Future imagined technologies and/or infrastructure can't help you with balancing the power on the grid today.
The recent rolling power outages in California came from the fact that they are too dependent on renewables and basically ran out of power generating capability as the sun was setting in the evening but everyone wanted to keep running their air conditioning.
Actually it's more complicated than that:
"Several gas plants that were supposed to provide power failed to operate or tripped off, the CAISO said in a press conference last Wednesday. ... The CAISO also confirmed that demand was no greater than on previous very hot days."[0]
You could equally make the case that the state was too dependent on unreliable gas plants.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew...
I found this article helpful: https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-8-16-h7249j4l4...
From that article:
Take out all of the solar and wind capacity, and California has
only about 43 GW of capacity to meet demand that could well
exceed that on any hot summer day. And to get to that 43 GW,
you would need all other facilities up and running at absolutely
full capacity with no scheduled or unscheduled outages, which
is not realistic. Yes, you could try to import some power from
the neighboring states, but at times of peak usage they probably
need all of their own power. In short, you have put yourself
in a position where regular intentional blackouts are inevitable.
And, as more and more reliable fossil fuel and nuclear facilities
get closed in favor of wind and solar, the problem looks set
to worsen dramatically over the next several yearshttps://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-4-15-what-is-t...
Doesn't it seem like the author is reasoning backward from a preferred conclusion, the way a lawyer might?
I'm not sure what to make of your "reasoning backward" statement. Just not sure what it means.
It’s actually a really great idea. Here’s a white paper that’s especially relevant for California (forgive the hokey graphic in the executive summary):
https://www.sdcwa.org/sites/default/files/White%20Paper%20-%...
This is widely known to be false, and I wrote to correct that.
> What is imagined is that it can be expanded at scale...
No power generation method that we have is a universal solution, and as long as we have nation-states we shouldn't expect it to be.
But pumped hydro has indeed been expanded at scale, and it is in operations, as the wikipedia page I linked demonstrates.
It's not helpful to say things that are obviously false.
I also said:
> Future imagined technologies and/or infrastructure
Sure I could have been clearer but the entire thrust of my message was to say that you can't solve todays grid problems due to intermittent renewables with future technologies (not yet invented) and/or future infrastructure (not yet built).
I certainly agree with you that pumped hydro is viable is some very specific locations. I would also insist that if you want to advocate for more renewables you better include the cost of a combined renewable + pumped hydro to save the intermittent supply problem. And if you are going to advocate for building the renewable generation in one location and the pumped hydro in another location, then you need to include the cost of the transmission lines to get the power to where it is needed and adjust your capacity calculations for the energy lost in transmission lines. Along the way you are going to have also plan for the litigation costs and delays the moment you suggest damming a valley to turn it into a reservoir.
Almost every glowing report about renewables, especially if it is about how "cheap" it now is, fails to account for the alternate generation capacity that must be maintained/built or for the effective generating capacity (i.e. not the peak capacity on the sunniest or windiest day).
>customers buy electricity when they need it, not when it’s cheap. //
It doesn't have to be like this. You can let customers buy according to price, distributors don't seem to want to; presumably because that democratises the cost savings.
Octopus, a UK energy company, I think offers a customer direct grid pricing policy to some customers.
I'm happy to run dishwasher, washing machine at night. Do hoovering (vacuum cleaning) on sunny days, etc.. Wait half an hour to bake a cake if a storm is passing. But these things mean paying less to the electricity company.
I can see fridges that use a cold-storage scheme. And would definitely get a hot water tank if I could be paid to heat it.
So that's a great example about what can be scheduled in a flexible way.
If something is not standard practice doesn't mean it can't be done, or even that it's hard to do. There was no motivation to use any smarts for water heaters because the electricity price was flat, or the price was on a fixed schedule (timers and night heating of water, was done in the eighties here already).
I am in an apartment: I have a small water heater - I easily run out of water taking a shower if I stick around too long. There are two people in the house, and if we both want to shower in one day, the hot water . That way, I have hot water to do dishes and someone can take a shower in evening. I'm happy the water heater for the washer is separate, but again, it heats when the temperature dips and doesn't keep the water cold until electricity is cheap.
Even if the hot water heater waited to heat until prices were low, you are going to have water that is not-as-hot if you are the second person taking a shower. This is simply because as the tank empties, cold water is added to the tank. All subsequent hot water will be cooler.
