It will all come down to regulation.
Here in Ontario, Pickering nuclear, which is a >4GW nuclear plant, is slated to close in 2025 because it was cheaper for OPG to buy gas plants ($2.8 billion) than refurbish it ($10 billion). So, despite all the crowing by government and utilities about "net zero" and "clean, green energy", ultimately, what drives everything is still money.
Carbon taxes are supposed to manipulate this behaviour, but conveniently, 90% of gas plant emissions are exempt from the carbon tax. So, it'll kick you in the butt if you are burning coal, but if you switch to NG, you get to emit for free basically.
Ontario performed a coal phaseout in the early 2000's. We invested 10's of billion of dollars in subsidizing wind and solar on 20 year contracts, but, because neither provides reliable baseload power, ultimately, what provided the electricity to replace the coal plants was reactivated and refurbished Nuclear. 70% came from the reactivation and refurbishment of 3.2GW at the Bruce site, and 20% came from the reactivation and refurbishment of Pickering units 1 and 4.
Both wind and solar produce reliance on natural gas peaking capacity. I will comment on both individually:
- For solar, it is the morning and evening ramps (duck curve) where demand early in the day and late in the day is not met due to the angle of the sun. This is exasperated in the winter where the sun appears later and departs earlier. If you are heating or running air conditioning with solar, clearly overnight is problematic, even if you run it less, but these morning/evening ramps are also a problem. Several hours of onsite storage to buffer these demand spikes/ramps could reduce their peakiness, but you still have the problem of overnight demand, which is met, presently, by baseload generation, which is often coal, gas or nuclear (and in some locations, hydro).
Solar has reasonable capacity value at low penetration levels during the day, but quickly starts to reduce as capacity increases. This is because, as we've already discussed, we know it is not going to produce, or produce significantly, for a good chunk of our 24hrs, which means there has to be another source running to cover for that period. If that source is already a lower emissions source than solar (nuclear or hydro) we are not improving our emissions intensity, and we are impacting the economics of those operations. If these are not low emissions sources, like gas, then we do improve emissions intensity for that period, but we also still impact the economics, so, during periods where solar isn't available, in a market-type system, these plants will just bid in at a higher value. So, your overall cost of generation profile develops much larger swings in it.
Presently, solar is still paid more generously than it should be; that is, it isn't hit for real transmission costs and the per kWh cost rebated to home users is either a subsidy (FIT) or a net metering arrangement where they are reimbursed retail against their bills. They are not paid market rate, which is what traditional generators get paid during these periods. Australia is already having problems with this and curtailing people's home solar output to limit grid penetration, because the other artifact of too much solar is a total absence of inertia, which can lead to grid stability issues. This of course PO'd people who were counting on their solar system paying for itself by back-feeding the grid.
- For wind, it tends to disappear whenever we get hot or cold spells. This is true whether you are in or on the ocean like the UK, California and Nova Scotia, or deep inland like Ontario and Germany. Wind's peak production tends to be during temperate periods where demand is pretty average/mediocre. Wind can also disappear for weeks at a time during a hot spell or cold snap, meaning a few hours of home storage isn't going to be much help. This absolutely locks in some form of alternative power generation.
Wind has an extremely low capacity value; one that approaches zero. This is because it produces grossly out of phase with demand. Wind is a popular pairing with natural gas (here in Ontario, the majority of wind farms are owned by fossil fuel interests) because they get to ride the subsidy (tax credit, FIT, REC...etc) and then also provide the backup power, at a premium, for when wind isn't delivering. So, say a baseload plant averaged $0.038/kWh, if they replace that with a combo of wind and backup gas, they get the revenue from the wind, which has basically zero OPEX, and, they get the higher revenue from the backup gas, because they are bidding in to prevent grid collapse and there aren't other sources in the market to compete against.
