( 9367 )

      I see... so you don't live downwind near *any* coal power plant. That could be fixed.

  • 228 kilowatthours ... ?! (Score:3)

    by evanh ( 627108 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @12:02AM (#64078029)

    One house roof can generate that in a month.

    • Re: 228 kilowatthours ... ?! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by madbrain ( 11432 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @12:04AM (#64078037) Homepage Journal

      My home has 70 rooftop panels. All time record is 140 kWh in one summer day. The number in TFS doesn't make sense.

      • My home has 70 rooftop panels. All time record is 140 kWh in one summer day. The number in TFS doesn't make sense.

        Just curious for Greed's sake...what does your homeowners insurance policy say about that solar configuration? Last I heard from a neighbor was he was forced to carry a $1M umbrella policy because of "structural integrity" roof excuses from "too many" solar panels.

        Also known as the corruption the local electric companies lobbied for in order to push money back into their pockets that you're "stealing".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by madbrain ( 11432 )

          My home insurance is OK with the configuration. The home is worth more than $1 million even without the panels, and I already carry a $2 million umbrella policy.

      • Re: 228 kilowatthours ... ?! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @11:20AM (#64078817)

        The number in TFS doesn't make sense.

        Indeed. TFA was written by an idiot.

        America consumes about 4 trillion kwh of electricity annually.

        In 2021, 434 billion kwh came from wind (about 10%), and 144 billion kwh came from solar (about 3%).

        What I think TFA is trying to say is that solar will increase by 39% to 228 billion kwh between 2023 and 2024. But that is almost certainly wrong. An increase that big in a single year is not realistic.

    • Journalists!

  • Nominal or effective capacity?

    • Libraries of Congress.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MacMann ( 7518492 )

      Nominal or effective capacity?

      I guess the term is "effective capacity". A couple clicks from the EIA page takes me here: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/s... [eia.gov]

      They expect at the end of 2023 to see 17% of total electrical energy from coal and 15% from wind and solar, with that flipping in 2024 so that it is 15% of electrical energy from coal and 17% from wind and solar. They expect the installed capacity from wind and solar in 2024 to be nearly double that of coal, the difference in electricity produced would be more from just burning less

      • Good then, thanks.

      • The percentage of the nameplate capacity that is delivered is not a good metric for reliability. Consider, for instance, that a plant generating peak capacity on demand, to the amounts required, would appear much less reliable than a plant which is generating constantly, regardless of demand. To understand reliability, you need to measure the expected required output over the actual output; or the percentage of time when no output was possible at all; or a variety of other measures I can think off.

        There wer

    • Neither. The cited estimate is from the EIA website [eia.gov] where it discusses actual production not any sort of capacity.

      We expect solar and wind generation together in 2024 to overtake electric power generation from coal for the first year ever, exceeding coal by nearly 90 billion kilowatthours.

  • 228? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @12:20AM (#64078055)

    >"EIA expects solar generation in 2024 to increase 39% (228 kilowatthours) from 2023"

    Um, no. That is almost nothing. Here is the article quote that as 39% in it:

    "We expect that the 23 gigawatts (GW) in 2023 and 37 GW in 2024 of new solar capacity scheduled to come online will help U.S. solar generation grow by 15% in 2023 and by 39% in 2024"

    23GW is 23,000KW. 39% of that is 8,970KW. And that is capacity, not generation. Generation would be KWh. So where did the summary come up with KWh?

  • I thought this was a great milestone to reach. It's not that I expect much from solar power but that I expect coal use to keep dropping. In order to get a better idea on how each are doing relative to each other I thought I'd look closer at the data. I found this image: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/s... [eia.gov]

    In that image is two charts, installed generating power capacity at the end of the year on the left, and energy produced that year on the right. The installed power capacity isn't in numbers but just eyeb

    • It is because natural gas is far cheaper that all plants that could have switched from coal to natural gas. the few coal plants still around are not feasible to be retrofitted so are left running until their replacments are complete.
      • Germany's target for complete elimination of coal for electricity generation is 2038.
      • You have no idea of what the input costs of a coal plant are, it is very situational. Using the coal commodity price inset telling the full story of the industry that is vertically integrated from mine face to top of stack. There are mountains of coal around the world, in closed pits or next to closed pits that are cheap go put on a train or barge and haul away to market. Coal drops another 25% over the next decade, that is more the doing of reductions due to economics of baseline than policy of far

    • I wonder if one of the reasons that the plants are kept around is that they can cold-start the grid. Not all power plants can start up from a grid with no electricity on it. For example, Finland uses a natural gas furnace to cold-start up some of their plants for additional capacity in the winter.

    • The increase in coal usage for electricity production in Germany has been 3% of total electricity production. That's wiped out about half a decade of previous reductions. The long-term trend is still down but it's been fairly slow and steady rate of reduction over just over twenty-five years. You'd actually be hard-pressed to see reduction in nuclear registering on the trend as the gaps have been filled in by gas-based production. Gas is at least lower carbon emissions but keeping (or renewing) nuclear woul

    • Re: Power vs. energy, watts vs. watt-hours (Score:5, Insightful)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @04:39AM (#64078301)
      Coal usage in Germany did NOT increase to cover reduction in nuclear capacity. https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]. Here you see a reduction in nuclear capacity from 2011 and a continued reduction in coal usage until the last two years. Renewables ramped up and filled the gap.