I'll add that some folks sweat at night and must take a shower in the morning (I do when hormones act up. Night sweats are no joke).
I'm in an apartment: I cannot update the hot water heater. It literally cannot be done for me and millions of others because we cannot replace such things. You'd have to mandate landlords do improvements, and even then, it'll be years before it is all upgraded.
I'd argue that the real answer is to go with tankless heaters in this case: It isn't that you'll be spending money when the electricity is cheap, but you'd use less overall for the actual heating of water.
Where has is available most people have Combi boilers in the UK, very little or no storage, instant hot water in demand.
The idea would be that you notice the electric price is negative (or a control system 'notices' for you) and turn your immersion heater on. The water retains enough heat you have plenty of time to use that water.
If we have excess solar this is an inefficient but easy way to slurp it up. Hydroelectric pumped storage would probably be better but grid capacity for that seems low.
The whole thread was started on the premise that "hot water is an especially hard problem for load shifting, because people have to get hot water immediately" - while the case is the opposite - because hot water is very easy to store.
https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/03/17/va-to-try-limited...
Although, in general if it encourages super-insulation of homes and things like ground-source heating ...?
The math worked out to 30 years before raw recoup. Once you add in a discount rate or life cycle would never justify itself. The per watt hour cost installed keeps to come down massively.
Solar and batteries are economical.
Once EV batteries become cheap, I'll charge my batteries when grid price is low.
Users would never even know, if they were factory wired with this kit the lights and any gadgets could continue to work.
Perhaps this should be something manufacturers have to include in order to get their A+++ energy rating.
Then home users can use devices with very basic built in electronics to save money or even earn money on electricity bills.
Neither can nuclear power. Nuclear power has significant and often unpredictable down-times making the power source not as reliable as one might think. In Sweden the availability for nuclear power is on average something like 85%. Availability depends on the age of the nuclear power plant, what the staff situation is and how tight the regulations are. Can't run the plant if most of the staff is home sick and tighter regulations means more downtime for inspections.
The availability for wind power in the North Sea is about 50%. Admittedly, lower than 85% but you can make up for it by building many wind farms.
> Currently, we’re paying 31 Euro cents in Germany per kWh while French customers whose grid has a large share of nuclear pay just 17 Euro cents per kWh on average.
That is an argument for tighter integration of electricity grids between countries. But also 31 - 17 = 14 cents/kWh. The cost of electricity isn't a problem for most households (in my household the static fee is the biggest expense even during the winter months).
But nuclear power plants? Completely uncorrelated. If each one produces power 85% of the time, then you need two, and you'll almost always have power.
Not really true. French nuclear output drops every time there's a European heatwave. It used to be the only time that the cross-channel link rank backwards (UK powering France).
I think France responded to this in the context of climate change by changing the protection standards for their rivers?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear
We made our bed and now we get to lie in it.
It’s not the technology’s fault we decided not to build any more power plants.
However, having said this, I would like to see a model of this with all the generation potential and costs involved, because right now we are all speculating. One can think of a multi-generation options, with wind and solar being the first and default option, battery (and other storage options) being the next option if wind and solar aren't enough, and gas being the third option if required.
Someone must have created a model like this?
In-depth studies petition that "the European energy system would strongly profit from exploiting the implications of these regimes for continent-scale wind generation patterns." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5540172/ and "Such a pan-European wind power system would provide a stable output across a wide range of large-scale weather conditions" "but also requires enhanced transmission". This enhanced european grid network benefits to other forms of power production and is already planed. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318476478_Balancing... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
There are ways to reduce loss induced by long powerlines, mainly HVDC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current )
All this is also true for solar, and there is even at least one megaproject: https://www.suncable.sg/
Nuclear power is not magic either and can also suffer from disruptions. For example, if the delivery of uranium fuel is delayed, if there is a CODID-19 pandemic so workers are unavailable for maintenance work, if there are strikes, if there are Greenpeace activists who have breached the security lines sitting on the roof, etc...
In fact, I believe that the reliability of the German grid has gone up after Energiewende. Though it was a long time since I looked at it so I don't have a source handy. Reason being that the main source of power outages is disruptions in the electricity grid and not in the electricity production.
