4 ms·

Electrifying heating doesn't improve this situation, it worsens it drastically. People come back home after work and turn on the heat or AC right as the sun goe

Electrifying heating doesn't improve this situation, it worsens it drastically. People come back home after work and turn on the heat or AC right as the sun goes down. A big part of why renewable generation is so high in Germany is because they mostly heat their homes with gas (which emits carbon, but doesn't factor into electricity generation statistics). Using car batteries for storage doesn't solve the fundamental mismatch between the staggering amount of batteries that get produced and the amount of storage that is required. Not to mention, I'm dubious if this scheme would even work. Why would I hook my car storage up to the grid? It's going to eat away at the battery life of my car. This essentially just offloads the cost of battery storage to consumers by decreasing the battery life of their EVs due to the constant charge and discharging.

adrianN 6y ago
Eletrifying heating helps a lot if you integrate it with a smart grid. People generally don't care whether their home is 21 or 23 degrees warm, but the difference enables a lot of load shifting. I know people who take advantage of this today. This is btw, also true for many industrial processes. You'd integrate your car battery with the grid because you'd get cheaper charging in return, or some other form of monetary reward.
- Manfredo_1 6y ago
  You use the word "smart grid" as though it just automatically makes electricity usage go down. A smart grid works by redistributing load to when there is power. A smart grid almost always needs storage, unless it's doing simple things like running your dryer where it's just a matter of turning on your appliances at a certain time of day. If you're at he from 7pm to 8am, and you want your home to be heated while you're there a smart grid isn't going to help you. A smart grid would tell to to be at home at different hours of the day, but people aren't appliances. And again, car batteries being used or not, we wouldn't have enough battery storage fulfill the storage requirements for decades or even centuries, and by then the first batteries we built will have long since worn out.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I use "smart grid" to mean that the electricity provider has a measure of control over the load. For example they can turn heating in your home on or off as long as the temperature stays within a band defined by you. This is not science fiction, it exists today. I know people who use it already.
    - bosie 6y ago
      How much can the provider shave off the load though? if i set my band between 21 and 23 degrees, is the reduction more than a few percent max? Doesn't seem to make a dent given the peak requirement when the majority of the people all shift locations (i.e. go home)?
      - adrianN 6y ago
        This paper [1] says up to 8GW in Germany with full integration of heating, cooling and mobility. [1] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0306261915001889 https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S03062619150018...
        bosie 6y ago
        Found the paper but couldn't find the 8GW claim. Doesn't that seem very little considering germany is producing electricity in the 500 TWh region?
        adrianN 6y ago
        The 8GW are in the abstract. 500TWh per year are about 60GW average. 8GW is quite a bit compared to that, but of course load shifting alone won't allow you get to 100% renewables.
        bosie 6y ago
        Dang, i was reading the wrong paper. sorry.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  And even more so if your heating and/or cooling system has integrated thermal storage. Storing a joule as heat (or cold) is much easier/cheaper than storing it in a battery.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Not to mention that modern district heating is super efficient thanks to modern isolation methods on all the pipes & you have a huge flexibility of prpducing the heat - combined gas steam cycle, waste incineration or extra heat from thermal or even nuclear power plants.
phicoh 6y ago
This very much depends on how you do the heating / cooling. An efficient way to heat a house is to have a heatpump plus low temperature floor heating (and cooling). This system works best by keeping the floor at a constant temperature, day and night. Of course, a house also needs to be properly insulated and have ventilation with heat recovery
cameldrv 6y ago
Agree about the car batteries. If you think about the storage problem in a less abstract way, it's largely shifting demand from around noon when the sun is shining to about 7-8pm when people are active but solar is producing zero. For car battery storage to help with this, the car has to be plugged in while its owner is at work to soak up the noonday power, and then plugged in again at home to be discharged. By the time most people go to work in the morning, there isn't enough sun to charge the car yet, so they have to go to work without whatever power has been taken out of the battery at night, so the battery has to be bigger than is necessary for driving. This extra battery capacity in the car is much more expensive. It's not 100% available, because sometimes people won't plug in their car, and it has to be made more rugged to deal with driving on the road. You're also paying an energy cost to haul an energy storage system to and from the office every day. Overall, you'd do better by just using large scale fixed battery banks that can be optimized for energy storage. The only real reason to like vehicle based energy storage is that it takes the cost of energy storage off the books of renewable generation and hides it in transportation costs.

