Day11 A reading note about "Clean Energy's dirty secret"

很喜欢这篇短小精悍的文章，区区4页将问题和解决建议搭建得井井有条。

Wind and solar energy are growing faster than any other energy source and their falling cost are making them competitive with fossil fuels. But, It is no longer far-fetched to think that the world is entering an era of clean ,unlimited and cheap power, about time , too. 

Why ? what happened ? 

Yet green energy has a dirty secret : the more it is deployed, the more it lowers the price of power from any source . Which makes it hard to manage the transition to a carbon-free future. 

This is the key of the problem .And it provided a hint in the end of this paragraph : 

Unless the market is fixed , subsidies to the industry will only grow. 

So, the solution should be focus on how to make the market fixed, and with a steady subsidies . However, it turns to analyse what make a distuptive of renewable energy caused.  To a simple conclusion : the subsidy system itself, intermittency of wind and solar; and their very low running costs. 

First, the splurge of public subsidy in the beginning lead to a result in some areas : a glut of power-generating capacity that has slashed the revenues utilities earn from wholesale power market and hence deterred the investment. 

Second, the inherent character of green power is intermittent. To cover this shortage and keep power flowing, the system relies on convertional power plants, such as coal, gas and nuclear. 

Third, renewable energy has negligible or zero marginal running costs, which depressed the power price in the wholesale market. 

All of above reasons lead to a paradoxical situation:  

The higher the penetration of renewables, the worse these problems get- especially in saturated market. 

在后面给出的建议之前 ，作者提到三个工具：digitalisation, smart meters, batteries. 这些都是有助于对付间歇供电的。 紧接着，是三个建议：

modular power plants;  high-voltage grids; redesign power markets to reflect the new need for felxible supply and demand.

第三个措施是要解决之重。这里作者也提出了具体办法，例如：

1.adjust prices more frequently

2. reward those willing to use less electricity

3. bills could be structured to be higher or lower, which depending how strongly a customer wanted guaranteed power all the time

再返回去看第一篇文中提出的“long-run solutions "：

Grids with lots of storage capacity built in -----和这里的modular power plants 对应 ？

grids big enough to reach out to faraway ---借助high-volatage grids 来实现

grids smart enough to adapt demand to supply ---那就离不开这里所提的三工具digitalisation, smar meters and betteries了

当然，整观全文，作者认为政府应担当起更大的责任来调节市场化带来的问题，所以他也把redesign power markets归为biggest task ，如何让供需平衡是长久之道 。