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Could you please point me to reputable studies that back up your claim that storage will be needed before very high penetration? Even for extremely high carbon

Could you please point me to reputable studies that back up your claim that storage will be needed before very high penetration? Even for extremely high carbon reductions (95% on 1990) the best models I've seen consider transmission lines and sector coupling considerably cheaper. And these models make very aggressive assumptions on the fall of battery prices. E.g.: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf Edit: The thing to look at is figure 11. on page 16. It gives a policy trade off. Given political limits on the amount of transmission grid extension (x axis) what is the cost of the economically optimal mix of technologies (y axis). Left graph shows sector coupling, right graph shows sector coupling. The second graph almost completely eliminates the need for battery storage. Nuclear is not in this mix, partly because this is exploring policy constraints on transmission capacity in the context of Europe (and nuclear is pretty much a non-starter politically) but it clearly shows that the idea that large amounts of battery are inevitable is outdated. I'll leave you with a quote from the conclusions: "The All-Flex-Central scenario with optimal transmission costs just 13% more than today’s system [even when excluding health benefits]"

jabl 8y ago
There are papers claiming that the various 100% renewable work by Jacobson, Breuer etc. suffer from a number of wildly optimistic assumptions. See e.g. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2017.03.114 . Also see work by Christopher Clack et al. (one of which caused the infamous Jacobson lawsuit, FWIW), and Jesse Jenkins et al.
- Certhas 8y ago
  Then you are no doubt aware of the response article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032118303307?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... Which I find considerably more convincing, given that it addresses the concerns raised in detail and gives a much wider overview of the literature and ideas around. In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome.
  - jabl 8y ago
    > Then you are no doubt aware of the response article: Yes, I am. I'm not particularly convinced by it, it seems to largely repeat the same claims made previously. Anyway, there's a preliminary informal response to that at http://4thgeneration.energy/response-to-brown/ http://4thgeneration.energy/response-to-brown/ > In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome. Clearly Heard is a nuclear advocate, yes, but AFAICT the criteria they chose aren't unreasonable. OTOH it's hard to argue Jacobson, Breuer, Brown et al. aren't pushing an ideology either, since they claim to be motivated by decarbonizing the energy supply, yet they are excluding one of the very few sources which, historically, has provided large-scale low-carbon energy.
apendleton 8y ago
You're right that arrangements that mostly avoid storage are possible, but might not be cost efficient in a way that leads to their eventual adoption, and any mass adoption of renewables at high percentages of overall capacity requires some kind of major investment beyond the cost of generation itself, to deal with the intermittency, be it storage or transmission (and the latter is really only helpful if by "renewables" you mostly mean wind -- the intermittency of solar is obviously highly correlated over broad geographic areas). Still, I think the more interesting question isn't "could it be done" -- it's pretty clear that it could -- but "could it be done in a manner that's cost-competitive with non-renewable technologies," and there's pretty abundant research at this point that shows that any advantages renewables have in terms of levelized cost of ownership get more than wiped out once these kinds of investments are factored in; see, e.g., https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-2017/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... From the executive summary: > Despite the sustained and growing cost-competitiveness of certain Alternative Energy technologies, advanced economies will require diverse generation fleets to meet baseload generation needs for the foreseeable future with specific numbers in the actual report. It's easy enough to focus on Europe or the Americas where the rich have the comparable luxury of being able to overpay for generation if the political will is there, but the overwhelming majority of new generation capacity brought online globally in the next century won't be in these places, it will be in Asia, Africa, and South America, as these countries work towards developmental parity with the West. We need to come up with solutions that aren't just possible, but cheap, and deployable in places that are starting from basically nothing in terms of modern grid infrastructure, and where hyper-inefficient diesel generation is currently the norm, to the extent that electricity is broadly available at all (as is the case in large parts of Africa in particular today). Again: this isn't to say that renewables can't work, or that any other particular technology will or won't be the solution. We just don't know yet, both in terms of feasibility and economics.
- Certhas 8y ago
  The study I linked to looks at nothing but the cost of dealing with intermittency and comes to the conclusion that it's barely more expensive than the current system. Also, once you go into the developing world context a lot of things change. What is difficult and expensive in the European context is to guarantee the last few hours of electricity a year. If you can take an area that has a few hours of electricity a week to that point, you have a massive win already. Plus you can build sector coupling in from the beginning. In a green field scenario you _really_ want wind/solar as a decentral bootstrapping technology that scales down, that can get you a really long way. Bangladesh has >5 million solar home systems installed. That's a Norway or a Denmark population running 100% on decentral off-grid solar. Edit: An important point here is to be aware of time horizons. A study looking at a 2025 or a 2030 system looks very different from one that looks at a 2050 system. If the foreseeable future means the next ten years, then sure.

