David Roberts: Today on Volts: Brett Christophers stirred up a lot of controversy & discussion with his book The Price Is Wrong, which argues that renewables aren't profitable enough to scale with private money. He & I go deep on the details. Extremely deep.

Today on Volts: Brett Christophers stirred up a lot of controversy & discussion with his book The Price Is Wrong, which argues that renewables aren't profitable enough to scale with private money. He & I go deep on the details. Extremely deep.

Are markets the right tool for decarbonizing electricity?www.volts.wtf In his book The Price Is Wrong, Brett Christophers argues that, contrary to recent economic triumphalism among renewables advocates, wind and solar are not profitable enough to attract the private cap...

Interesting listen! Haven't read the book, but it seems strange that so much focus was on spot markets. The wild price variations in space & time are certainly unusual compared to other commodities but largely a "feature, not a bug" incentivizing things like storage, and it's other market-design ...

... elements (super-wonky and region-specific ones like Reliability Must Run contracts, or methods of deeming qualifying generation capacity in capacity markets, or even utility cost-of-service regulation) that are keeping fossil power plants online and/or undercompensating renewables.

Also, this is really nitpicky, but the description of nuclear as being @ the top of the bid stack ("tends to be the most expensive") was incorrect. A plant like Vogtle has a very high levelized $/kWh cost, but nuclear plants in competitive wholesale markets bid in a low price, because their fuel ...

... cost & therefore their marginal cost is lower than fossil fuels. Also, US reactor designs can't really ramp up and down, so they have to be run at constant output to serve "baseload". See the Figure 2 graph, which I found on PJM's website: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Electricity Markets, Optimal Power Flow, & LMPwww.researchgate.net PDF | On Jan 5, 2016, Ryan Mann published Electricity Markets, Optimal Power Flow, & LMP | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

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