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We'll need a lot more storage and overcapacity than people think. For example yesterday germany had a renewable fraction of around 50% throughout the whole day
by the8472 10y ago
We'll need a lot more storage and overcapacity than people think.
For example yesterday germany had a renewable fraction of around 50% throughout the whole day. Yay? Nope. During january there was a whole week where it was in the 0-10% range during the night and 5-20% during daytime.
That means we don't just have to smooth out daily variability but on the span of multiple weeks.
Of course that doesn't mean we need to store all of that in batteries or that we need to keep a whole shadow infrastructure of fossil/nuclear plants around. With enough overcapacity from renewables we could also produce hydrogen and store that for example and run it through fuel cells or gas plants when needed.
But that still means that a bunch of smartmeters won't fix the issue, we'll need real infrastructure to handle that variability.
- rb808 10y agoIn reality it means Wind and Solar really aren't suitable yet to take a significant part of the power supply in Europe.
- the8472 10y agoWe need to get from A to B. In between there'll be a time where this variability needs considerable conventional backup. We're living in that time.
- beat 10y agoIt's not as bad as you think. The amount of storage capacity required is easily computed from known long-term weather patterns, and we can (and necessarily will) work toward it slowly. "More than people think"? Who cares what people think. It's still cheaper than fossil in the long run, and energy investment is long-term investment.
- brandmeyer 10y agoI'm not convinced that it needs to be explicitly computed in a feedforward sense. If you just let the price float, then price will naturally form an error signal that the energy storage market (and customer demand) can respond to.
- leereeves 10y agoNot many people will be happy "reducing customer demand" in the middle of the night in a bitter cold winter.
- mrfusion 10y agoBut their automated thermostat won't mind!
- brandmeyer 10y agoThere's definitely a vein of "smart grid" technology that is based around the utility shedding the customer's load for them, in a sort of fractional rolling brownout. I don't think we need to go there, and that most folks would be rightly pissed off at the imposition of such by their mammoth utility. OTOH, I could see a Nest-style device which can read the day-ahead price and adjust for the customer based on their own preferences being perfectly acceptable.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoThere's no need to "impose" this. It provides economic value, so it can either be seen as a discount for opting in, or an extra charge for opting out. People already do this in a manual fashion with time-of-use rates.
- greglindahl 10y agoNote that load shedding can include changing the temperature by a couple of degrees. So, not only can it be an opt-in or opt-out situation instead of being "imposed", it can be something that most folks would sleep right through.
- brandmeyer 10y agoCold snaps certainly do happen even in climates that normally only justify a heat pump. I grew up in rural SE Tennessee, so I totally get that. Even in an environment of electric heating and an impoverished customer base, the price doesn't have to be totally inelastic to avoid a social justice nightmare. You can choose not to run the electric clothes dryer in the middle of the night, for example. Having regular large price swings will be accurately perceived by the energy storage market as an arbitrage opportunity. Even if you only allow the price to swing by some limit (say, by enforcing a maximum price ceiling on the utility through the state regulatory commission), the electric utility will be incentivised to pay even more than the natural swing to third parties who can provide that arbitrage.
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y agoCheaper? Hell no. Fossil fuels and nuclear carry their own weight, unlike, say, wind. Here in Finland, there would be no new, not any installations of wind without massive subsidies (we're talking about a guaranteed price more than 2 times the market prices) – just to disrupt the working grid as it is. (Solar isn't really even worth talking about here...) Coal is dirty, and dirt cheap, but wind is simply too inefficient.
- wbillingsley 10y agoIn the steady-state, renewables will be cheaper. For fuel-based plants, you have the cost of the plant, the mine, the transport between the mine and the plant, as well as the clean-up. That's quite a lot of operating cost on top of the capital cost. For a network of solar-panels and domestic batteries, it is almost all capital cost. There is no fuel transport, no mine, etc. And whereas one massive plant with one massive mine is a decade-long planning and construction process, the domestic panels and storage are each very short installations that can happen largely in parallel. The domestic solar+storage grid should win, because it is a heck of a lot faster to marshall consumers into buying a consumer good, than to plan and build out nation-wide infrastructure projects.
- mikeash 10y agoWhat would the picture look like if you included a wider area? Germany is relatively small, and geographical diversity can substitute for storage to an extent.
- the8472 10y agoI recall seeing a blog post about that issue, assembling publicly available data, and they found that even over larger geographical regions there were still fairly significant lulls lasting longer than a day.
- wang_li 10y agoThere's definitely a slant to this piece, but it Germany's policies do cause problems over a wider area. http://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/02/17/germanys-energy-mistakes-are-hurting-its-neighbors-too/ http://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/02/17/germanys-ene...
- mikeash 10y agoAlthough both of us discuss wide geographical areas, I don't think there's any actual connection between that article and my comment.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- theandrewbailey 10y ago> With enough overcapacity from renewables we could also produce hydrogen and store that for example and run it through fuel cells or gas plants when needed. Aren't lithium-ion batteries more efficient than hydrogen fuel cells?
