More long distance transmission lines will be built to average out local variation in production.
Grid-scale battery systems like brine4power may start to come online.
Excess power may be dumped into power-to-gas systems which enrich natural gas with hydrogen.
Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade.
On top of that we get intelligent meters, with machines like my washing machine pulling power at the best time, my battery chargers using the right time etc, so (non-industry) demand will flatten out over time with intelligent metering.
I would have feared about this issue 20y ago, but I think this is no longer of any importance for the development of solar power.
What is relevant with the ongoing centralization of solar power is power transmission.
Chem engineer here, battery technology doesnt seem to be a guarantee to improve.
Batteries are limited by the physics of our universe. The chemistry between two chemicals will not change, and it feels like we have exhausted every option.
This is a non trivial problem and I am unsure if I expect a solution.
80khw battery in an average model s * 300000000 million cars / (3,911,000,000,000 kwh energy use in the in all of 2015 [2] / 365 days per year) = 2.239 times as much storage in cars on the road versus energy usage which seems pretty doable. Also, it also gets better because as car batteries age and their storage / weight goes down, you can replace them with new ones and put the old ones in grid storage locations where weight / storage does not matter and run them till they are literally dead.
[1]: about a little less than 1 per person (just rough estimating here)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
1. We need to eventually switch our winter gas heaters to electric which while helping balance summer vs winter electric usage, electric heating isn't as efficient and we have to increase the outside air a lot more in the winter than we have to cool it in the summer (for most people at least).
2. I forgot to add in the extra electric demand needed to power the cars which is currently powered by oil.
So, heat pump efficiency vs temperature only tells part of the story. With good insulation you will almost always need more cooling in the summer than heating in the winter outside of the arctic circle.
Ground source heat pumps have a typical efficiency of about 400%. You're moving heat from the ground to your house rather than heating up the air, so you get considerably more useful energy out of the system than you put in.
Ground heat-pumps are being championed as a cost effective replacement for keeping houses warm. They provide a 4:1 heat:electricity ratio so have lower running costs than gas. They can also be attached to sun panels and can work with storage heaters (heat the water when the sun shines, use it when it doesn't).
Unfortunately pumps are expensive and very invasive to install in existing houses - you need to dig gardens up to lay the pipes and installation for an average house is about 15-20k EUR ($17k-$23k).
(They’re special for several reasons. A big one is that they have huge thermal mass, so your heat pump can operate at whatever time of day you want. This means you can optimize for electric rates vs outdoor temperature. Heat pumps, unlike gas boilers, are considerably more efficient when it’s warm out.)
However, I do expect cost improvements. Even if the cost to make a battery is constant when measured in joules, PV is getting cheaper and can supply more joules for less money.
It's too far out to say if electric cars/dynamic grid/renewable energy will revolunatize our planets energy usage since we are very entrenched in the current system (and anyone claiming anything beyond 5 years underestimates how fast shit changes IMO) but I am seriously excited about these changes with how much the economics have been improving for a clean energy society.
While Apple Pay itself is only about four years old, contactless payment has been fairly standard in the UK for about 10 years, and chip and pin is over 20 years old.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
In 2 decades there will be hundreds of millions of electric cars in the world which currently do not exist. This is a huge increase in battery power even with battery technology not changing in the next 2 decades.
I was more thinking along the lines of larger 'industrial' scale capacitors, but I'm not sure if there are fundamental barriers physical that can't be overcome to make such devices a sensible route to pursue?
Right, but our ingenuity and understanding of the physics may well not be perfect. Didn’t Moore’s law continue on well past it’s sell-by-date?
Our understanding of gravity is pretty much the same as Newton's in how we can utilize it. We know its not perfect but that doesn't change the reality. And ironically, battery chemistry is better understood than gravity.
I suspect anyone from Newton’s day would be surprised to see an A380.
Nuclear power promised "too cheap to meter" and of course this never materialised, because someone does actually have to pay the capital and operating costs.
While spot prices may drift around all over the place, and renewable guaranteed price floors will continue to lower gradually, I wouldn't expect retail electricity to get much cheaper soon.
In order to fulfill the Paris agreement of limiting warming to 2°C (which would already be a global catastrophe), developed countries must reach zero CO2 emissions by 2035. We need to be reducing emissions about 10% per year. Instead, emissions are increasing by about 2% per year.
If you want to convert all of the ICE cars on the road to electric cars, where will the energy come from to do that? Manufacturing the cars requires fossil fuels. They have a limited lifespan, and then you have to replace them. By that time, our economy must not be running on fossil fuels, so how will those cars be replaced?
Even solar panels require fossil fuels to be manufactured and transported.
In sum, at the moment, we’re actively robbing from the future in order to appear to be heading toward sustainability.
[1] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/...
In a world where the economy must be carbon neutral to negative, none of that manufacturing and transportation infrastructure can be run on fossil fuels.
At 25 years, solar panels still produce between 80% and 87% of their manufactured capacity. At 50 years, they should still produce between 60% and 75% of their manufactured capacity.
It's quite possible that solar panels could have much longer life spans. There isn't a lot of data yet, but there are some indications that they'll be performing well.
A 33W solar panel (Arco Solar 16-2000) actually outperformed it’s original factory specifications 30 years after it was manufactured
World`s first modern solar panel still works after 60 years
Kyocera has reported several solar power installations that continue to operate reliably and generate electricity even though they are nearly 30 years old
The big problems in longevity at the moment are batteries and inverters that typically have to be replaced every 5 to 10 years.