The availability for wind power in the North Sea is about 50%. Admittedly, lower than 85%
It's not only lower. It's 35% lower. That's a lot of lower.
Aside from hydro, which I very much like, but it has its own limitations, what else comes even close to nuclear?
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-releases-2019-data...
I'd say nuclear is very much predictable.
It's the point for solar/wind energy.
Continent wide grids could be created connected Europe, Asia and Africa. Storage requirements could be lowered with HVDC grid interconnect. India's One Sun One grid plan is to build a Asia Africa hvdc grid.
The Pacific DC Intertie supplies power to Los Angeles from hydro dams in the PNW over HVDC lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build...
If the people who run wild wonderful off grid (great channel) have taught me anything, it's that battery backup is essential.
Maybe the solution is to keep a lot of dirty petroleum or coal-based generation capacity around to use in an emergency or war, but don't actually use it.
As usual, there's a trade-off between efficiency and resilience.
The discussions I found on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958
changed my mind though. Nuclear power in France is heavily subsidized and it doesn’t make much economic sense. I mean, the radioactive emission from coal plants is higher than from nuclear powerplants - but the overall costs are too high.
Check out what Patagonia has to say on hydro plants and the ecological impact in case you are interested.
I do think that the way Germany is tackling electricity/energy is not great. Like so many things they are not solving...
Incident Location Fatalities
Banqiao China 171000
Machchu India 5000
South Fork USA 2208
The environmental impact of flooding entire basins is also pretty rough, and basins don't exist everywhere you might want one.
Banqiao, however, is spot on.
The "Cultural Revolution" began in 1966.
In such a context an otherwise avoidable catastrophe may happen.
This Revolution followed the "Great Leap Forward" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ), with famines. "In the subsequent famines of the early 1960s popularly attributed to the Great Leap Forward, Henan was one of the hardest hit and millions of lives were lost." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henan#Modern_Era .
Moreover all this came after a civil war and violent Japanese invasion, during which dams were bombed, causing "massive flooding in Henan" (same source).
Predicting and adverting this catastrophe was possible, but given such a context nobody was able to do so.
This is Patagonia's brand strategy to sell products, rather than a political policy. So they have the luxury of pointing out problems and being light on the detail of solutions.
They get to focus on the negative ecological role of dams, and generally promoting reducing resource consumption. All energy production has a negative ecological impact to a greater or lesser degree, and it's rich for a company selling mainly things we don't need to talk about reducing consumption. The headlines are also different to the detail which calls for decommissioning the worst offenders rather than all dams. The difficult broader question of where energy comes from instead is ducked:
> ... solar, wind, tidal, wave, geothermal and biomass are helping us to transition to a clean energy future. [1]
The cynic in me feels like there is probably scope for future marketing campaigns about the ecological impact of these too. I had professional dealings with the company and advise taking it with a pinch of salt.
[1] https://www.patagonia.com/on/demandware.static/Sites-patagon...
I learned about it through Blue Heart: https://blueheart.patagonia.com
And the story I heard about it was: their CEO went on a fly fishing trip there, really loved it, was told by the local guide that all will be gone in short time for hydro plants. He then decided to use all/most/a significant portion of the marketing budget in this campaign instead.
You can always criticize ulterior motives - and we will never know for sure. But I give them some kudos for the initiatives they take - like taking their biggest revenue driver (e.g., dry suits) and deciding to make it “as ecological as possible” and 3x as expensive along the way...
Every company is in the business of making money. And the fashion industry is known for making little money and having a big environmental impact. I don’t mind if somebody goes a more risky route that also makes them money along the way...
I think what they do is great, but I would take their campaigns, and especially all the Yvon stories, with a pinch of salt.
Tonuge in cheek, I'll share a story of my own - to launch a new Patagonia store in a Europe, they had bespoke furniture commissioned from recycled wood (probably using no solvents etc etc). Great! Except that it was made by in California, covered in bubble wrap and sent thousands of miles by land and sea.
Yes, No worries, I am not glorifying them.
But I guess they try harder than I do. That’s good enough for a start...
Wind and solar have been heavily subsidized in France through buying it at an above market rate. [0]
0: http://www.bsi-economics.org/1016-evolution-prix-electricite...
* Guaranteed minimum price for the electricity generated, well above current market rates. Taxpayer pays £92.50 per Megawatt Hour - when the wholesale price of electricity has been £35-£42 for the last year or so. The guaranteed price rises with inflation, and lasts 35 years.