- ben_w 10y agoThey are, but we probably want lots of hydrogen anyway. I don't know if we can easily substitute methane with hydrogen in gas power stations or gas ovens, but it is certainly possible.
- Filligree 10y agoYou can burn hydrogen in gas turbines. Not the same ones, you'll need to replace the turbine itself, but most of the power plant can remain intact.
- neolefty 10y agoIs it worth generating methane from electricity instead of hydrogen? Sabatier reaction etc?
- ptha 10y agoMethane is a much worse greenhouse gas than C02 https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-potent-greenhouse-gas-than-co2-methane-emissions-will-leap-as-earth-warms-nature/ https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-poten...
- epistasis 10y agoYes, but the methane here is generated from CO2 and H2, then combusted back to CO2. With no leaks, that cycle is carbon neutral, and leaks can be minimized. If this infrastructure is built out, it may also provide the path to pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere or ocean and permanently sequestering it. That is something that I think we'll probably be very interested in doing in coming decades. Having affordable technology for that (perhaps $20-80/ton?) would enable CO2 emissions for those cases that really require it, and possibly also some clawing back of the worst parts of anthropogenic climate change.
- dashundchen 10y agoI look at maps like this http://www.electricitymap.org/ http://www.electricitymap.org/ which show the solar and wind potential across Europe along with imports and exports between countries. It makes me wonder how much more of a baseload renewables could provide with a more integrated energy market and continent wide capacity planning. At least in the US, electrical grids are highly fragmented and poorly connected between states and regions. When Germany was in the 10% range, was there a region that could provide high amount of wind generation to pick up the slack? Or on sunny, windy summer days when electric prices go negative, is there somewhere to put that energy? https://energytransition.org/2014/05/german-power-prices-negative-over-weekend/ https://energytransition.org/2014/05/german-power-prices-neg... I noticed in Germany, there are solar panels on houses and barn roofs everywhere, even in not so sunny regions - maybe that investment would be better put into grid scale wind, while Spain and Portugal build out grid scale solar. If investment in renewables took place on a continental scale, with high capacity connections between solar installations in Spain, wind turbines in the North Sea, nuclear plants in France, renewable and lower carbon utilization could go up and some of the gas and coal plants could be spun down.
- kogepathic 10y ago> If investment in renewables took place on a continental scale, with high capacity connections between solar installations in Spain, wind turbines in the North Sea, nuclear plants in France, renewable and lower carbon utilization could go up and some of the gas and coal plants could be spun down. Yes, but countries don't typically like being dependent on each other for their energy needs. We are even in an era where people are openly questioning the future of the EU due to the rise of Euro sceptic parties in France and the Netherlands. The power grid operates at a snail's pace compared to the rest of the high tech industry. Getting the permission to build something, passing all the environmental impact assessments, financing, etc, can take years before the first shovel of dirt is moved to build the project. > I noticed in Germany, there are solar panels on houses and barn roofs everywhere, even in not so sunny regions - maybe that investment would be better put into grid scale wind, while Spain and Portugal build out grid scale solar. This I do agree with. Financially, I can't see how it makes sense for someone in Germany to install solar, when places like Spain or Greece get far more sun in the year. It simply a question of location, and northern localities such as Germany receive much less annual irradiation than more equatorial localities do. However I think most people in Germany would install solar not for the electricity, but because they are conscious of the environment and believe that by installing solar, they are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Ökostrom (ecological electricity) is very big in Germany.
- brandmeyer 10y agoIts not the infrastructure, its the price. If you let the price float more, then customers will naturally avoid buying electric energy when it is expensive, and will shift some of their demand to the less expensive times automatically. Energy storage naturally becomes an economically decentralized business that follows any other arbitrage pattern.
- dragontamer 10y agoA floating price means smarter grids. Smart grids that don't exist yet in large swaths of the country. We gotta upgrade all of those electrical meters in everybody's homes to take into account time AND price changes. We've gotta build the algorithms to distribute those price changes. A lot of cities have that kind of infrastructure already of course. But lets not deny the monumental task ahead of us. The idea of "smart meters" that communicate with a central server (ie: requires perpetual and reliable internet access) was unfathomable just 10 years ago.
- brandmeyer 10y agoI don't think the meter needs to be that smart. First off, I'm using the existing day-ahead markets that many of the independent system operators are already using to predict demand. These markets clear once per hour, for the price of energy 24hr in advance in one hour windows. They also account for somewhat fine-grained regional variation (ie, power line usage). There are additional markets that clear only 15 min in advance (the "spot" price for power) and these can have much more volatility. So, if I were king of the electric market, I would only expose retail customers to the day-ahead price. This way, existing web-scale publishing tech can tell people what their price will be up to 24hr in advance. Retail customers' price gets fixed at that time, and they pay a small energy premium for reducing their volatility exposure. Now, the meters only need to record a list of {kWh, hour-of-day} pairs, one for each hour between the last reading and today. So if the local electric utility reads off the consumption once a month, then you only store ~700 entries or so. That's much cheaper than needing a reliable Internet connection to the meter.
- 10y ago