Tony Seba & co-author talk about the decline of coal and conventional energy, the incorrect predictions of the EIA, and how much cheaper renewables plus storage are and will be.
Quotes:
<< …the costs of solar, wind plus storage will fall by another 70% by 2030. What natural gas did to coal in the 2010s, solar, wind and batteries will do to conventional energy in the 2020s. >>
<< …we show that much of the mispricing and overvaluation of conventional power plants can be traced to a fundamental flaw in the calculation of LCOE… Virtually all widely cited sources of LCOE analysis assumed that newly built coal, gas, nuclear and hydro will be able to successfully sell the same amount of electricity year after year to 2040 and beyond. Market data show that this assumption is totally false. >>
<< We recommend that [all parties involved] demand that analysts calculate LCOE on the basis of actual market-based assumptions for capacity factor, in dynamic, realistic projections, for all variables of their LCOE calculations, that includes the reality of disruption ahead.
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<< Government regulators should not enlist ratepayers to subsidize, insure or backstop any investments in conventional energy assets.
Protect public against regulated utilities who are trying to offload risk through ratepayer-backed debt or securitization.
Assume that every conventional power plant will become a peaker — without the ability to charge peaker prices.
We need to protect the people, not incumbent companies or industries. The time to act is now. >>
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The EIA assumed, contrary to *their own* data, that the capacity factor of coal power plants would continue to be 85% (this is explained in the video). Instead the capacity factor has dropped, causing the LCOE to skyrocket.
This is important. Elon was right: Solar is the future.. The problem was that the EIA failed to account for the S curve of Wright’s Law. The lower the cost, the more it will be adopted, and the mass production will drive down costs even further.
At the same time the drop in the capacity factor of conventional power plants will cause their capacity factor to drop, their LCOE to skyrocket and they will become stranded assets that must be written off.
Thus solar, wind plus storage will dominate the energy sector and conventional power will no longer be a sustainable business model. And the excess renewables that will be necessary to maintain reliability, when not needed, will be used to generate green hydrogen to replace fossil fuels, including for transportation.