* Loan guarantees, reducing their interest rates.
* Guaranteed maximum price for waste disposal, taxpayer pays anything above that.
* Capped liability / reduced insurance requirements for nuclear accidents. Taxpayer pays if an accident exceeds their insurance.
* Guaranteed maximum cost for decommissioning. Taxpayer pays if decommissioning costs more than predicted.
When the whole project was kicked off it was pre-brexit and our politicians were pro-chinese-investment. So a nuclear plant built with French expertise and Chinese money seemed like a great way to replace our ageing coal-fired power plants and keep the lights on.
[1] https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/united...
Could you even get someone else to guarantee you an inflation pegged price of electricity for the next 35 years? And in that case, how much would it cost?
I think anyone would love to offer a CFD over a 35 year timeline, only HinkleyPoint C (and Sizewell C in the same agreement) where offered these conditions. i.e it makes financing much easier.
HinkleyPoint C is in planning since 2008 or so, not exactly a quick process. Real construction since 2018 (but some prep work done in the decade leading up to this.) Expected generation is in 2025/2026. This sounds bad but is actually decent, 10 years from idea to generation is common and outliers exist in both directions.
How do they guarantee that they will actually provide the energy at a given time? Are they pairing wind with another power plant?
The CFD for hinkley point is available and is a few hundred pages.
Part of reason for the strike price with HPC is that they expected offshore to cost 85 GBP in 2025, while it costs 50 GBP in 2020.
Thanks for the explanation on CFD. One of the advantages of nuclear is its predictability, it seems unfortunate if this isn't what was bought by the UK.
The remaining points about the intermittent nature of renewables and how difficult it is to incorporate them into a reliable grid economically are still valid.
How much would it cost per kilowatt hour without subsidies?
Maintaining the energy grid is a careful balancing act between preventing surges and blackouts. There are a lot of grid-related engineering problems that come from increasing decentralization (e.g. wind, solar, hydro) because, as you mentioned, it increases unpredictability in supply.
All power grids require that balancing. Old, new, American, non-American ...
It could potentially increase the cost of buying a home in the future. Or significant investment from the government so we don't regress our back to having blackouts (especially when it puts even more pressure on the poor in the name of the environment)... either to homes or some centralized system.
Things I've noticed. Even high efficiency residential fridges aren't that efficient. Some off grid ones use three times less power. And lot of the modern fridges have inverters to drive the compressor. Which means would not that big a stretch to add a 12/24V input like my portable fridge.
I mention this because not all household loads are the same. You really don't want your fridge to stop working. You probably can manage if you can't run you whole house air conditioner full tilt.
Having appliances that can run off back up and ones that can adjust their load probably would help.
Another random opinion is a lot of house wiring could be replaced with Power of Ethernet. There is a new automotive standard that provides up to 100W. A house where lights and light loads were run off POE could be trivially backed up by a battery.
And one ethernet cable per two bulbs would work fine for lots of lighting situations anyway.
But then that highlights the problem with trying to PoE and entire house - You have to run a line out from a PoE source to each item you want to deliver power to, and provide a port for each which comes at some cost. I guess you could try and run some kind of PoE passthrough circuit arrangement like you see with some office voip phones...
Complicated.
The other thing is price out Ethernet cable by the foot and compare with 14g Romex. The former is $0.05/ft vs $0.20/ft. And you don't need a licensed electrician to run it.
Also PEO is low voltage and power limited, so safer.
I gotta imagine 100W PoE requires some bigger cables than plain-jane Cat5E or even Cat6, though...?
The higher power levels require that you take into account how each cable is going to safely dissipate a couple watts, which is easy if you're not running big bundles.
HVAC usage can be stockpiled in the thermal mass of the house. The same with the electric water heater - the thermal mass of the water in the tank. This is where variable electric rates come in, and smart HVAC/heater systems that run mostly when electricity is cheap.
Manufacturing and Cloud Providers both have to contend with the fact that idle equipment may cost them more than expensive power. Battery storage is predominantly about peak shaving of load variability, elective loads could help with trough filling. That doesn't get us to renewable power, but it does help get us away from the worst of the fossil fuel power plants.