When I build my off-grid solar system, I'm planning to use NiFi batteries (Nickel Iron) that have lifespans in the hundreds of years with minimal maintenance. They're larger and hold less capacity, but don't damage themselves when over/under charged and use materials a lot more available than modern high-density battery storage technologies.
I haven't seen a long-life inverter yet and that's frustrating. Inverter manufacturers have thin margins and competition, so they focus on lowering costs rather than redundancy and hardening.
(P.S. I wonder why my comments above were downvoted?)
I didn't downvote you but a lot of your claims come off as over the top fearmongering and/or ignorant. I'll try and counter with your 2 main points that I see:
> In order to fulfill the Paris agreement of limiting warming to 2°C (which would already be a global catastrophe)
This one I just haven't really heard about how a 2°C temperature increase would be a global catastrophe. I've read that it will improve certain countries farming and hurt others. Overall, not much out of speculation how it will affect humans in the grand scheme of things. (I agree that it will be really bad for other species like the great barrier reef which I am really sad about but most people don't care about that, they just want to improve their own life and cheap energy is massively beneficial to people which currently outweighs the cost even if it is currently costing the plant).
> If you want to convert all of the ICE cars on the road to electric cars, where will the energy come from to do that? Manufacturing the cars requires fossil fuels.
No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies. We just don't do it because it is too expensive to switch all at once. However, if renewables and batteries keep improving like they do, fossil fuels get too expensive once we run out of ones to cheapy extract, we will end up that way (the latter which is guaranteed no matter what happens as fossil fuels are limited). Pretty much every government even china and the Saudis recognize this which is why everyone is subsidising/investing in renewable energy and taxing fossil fuels to get renewables cheaper.
There’s also this recent paper which got a lot of press http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115
> No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies
I said that it currently requires fossil fuels. In order to build “renewable energy” systems, you need to bootstrap it by expending fossil fuels today. Even if you could somehow mine iron ore with electric bulldozers, that’s not currently how iron is mined (and transported, refined, etc). So, you have to convert every link in the supply chain. Some people have already calculated that, in order to completely convert our electricity system to 100% renewable, we’d have to burn more fossil fuels today than would be allowable under the carbon budget outlined in the Paris agreement. Others have calculated that the transition will simply take too long (and the rate it has to happen increases all the time).
Can you outline how it’s possible to convert our industrial system to 100% renewable energy, using real numbers and timelines? Does your model also include economic growth (and therefore growth in energy consumption)?
build large scale energy storage instead of offshore oil wells, super tankers, and refineries I guess. It will be hard, it is hard to get oil out of the ground and into your car too.
At least in the UK the National Grid is doing a huge amount of work to prepare for this[0].
There is also work to install large battery installations commercially in public EV charging areas and National Grid sub-stations[1] - first ten multi-dozen MWh installations should be ready Q2 2019.
So, for instance, installing MWh of battery capacity at (lets say) a current Fuel Station and that is constantly trickle charged at say 350KW from the grid, then discharge that to cars at super high rates - smoothing out delivery to EV's but having the added benefit of acting like a distributed storage system in periods of lower use (say at night) when things like wind generate surplus. This specific example isn't covered in the videos linked but the installations at sub-stations are.
Just look at the years in which the reactors were constructed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#Franc...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by...
If that happens often enough, it will be profitable to run something serves electricity in these demand peaks. For example, storing excess electricity in batteries or by pumping water to elevated reservoirs, and generating electricity with them in that moment.
Yes, they are.
https://www.edie.net/news/6/Green-light-for-first-UK-hydro-s...
or
https://www.fastcompany.com/40580693/exclusive-tesla-has-ins...
Actually, the share of intermittent renewable energy is negligible in France. Let's worry about that later, as there will be plenty of choices (demand response, PHES, and even tesla, which is building AS plants without us noticing (Belgium))
You have to keep in mind that capital costs are a huge part of electric generation. The capital costs associated with most traditional generators are too high - this is why utilities pushed for regulatory
PV/wind are cheap and have low opex and will start to eat at the baseload generators. Gas plants can spin up quickly, but the marginal cost will be high if they are idle too much. That market condition will make storage cost sustainable.
The French have a LOT of Nuclear power, and idling a nuclear power station, though possible, is economic insanity, so it makes sense to sell it at a discount to the British.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/insid...
Didn't know about that, which ones? I thought it was natural gas plants?
[1] looks like a small list
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerk...
This is not going well, with boiler and legal issues meaning a plant which was supposed to open in 2013 is to open 7 years later in 2020. Making it not exactly a great poster child for how to build a coal power plant. Being in construction for 13 years is not cheap and fast.
Kind of funny that "big coal" is now suffering from a problem that nuclear has struggled with for a long time.
- 3 plants (Lünen, Profen and Niederaußem) have apparently been cancelled.
- The promoter of Kalkar-Appeldorn has applied for a permit
- The one of Stade has gotten one, but there is a lawsuit against that
- Datteln replaces a plant that was shut down in 2014, though the old plant only had about 1/3 of the power.
Meanwhile, coal power plants are being shut down without being replaced all the time.
Granted, due to the cost structure of nuclear, it makes sense to run flat out if possible, but technically it's not necessary.
If they continue to build out solar/wind and thereby drive FF-production "out of business" what happens when solar/wind cannot meet demand? Are they building stored energy reserves as well? What happens then?