adrianN 6y ago

Eletrifying heating helps a lot if you integrate it with a smart grid. People generally don't care whether their home is 21 or 23 degrees warm, but the difference enables a lot of load shifting. I know people who take advantage of this today. This is btw, also true for many industrial processes. You'd integrate your car battery with the grid because you'd get cheaper charging in return, or some other form of monetary reward.

Manfredo_1 6y ago
You use the word "smart grid" as though it just automatically makes electricity usage go down. A smart grid works by redistributing load to when there is power. A smart grid almost always needs storage, unless it's doing simple things like running your dryer where it's just a matter of turning on your appliances at a certain time of day. If you're at he from 7pm to 8am, and you want your home to be heated while you're there a smart grid isn't going to help you. A smart grid would tell to to be at home at different hours of the day, but people aren't appliances. And again, car batteries being used or not, we wouldn't have enough battery storage fulfill the storage requirements for decades or even centuries, and by then the first batteries we built will have long since worn out.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I use "smart grid" to mean that the electricity provider has a measure of control over the load. For example they can turn heating in your home on or off as long as the temperature stays within a band defined by you. This is not science fiction, it exists today. I know people who use it already.
  - bosie 6y ago
    How much can the provider shave off the load though? if i set my band between 21 and 23 degrees, is the reduction more than a few percent max? Doesn't seem to make a dent given the peak requirement when the majority of the people all shift locations (i.e. go home)?
    - adrianN 6y ago
      This paper [1] says up to 8GW in Germany with full integration of heating, cooling and mobility. [1] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0306261915001889 https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S03062619150018...
      - bosie 6y ago
        Found the paper but couldn't find the 8GW claim. Doesn't that seem very little considering germany is producing electricity in the 500 TWh region?
        adrianN 6y ago
        The 8GW are in the abstract. 500TWh per year are about 60GW average. 8GW is quite a bit compared to that, but of course load shifting alone won't allow you get to 100% renewables.
        bosie 6y ago
        Dang, i was reading the wrong paper. sorry.
pfdietz 6y ago
And even more so if your heating and/or cooling system has integrated thermal storage. Storing a joule as heat (or cold) is much easier/cheaper than storing it in a battery.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Not to mention that modern district heating is super efficient thanks to modern isolation methods on all the pipes & you have a huge flexibility of prpducing the heat - combined gas steam cycle, waste incineration or extra heat from thermal or even nuclear power plants.

phicoh 6y ago

This very much depends on how you do the heating / cooling. An efficient way to heat a house is to have a heatpump plus low temperature floor heating (and cooling). This system works best by keeping the floor at a constant temperature, day and night. Of course, a house also needs to be properly insulated and have ventilation with heat recovery

cameldrv 6y ago

Agree about the car batteries. If you think about the storage problem in a less abstract way, it's largely shifting demand from around noon when the sun is shining to about 7-8pm when people are active but solar is producing zero. For car battery storage to help with this, the car has to be plugged in while its owner is at work to soak up the noonday power, and then plugged in again at home to be discharged. By the time most people go to work in the morning, there isn't enough sun to charge the car yet, so they have to go to work without whatever power has been taken out of the battery at night, so the battery has to be bigger than is necessary for driving. This extra battery capacity in the car is much more expensive. It's not 100% available, because sometimes people won't plug in their car, and it has to be made more rugged to deal with driving on the road. You're also paying an energy cost to haul an energy storage system to and from the office every day. Overall, you'd do better by just using large scale fixed battery banks that can be optimized for energy storage. The only real reason to like vehicle based energy storage is that it takes the cost of energy storage off the books of renewable generation and hides it in transportation costs.