jabl 8y ago

There are papers claiming that the various 100% renewable work by Jacobson, Breuer etc. suffer from a number of wildly optimistic assumptions. See e.g. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2017.03.114 . Also see work by Christopher Clack et al. (one of which caused the infamous Jacobson lawsuit, FWIW), and Jesse Jenkins et al.

Certhas 8y ago
Then you are no doubt aware of the response article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032118303307?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... Which I find considerably more convincing, given that it addresses the concerns raised in detail and gives a much wider overview of the literature and ideas around. In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome.
- jabl 8y ago
  > Then you are no doubt aware of the response article: Yes, I am. I'm not particularly convinced by it, it seems to largely repeat the same claims made previously. Anyway, there's a preliminary informal response to that at http://4thgeneration.energy/response-to-brown/ http://4thgeneration.energy/response-to-brown/ > In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome. Clearly Heard is a nuclear advocate, yes, but AFAICT the criteria they chose aren't unreasonable. OTOH it's hard to argue Jacobson, Breuer, Brown et al. aren't pushing an ideology either, since they claim to be motivated by decarbonizing the energy supply, yet they are excluding one of the very few sources which, historically, has provided large-scale low-carbon energy.

apendleton 8y ago

You're right that arrangements that mostly avoid storage are possible, but might not be cost efficient in a way that leads to their eventual adoption, and any mass adoption of renewables at high percentages of overall capacity requires some kind of major investment beyond the cost of generation itself, to deal with the intermittency, be it storage or transmission (and the latter is really only helpful if by "renewables" you mostly mean wind -- the intermittency of solar is obviously highly correlated over broad geographic areas). Still, I think the more interesting question isn't "could it be done" -- it's pretty clear that it could -- but "could it be done in a manner that's cost-competitive with non-renewable technologies," and there's pretty abundant research at this point that shows that any advantages renewables have in terms of levelized cost of ownership get more than wiped out once these kinds of investments are factored in; see, e.g., https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-2017/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... From the executive summary: > Despite the sustained and growing cost-competitiveness of certain Alternative Energy technologies, advanced economies will require diverse generation fleets to meet baseload generation needs for the foreseeable future with specific numbers in the actual report. It's easy enough to focus on Europe or the Americas where the rich have the comparable luxury of being able to overpay for generation if the political will is there, but the overwhelming majority of new generation capacity brought online globally in the next century won't be in these places, it will be in Asia, Africa, and South America, as these countries work towards developmental parity with the West. We need to come up with solutions that aren't just possible, but cheap, and deployable in places that are starting from basically nothing in terms of modern grid infrastructure, and where hyper-inefficient diesel generation is currently the norm, to the extent that electricity is broadly available at all (as is the case in large parts of Africa in particular today). Again: this isn't to say that renewables can't work, or that any other particular technology will or won't be the solution. We just don't know yet, both in terms of feasibility and economics.

Certhas 8y ago
The study I linked to looks at nothing but the cost of dealing with intermittency and comes to the conclusion that it's barely more expensive than the current system. Also, once you go into the developing world context a lot of things change. What is difficult and expensive in the European context is to guarantee the last few hours of electricity a year. If you can take an area that has a few hours of electricity a week to that point, you have a massive win already. Plus you can build sector coupling in from the beginning. In a green field scenario you _really_ want wind/solar as a decentral bootstrapping technology that scales down, that can get you a really long way. Bangladesh has >5 million solar home systems installed. That's a Norway or a Denmark population running 100% on decentral off-grid solar. Edit: An important point here is to be aware of time horizons. A study looking at a 2025 or a 2030 system looks very different from one that looks at a 2050 system. If the foreseeable future means the next ten years, then sure.