I saw some pundit conversations about Battery Day recently. There's some speculation that a 'million mile battery' may be coming due to union of a few different complementary improvements to the battery design and manufacture.
If your battery can survive four times as many discharge cycles as the drive train, hooking back into the grid isn't so bad as long as your car doesn't conk out 10 miles shy of Grandma's house.
If you know your going to be parked at the office for the most part for 8 hours a day, then you'd probably be ok putting your car in opportunistic mode as long as you have enough for your commute.
The car can also track your driving patterns and manage all of this seamlessly. Having worked at a gas station and seeing how people swarm my station when gas was $0.10/litre less than the surrounding stations because we didn't update fast enough, I think there will be plenty of price chasers for these modes.
The anxious / I drive for recreation types / road trippers can pay extra to stay topped up all the time.
The peaks in the grid utilization curve actually tends to match the solar production curve pretty well (there are local deviations, running an aluminum smelter at night). Look at the demand curve in CA, you will see that it is flat midday. Before solar there was a peak midday. This creates issues on the ends (duck curve) of course but the key point is that solar production very closely matches peak electricity use.
There used to be a great article on Wikipedia how about this is done in the UK, but it was deleted. Notionally, it was merged into the main article about the National Grid, but all the interesting content was discarded when that happened. I think the worry was that the article was unsourced - it was pretty clearly just a Grid engineer who sit down and bashed it out one day. Anyway, here it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Control_of_the_Na...
My other point is that solar generally matches peak demand pretty well so you don’t need a ton of demand responsiveness (given that electricity demand is already inelastic).
This work is an attempt to capture the “whole system costs” of an individual power plant. This could include the costs of enhancing the electricity network to connect a new power station, balancing supply and demand in real time, and providing backup power during periods of low wind or sun.
From the comment I'm replying to:
I wish proponents renewables were honest enough to not withhold these problems
As the article makes clear, nobody is hiding from the fact that there are costs associated with providing backup power during periods of low wind or sun.
The other problems in the comment are not problems with renewables per se (aside from one problem with the straw man "100% renewables"), but problems with German government policy.
The French public financial auditing institution (la Cour des Comptes) published in 2012 that public nuke investments are opaque, and that it costed around 228 10e9 euros, plus nowadays 3.4 10e9 euros per year for the sole maintenance. Nuke risk is what it is, and even financially it is not sound. Read there, starting folio 269: https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rappor...
It is so expensive it cannot be hidden anymore. Electricity in France is absolutely not cheap, its price there is average in Europe. Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Germany now pays in order to solve the problem.
France isn't completely dumb and a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it. However those are only words, until now.
Meanwhile... Germany solves its problem by switching to more adequate energy sources.
Oil and gas - _when compared with solar, wind, etc._ - aren't energy per se, they are batteries. The energy is stored and all we do is release it.
On the other hand, wind and solar need to be created from scratch - and until we get better batteries - are released immediately.
We're not usually comparing apples to apples but batteries (tradional energy sources) to from-scratch energy (solar and wind).
Not only was it quick and cheap to build but it turns a good profit.
That's an interesting statistic, but the topic of the article is electricity in the UK not energy use in the world. A more useful statistic would be this:
"The government’s official data has revealed that renewable energy made up 47% of the UK’s electricity generation in the first three months of the year, smashing the previous quarterly record of 39% set last year."[0]
It's true that doesn't include the energy used by gas heating systems or fuel used by vehicles, for example, but to bring those into consideration it would be helpful to know how quickly heating systems and vehicles are being replaced by electric equivalents (increasing the load on the grid, although per capita energy consumption in the UK has been decreasing for decades).
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/25/renewable-e...
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/07/renewables-rea...
and here are the statistics to back that up https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Electricity is only a subset of our energy usage (around 20%) and out of that wind and solar is only a small part. Hydro is much bigger.
How about cars? Most ICE engines are less than 40% efficient. If you charge an EV with renewables it will consume 2.5 times less primary energy. Renewables look small in primary energy comparisons because they are less wasteful.
The problem is that people cannot access these wholesale spot markets, only wholesalers. The consumer prices are usually set at like 11c kWh. If companies were given a chance to purchase electricity in a spot market, there would probably be some interesting business use-cases built around it, such as opportunistic bitcoin mining or battery arbitraging.
But it's definitely one arrow in the quiver, and together there are solutions for just about any storage problem you can imagine.
