an oversupply at those times and therefore lower and sometimes even negative prices the cost of that solar energy calculated with lcoe is very low but the amount of energy that the solar panel owner can get for that energy is also low so the value adjusted lcoe reflects that and at the other end of the spectrum we have gas turbines which have a high cost per megawatt hour but their operators can choose when to turn them on so they'll only generate at times when wholesale prices are fairly high which might be because there's not that much wind or solar available or you know maybe a coal power plant exploded or something like that so they don't operate all that much but when they do they get paid well so they have a high value adjusted lcoe it's worth noting that this infrequent operation also means that their greenhouse gas emissions are reduced relative to if they were operating with a high capacity factor so that's one reason why i think we'll probably see gas turbines continue to fill gaps in wind and solar generation well into the future and you know like gradually reducing as um other energy storage options come on board like batteries and i'm not that worried about it i'm not that worried about the emissions from new gas generator like the australian government curry curry one if it's only used a tiny bit then it'll only release a tiny amount of emissions so it might be a big waste of public money but at least it won't have that much of a climate impact so value-adjusted lcoe it adds something but it's still not telling the full picture because it projects into the future based on today's operating environment in reality no one's going to be investing in more solar farms if they're mainly working during periods where there's negative electricity prices but if we continue to see a lot of negative prices on sunny days followed by price bucks in the evenings and that's the basis of this duck curve chart which you've probably seen before if this persists well then batteries and other forms of energy storage are going to start to look pretty attractive to investors who want to do a little energy arbitrage they'll get paid to charge their batteries on sunny days and then get paid even more to sell that power back in the evenings so the more storage we get online the less price extremes we'll see smoothing out that famous duck curve a bit and meaning that the real value adjusted lcoe when we reach NUMBER_TOKEN variable renewable generation it will probably look really different to how it's predicted too now if you want to hear more about these kinds of changes in the energy system then check out this video i made with renewable energy finance experts and podcasters laurent and gerard earlier this year and if you want to support the channel to make more videos like this then you can join the engineering with rosie patreon team and we would love to welcome you to the exclusive discord server to chat all things cleantech and help shape the future of the channel i just wanted to pop back in because while i was editing this video i could tell that there was a bit of a gap and i knew i knew i would get comments um telling me that dollars are not the only value that's relevant here and i definitely agree with that so i wanted to mention that whilst we've been really focused on the cost bringing the cost of renewable energy down over
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN hear more about these kinds of changes in the energy system then check out this video i made with renewable energy finance experts and podcasters laurent and gerard earlier this year and if you want to support the channel to make more videos like this then you can join the engineering with rosie patreon team and we would love to welcome you to the exclusive discord server to chat all things cleantech and help shape the future of the channel i just END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN