David Keith on cheap solar - and other notable stories of the past week

I suspect this will be the hot energy post of the coming days.

blog post on cheap solar power, why it matters, where are the limits, and why i need to eat crow: https://t.co/BRmV5CfDgt @ENGSCI137x

— David Keith (@DKeithClimate) April 24, 2016

An "only Nixon can go to China" moment could come from Keith's Cheap Solar Power:

..one can now build systems in the world’s sunny locations and get very cheap power.  

Implication 

What does this mean? 

Implication #1: In sunny places, solar will reshape commodity power markets.
Examples

• Power prices will have a mid-day low. This is already happening in California, where it’s called the “duck curve.” It will soon be the norm in other high-sun demand centers, and the changing power price structure will shake utilities and industrial customers.

• Wind suddenly looks less interesting. The capacity factors, global build rate, and costs for wind power have been nearly flat for five years.

• Nuclear and CCS will have a harder time competing. For example, there are nuclear builds in the middle-east (e.g., UAE building Korean reactors), but with cheap solar it will be hard to compete against solar with gas backup.

• Gas for load following and low-capex peaking looks ever more important. 

Implication #2: There will be opportunities to bring electrical demand to where power is cheap. 

One option is look for products that have very high energy cost and are easily transportable, and build solar farms and production together in high-insolation sites.
Four options are aluminum, ammonia, desalination, and transportation fuels.

Read the entire post at The Keith Group

Not sure northern, nighttime demand peak climates should rejoice over the implication power intensive industry should look for sunnier climates.

Hydrogen's promise - and avoiding common mistakes about energy

Today, some information on hydrogen and the promise it has to power the future.

But first, the consistently lucid Brad Plumer has a post that leads into the space hydrogen promises to, at least partially, fill.

The most common mistake that news stories make about energy - Vox: "

Repeat it over and over: "electricity" is not the exact same thing as "energy."
Last week, I wrote about a nifty milestone in Costa Rica — the country had gone 75 days without using any fossil fuels to generate electricity. It was intriguing news, and lots of other outlets also covered it.
Except a number of stories featured headlines that were quite wrong, saying that Costa Rica was now running completely on renewable energy:
That's not true, and this subtle error pops up a lot in energy coverage. "Electricity" and "energy" aren't perfectly interchangeable.
Yes, Costa Rica's power plants were all running on renewables (mostly hydro) and delivering clean electricity through transmission lines. But the country still had plenty of cars running on old-fashioned gasoline. There were still airline flights in and out of Costa Rica powered by jet fuel. The country has two large cement plants that were still burning coal in their kilns. It simply wasn't true that, as one outlet put it, Costa Rica had "eschewed fossil fuels completely."

I suggest people read this entire article, and Plumer's other work.

image from Student's Guide to Alternative Fuels

I received an e-mail noting work posted to the site of the "Auto Insurance Centre." I'm not sure I would have opened the link if it had not cited a work of mine that I enjoyed compiling/writing (Exporting more U.S. Coal can lower global emissions?)
I'm glad I did, as it summarizes a number of alternatives for powering transportation; I was particularly interested in the section on hydrogen.

Students Guide to Alternative Fuels