Personally I think a big obvious shift is that EV chargers should be located in the places that the cars park during the day. The whole "charge at home overnight" thing is an unnecessary demand shift. Charge at work during the day, when the PV is producing like mad.
Even if the PV is on the roof at home and the power is getting shipped several miles over the grid to the office where the car is parked, it's still easier to move power over distance than to store it over time.
Of course PV on the roof at work would be even better, since commercial roofs tend to be broad and flat and boring. But it'll take quite a bit of forward thinking to unlock that cognitive step.
I’m completely happy if my dishwasher waits until the sun comes up to start. Or my dryer determines it’s a good idea to wait an hour before starting. Or if my XYZ charges super slow today because it’s not too windy. Or if my freezer goes into deep-freeze mode because...
I wish I got to pay the “real” price of electricity instead of lame time of day buckets.
I really think a lot of night time load is just industrial customers chasing price. Change the price structure and they'll immediately adjust their time of use to match. Certainly smarter appliances could also chase low rates like industrial users.
You can spend some of the money you'd otherwise save on electricity in those cases.
> You wouldn't be happy either if factories can't produce enough food because they would have to wait for wind or sun.
A factory shifting hours wouldn't be noticeable at all by the time the product reaches the consumer weeks later.
If the factory isn't running enough hours at all, that's not a problem caused by renewables being unpredictable. That's just bad management.
But more realistically you'll be able to pay more per watt for that short period and get as many amps as your house can handle.
But also, buying such a variable-price contract is only going to be an option. If you want a certain amount of guaranteed-price power, as an individual household, there will always be someone willing it to you.
We could all probably do well eating a little less factory-produced food and a little more farm-produced food.
However, as far as I understand, this is not a sufficient solution to the storage problem because you can't build them just anywhere; (a) the feasible locations are not enough to fill the enormous storage need required for a full transfer from fossils to wind/solar; and (b) in general, the type of locations that are good for pumped hydro (e.g. rivers on mountains) are not the type of locations where we have major cities (e.g. fertile plains) and mass production of renewables, so they are far from the major consumers and producers and we have a bit of a grid transit problem and international cooperation problem for that.
So while we build pumped hydro we still need to look forward to something else (e.g. mass battery storage) that can fill the gap between what we can store today and what we'll need to store to stop burning fossil fuels.
It's ok for some niche use cases but I doubt it's the future.
...can supply a maximum power of 1,728-megawatt and has a storage capacity of around 9.1 GWh.
Try harder, please.
Firstly, I would think the difference between production and demand on a single day is a better indicator than the difference between your daily production peak and your daily demand peak, which could be months away from the day production peaks.
Even that isn’t correct, though. Such a reserve buffer would be depleted after that worst-case day, so if the day after that day also has demand outstrip production, you’re in trouble.
If your goal is something not ridiculous, for example, storing storing the difference of production-consumption when production>consumption for use later when consumption>production, you would likely need very significantly less than 50,000+ of those.
For your average country even having 100 is difficult. Think of some flat place like Poland.
More than that, Germany isn't even the biggest producer/consumer of electricity... Imagine some place like China trying to ramp this up.
Clearly you only need a small proportion of grid power in storage to cope with peaks.
There are also multiple ways to smooth load - overcapacity, battery storage, pumped storage, load shedding, pricing. These are solved problems which just need a bit more work and investment, and many countries already use pumped storage extensively.
1. Small population.
2. Pretty tall mountains and sparsely populated mountains (see 1.)
3. Quite high yearly rainfall levels.
4. Very rich country.
5. Country with a very low level of corruption and from what I know, pretty efficient at building new infrastructure.
Is there an example of an "average" country having decent levels of pumped hydro storage at a level that's above 0.5% of the country's needs?
Scotland has already entirely met its needs with renewables this year. This can and will be expanded to other nations in time.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
Although, at some point it could be easier to just build coastal lagoons and let the tide do the work.
A fixed 24/7 electricity rate is thoroughly obsolete and has got to go.
Also, the grid doesn't use power evenly, but nuclear power (like geothermal) produces very even output so the US & Canada have agreements where Canada supplies excess hydro power during the day and then buys back cheap nuclear power at night.
Of course, wind & solar are very intermittent, an many places don't have easy access to hydroelectric power, so this is certainly true in some places.