The combo of wind and gas is claimed to reduce overall emissions intensity, but there's some conflict taking place on that because the fast-ramp peaking plants (OCGT) or running a CCGT in fast-ramp mode, greatly increases the emissions intensity over baseload operation, so the overall reduction in emissions by replacing capacity with wind is not as great as one might expect. Couple that with the fact that you are running those gas plants the most during periods of high demand.
Of course a wind and gas combo have a higher combined emissions intensity than any other "green" sources save biomass (which is a joke). So retiring a nuke for example, and then replacing its output with wind and gas is a huge step backwards.
So, to get back to EV's, if we are charging overnight, regulation is going to dictate what that looks like source-wise. If it is wind and gas, well, you aren't making a huge difference over driving an efficient ICE vehicle in terms of emissions intensity, and would be worse off than an ultra efficient vehicle like a Prius. Now, if your main source of electricity was coal, the emissions intensity will actually be higher with the EV.
With carbon taxes properly applied, electricity rates will absolutely go up, and this will make charging EV's more expensive. Of course this also makes nuclear cheaper than gas.
The problem with nuclear is that it makes wind generation completely useless. There's absolutely no reason to build the Rube Goldberg of wind and gas if you can achieve a lower emissions intensity with the nuke. Also, a nuke/gas pairing (gas peaking) is lower emissions if you lack hydro and a nuke/solar/gas combo is lower emissions still, bested only by a nuke/solar/storage combo to cover the morning/evening ramps. This necessarily limits solar installation capacity however, because you don't want solar eating into your low emissions baseload power during the day.
For us in Ontario, the ideal combo would be nuclear + hydro with a limited level of unsubsidized utility solar to reduce daytime peaking, and hydro can be ramped in the morning/evening to cover those ramps, or even a little bit of gas if necessary. However, we did build the Rube Goldberg and now dump wind on the US market, sometimes at negative prices while we subsidize the contract cost of $0.148/kWh, while we burn some trees in former coal plants and pay an average rate to solar of just under $0.50/kWh. And yet despite all that complexity and cost, nuclear + hydro produce 85% of our electricity.
We recently had a group here advocate for home storage with electric F-150's as the panacea for gas usage in the province. My response:
I did the math on the “million F-150’s” the other day, it was 9.6GW for 13 hours, assuming all million were fully charged and would stay grid connected for the duration. Gas, right now, without Pickering, on a low demand Sunday night would be 6GW; 8GW ~6PM. If we go back to Wednesday the 12th of January, wind collapsed for ~36 hours, 848MW and dropping at 4PM, not recovering until 4AM Friday. This was also when Quebec demand exceeded supply and they were importing from Ontario. Gas was ~5,600MW; so over 8GW without Pickering.
If all 1 million F-150's were the Extended range variety with the 131kWh battery and they were all fully charged and capable of being completely drawn-down, that's 131GWh. During the period in question gas provided >200GWh.
A few days later, early on the 20th, wind collapsed again, but gas demand was even higher, crossing 7,000MW and not dropping below 5,000MW until the 22nd. 43 hours. Without Pickering that would have been 9,700MW; >8,600MW for the duration; 370GWh, roughly 3x the Gibbons fleet.
If we take a gander back at our Quebec graph, we can see that this was again a period where demand exceeded supply and they were importing from Ontario.
To put this in perspective, there are only 8.5 million registered vehicles under 4.5 tonnes in Ontario. The "Gibbons scenario" assumes 1 million of those will be replaced by F-150 Lightning pick-up trucks, but we've determined that's not sufficient. If we triple that to 3 million, to cover this most recent period, ignoring the unfeasible logistics, state of charge, full discharge cycle...etc. That's 35% of all vehicles under 4.5 tonnes registered in Ontario that would have to be extended range F-150's to prop-up the grid.
Note that this was all during an extreme cold snap. If everyone was heating with electricity, demand would have been almost double what we see there. This is of course also the time of year where solar capacity factor approaches zero, as contribution during the day is only a few hours, and zero if it is snowing.
Then, we get the summer!
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