166
86% of New US Electric Utility Generation Capacity Coming from Non-Fossil Fuels in 2023
(cleantechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
166 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
58303 readers
12 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They don't, obviously, but what they do is charge when the spot price for electricity is low, and then discharge when it's higher.
While not exclusively the case, this drop in price most typically occurs when you have a higher amount of electricity being generated than being consumed, which is usually because of high amounts of renewables because the unit cost of renewables is essentially 0. For example, the middle of the day at peak solar, or windy nights. Fossil fuel generators are burning a commodity with a substantially higher unit cost, so they will mostly turn off (where possible) during these times.
This is why batteries are often counted under renewable, because they shift an abundance of renewable power in to times when there is less or none.
Personally I don't think we should really be considering the extensive use of rare earth metals as renewable, but that's a separate point.
We should be calling them "cleaner" not "renewable." Clean isn't even really accurate when it comes to their manufacture and construction, but better than coal.
Yeah, I fully understand their benefit to make better use of renewable energy sources. But they are not net-generating power, so their inclusion in the graph is still somewhat misleading.