Can you point me toward any studies about geothermal 'running out'? Is that a thing?
Interconnection could also make a big difference. You can export power from the North Sea to Germany or from Germany to Belgium for example. And ideally the market across Europe would help encourage cross border imports from less carbon intensive sources.
Obviously nothing is a 100% solution, but that is why we have a grid and a market.
The price thet consumer pays includes the electricity price (i.e. market price, as seen on epex spot or eex), the taxes, and the network !
Networ costs can be half of the final cost !! And these can change depending on the country and the electricity provider.
So please, when comparing prices, only compare the market prices of the energy component.
But also some of their market and grid reports. It is really interesting, especially from a geeky perspective.
Not so. Home energy storage systems are getting there. Case in point, smart storage radiators: https://www.ovoenergy.com/smart-home-heat
Until a few years ago, the cost of Solar/Wind didn't make it worthwhile studying this problem. Now it's probably viable.
Personally, i think the solution would be in converting energy into fuel in some way. Hydrogen is probably the easiest but very dangerous to handle in field conditions. Hydro Carbons would be ideal (extracting Carbon from air or maybe organic waste). There have been recent advances in catalysts - how to use electric/magnetic fields to mimic the action of physical catalysts etc.
It doesn't really matter. Each kWh of renewable energy reduces the number of kWh that have to be generated via fossil fuels thereby reducing emissions. A grid with 80% renewables is possible with very little energy storage.
>It doesn’t really matter whether a wind farm in the German North Sea can produce a lot of electricity cheaply during a windy day when that electricity is needed three days later in Munich.
Renewable power generation follows a normal distribution. Yes there are extreme outliers in each direction but the more extreme the lower the likelyhood of it happening. There are at most 10 days per year where renewables are below 30% of generated power. Running some gas plants during those 10 days doesn't matter. Especially if you are using power to gas.
>That’s because whenever solar and wind aren’t delivering any electricity we’re starting up coal and gas plants.
It's usually the opposite. When coal starts up and there is renewable energy available the renewable energy has to be curtailed but it gets paid anyway. Coal is the issue here. Gas is not a problem because it is more flexible. [0] The irony is that energy intensive industry doesn't have to pay the EEG surcharge which means consumers end up paying a 2-3 times higher EEG surcharge than they should. It's practically a heavy industry subsidy at this point, not a renewable subsidy. Consumers pay the electricity bill of arcfurnaces now.
Germany has high emissions because Germany turned off nuclear before phasing out coal and the coal lobby in Germany is huge.
>The intermittency and low energy density are inherent physical properties of solar and wind farms which is why 100% renewables is newer feasible (unless for countries like Norway who have the possibility to build lots of hydro plants).
I actually couldn't care less about 100% renewables. Even 80% renewables sounds like a dream today. However what you're saying is not the whole truth. 100% renewables are possible with today's technology and it will only get easier in the future. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewab...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkA65vpeA5g (Video in German)
Besides that, if ever electricity cost goes negative I think some electricity companies should invest in storing solutions. I know there are a few out there but most I've seen need more research and large investment. Maybe some can be distributed with making it easier for common folk to store and sell back.
That’s true of baseload generators like coal and nuke. Power generation is complex and multifaceted (hence calculation is always done on LCOE). Gas peaked plants are a critical part of the legacy generation systems, and permit more intermittent zero input sources like wind and solar to reduce the amount of baseload capacity.
I don’t know about renewable “proponents” but actual providers (of renewable or not) understand these issues well. Source: I used to be in this business.
But anyway am the issue here is about storage. And storage is getting cheaper by the day. Utility scale storage is also a lot cheaper.
Finally, if Germany was to build nuclear today it would cost far more than what they are paying for any other electricity source.
There’s a huge difference between the cost of nuclear whose capex was already paid for by the government decades ago and new nuclear. New renewables are cheaper by far than new nuclear.
A carbon-free & nuclear-free grid definitely depends on either dramatic advances in storage or substantial infrastructure development in transporting electricity over long distances.
Transporting the energy via cables is part of the solution for this and is exactly one of the things where Germany is struggling. A lot of wind capacity is in the north and east; a lot of the demand is further south and west. It's a combination of politics being a problem (this involves lots of federal states and local councils), poor planning, and old energy corporations dragging their heels.