      • Re: Power vs. energy, watts vs. watt-hours (Score:4, Insightful)

        by laddiebuck ( 868690 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @02:59PM (#64079563)

        Coal decreased, but it's still a pretty large share. Yet coal could be zero right now if they had kept nuclear.

        https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
        "Electricity production in Germany in 2010 from lignite 146 TWh, coal 117 TWh, nuclear 141 TWh, gas 89 TWh and renewables 105 TWh.
        Electricity production in Germany in 2022 from lignite 116 TWh, coal 64 TWh, nuclear 35 TWh, gas 80 TWh and renewables 254 TWh."

        That 106 TWh of capacity would be more than enough for current coal, or almost all of lignite (which is much worse).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
          It's a fair point. Coal didn't increase through cutting nuclear (which is often claimed incorrectly) but could have fallen faster

  • Rosy picture (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @02:57AM (#64078227)
    This announcement paints a rosy picture. But as of 2022, US energy consumption (percapita) was about 79 MWh. About 64 MWh from fossil fuels, 9 MWh from renewables and 6 MWh from nuclear. So, we may be making progress on the electrical grid, but from an overall energy perspective, we are pretty far from weaning ourselves from fossil fuels in the US (or worldwide). Worldwide, 80 percent of total global energy comes from fossil fuels (as of 2022).

    Source of data is ourworldindata dot org. https://ourworldindata.org/ene... [ourworldindata.org]

    I am not trying to be a pessimist. It is just that a lot of people think that we have all the solutions in hand to end fossil fuels, but they are not looking at the real numbers. If we are going to do this, we need a lot of R and D in a lot of areas. Heating is a big problem because the demand does not line up seasonally with the supply of sunshine. If we have enough solar panels and batteries on the grid to supply energy for heatpumps to every home throughout the lower 48, then we will have a 2x or 3x overcapacity during the summer. We should be looking at what we can do with that overcapacity. Desalination? Synthesis of CO2 and H2 into synthetic natural gas (and longer chain hydrocarbons for jet fuel)? Not saying I know the right mix of technologies. I am just saying that we have a long way to go, and the full picture of a solution has not yet emerged or been proposed by anyone.
    • Some heat pumps can be run in reverse to provide air conditioning, although that means using heated air to provide the heat in winter which is slightly less efficient in terms of heating. Given many homes in the USA already have air conditioning ducting or heated air, it's less retrofitting effort, though. That would probably use up the summer excess. I looked at this here in the UK to deal with the few weeks a year that air conditioning might be welcome but the cost of getting ducting fitted didn't seem wo
    • Well it will certainly take time to wean the world off fossil fuels, and perhaps one shouldn't be an optimist.
      But with the decrease in prices for wind and solar power, they are predicted to generate 33% of the worlds electricity by 2030. They are only forms of power generation currently increasing.

    • If we have enough solar panels and batteries on the grid to supply energy for heatpumps to every home throughout the lower 48, then we will have a 2x or 3x overcapacity during the summer. We should be looking at what we can do with that overcapacity.

      I think that will be a good problem to have. One option: grinding up basalt to spread on fields. It improves the soil and pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere to form stable carbonates, sequestering it.

  • ...unusually warm weather means that Americans are consuming less fossil fuels than usual. Consumption temporarily dips below solar & wind production. I'm sure fossil fuels consumption will pick up when it starts snowing in the Carolinas again.
    • No, this is for the whole year.

      But it's a projection for next year, so the article about this actually having happened will be about 14 months from now.

  • sky high and going higher.

    Coal is the most plentiful and cheapest, which is why India and China are building new coal plants [google.com] at a pace that nullifies all the emissions reductions of the entire rest of the planet (while the global bureaucracy class keeps exempting them from such limits). Coal only loses out to natural gas when governments artificially inflate the price by adding emissions requirements. Natural gas, in turn also loses out to wind and solar only when governments put their boot into the marketp

    • coal is the most plentiful and cheapest

      Only if you do a shit job on safety and pollution controls.

      which is why India and China are building new coal plants

      Guess who does a shit job on safety and pollution controls?

      The most plentiful sources of energy are wind and solar. They can be found almost everywhere (though solar operates best in a certain range of latitudes, where luckily most people on the planet happen to live) and their total volume is massive.

    • "Natural gas, in turn also loses out to wind and solar only when governments put their boot into the marketplace with rules and regulations on that."

      Apparently not:

      "In Ontario, the LCOE is $0.08 per kilowatt-hour for solar and $0.05 per kilowatt-hour for wind. Without factoring-in carbon pricing, solar is pricier than natural gas, while wind is cheaper. By 2035, those are expected to fall to $0.07 and $0.03, respectively...

      "In Alberta, a $0.06 kilowatt-hour price for solar and $0.05 kilowatt-hour price fo

    • Re:and...wait for it...your electricity prices are (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2023 @03:48PM (#64079717)

      "Coal is the most plentiful and cheapest"

      Total BS, coal is more expensive than wind, solar, and NG. That's one reason why coal plants have steadily been shut down in the US and the EU. No new coal plant is likely to ever be built in the USA.

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