The obvious solutions of putting some cables in place is basically completely blocked on this. Hence you have southern Germany burning expensive coal & gas at the same time the northern part is oversupplying wind power and exporting it to other countries at a discount. E.g. France is importing cheap German power and struggling to export more expensive nuclear power, which is one reason they seem to be shutting down older nuclear plants and gradually shifting to non nuclear renewables. France is of course still a net exporter but nuclear is too expensive for them to export.
The other part of the solution is of course investing in batteries and other forms of energy storage. This evens out peaks in supply and demand much more effectively, cheaper, and faster than any peaker plant can do. Also, vehicle to grid technology could be very interesting mid term as German car manufacturers are about to ramp up EV production to the order of a couple of million cars per year in the next few years. 1 million cars is about 0.5 twh of battery capacity (assuming about 50 kwh per car). A couple of million of EVs plugged into the grid could provide some very serious peak capability (to absorb over supply and provide peak demand). The hardest thing to figure out is proper incentives for this, which is not a technical problem. Long term, there should be zero need to keep legacy gas/coal plants around for this.
Of course, short term cables & batteries are lacking and there is a lot of legacy infrastructure there to be used. This actually keeps the prices higher than they should be. Overall, the picture is improving rapidly. Renewable market share is growing year on year at the cost of basically everything else.
The reason energy prices in Germany remain high is also because it continues to maintain a quite expensive and dirty brown coal infrastructure. The reasons for this situation are also entirely political. Politicians in the areas where this stuff is mined & burned are being pressured to keep that going even though everyone has known for decades that it is a stupendously dirty business that ultimately will have to go. It's been a point of contention between the two governing parties. Basically it's a combination of protecting jobs and big energy companies who are of course shifting investments to renewables but are putting the brakes on to protect their sinking legacy assets.
Basically, there are big German energy companies that are slowly going bankrupt because they are neck deep into stranded assets related to coal that need these high fees just to survive. So, expensive wind plays to their agenda because they get to keep on burning coal for a bit longer.
Yes Germany's early investments in wind were questionable but most of the new capacity is much better and quite competitive in other parts of the world (e.g. the US, the UK, etc.). E.g. Siemens is a big supplier in this space and of course a big German corporation.
The actual price (before taxes) is less than 9ct/kWh (about 7.6ct/kWh to be precise - including profits, btw.) and that's what industrial customers pay.
edit: I tried to find some figures to seejust how much bigger the German grid is compared to Kazakhstan and it's mind boggling. 25000 km in Kazakhstan vs 135000 km of just high voltage- and supergrid in Germany. Germany's grid is 1.8 million km versus 25 thousand km in Kazakhstan [1] [2]. Different worlds.
[1] http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/energy/se/pp/eneff/9th__F... page 4
[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...
Industrial customers pay <0.09€/kWh.
Unlike many other products, customers buy electricity when they need it, not when it’s cheap. It doesn’t really matter whether a wind farm in the German North Sea can produce a lot of electricity cheaply during a windy day when that electricity is needed three days later in Munich.
This complete lack of matching supply and demand is what drives electricity prices with a large share of renewables in the market so high.
In Germany, lots of electricity is produced from renewables at times when it’s not needed. This causes market prices to be negative at times and Germany is paying neighboring countries money to buy that excess electricity.
At the same time, producers of renewables have guaranteed sales by German law, i.e. their electricity is always bought by the market whether it’s needed or not.
It’s this gap between supply and demand that customers are paying for which drives German electricity prices.
Currently, we’re paying 31 Euro cents in Germany per kWh while French customers whose grid has a large share of nuclear pay just 17 Euro cents per kWh on average.
At the same time, the average CO2 emissions in Germany per kWh are at 400 grams in Germany while they’re only at 50 grams in France. That’s because whenever solar and wind aren’t delivering any electricity we’re starting up coal and gas plants.
I wish proponents renewables were honest enough to not withhold these problems.
I mean, absolutely no one argues that it’s not that expensive to build a wind or solar farm. What makes wind ans solar expensive is keeping the necessary backup plants in standby for when they’re not delivering and paying for getting rid of excess electricity from renewables when they’re not needed.
The intermittency and low energy density are inherent physical properties of solar and wind farms which is why 100% renewables is newer feasible (unless for countries like Norway who have the possibility to build lots of hydro plants).