4 ms·

> deploy 2x in renewables and a bunch of energy storage plus some gas plants and long distance transmission Is it actually sufficient? Feel free to link even t

> deploy 2x in renewables and a bunch of energy storage plus some gas plants and long distance transmission Is it actually sufficient? Feel free to link even technical sources (as long as it is not paywalled without way of checking quality). My impression is that right now "bunch of energy storage" is 100% unfeasible to provide power from renewables without blackouts. And existing ones work thanks to nearby countries with scalable non-renewable on demand power, with rare exception of countries with low population density and great opportunity for hydropower that is available on demand.

eloff 5y ago
I'll turn that around and ask specifically why that's not possible. It would require a better interconnected grid, overbuilt renewables, and plenty of storage with some level of on demand generation like gas. A good percentage of baseload power like hydro and nuclear certainly help, but it's not required. It's just a matter of how much are you willing to spend as opposed to something that's physically impossible. I believe renewables + grid scale batteries are already cheaper than new nuclear and much lower risk and much faster to deploy. The momentum is in favor of widening that gap.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Currently power storage is tiny, even largest hydropower projects would be insufficient to provide backup power in most places. And just 2x renewables overbuilt would regularly run below demands - sadly solar/wind is not acting on demand. And during drought also hydropower may be unable to work. And in most places hydropower, geothermal is unable to provide enough power. (please correct me if I am wrong! But last time I checked nearly no place can run on renewables without relying on importing fossil-based power, and places that succeed have ideal places for hydropower/geothermal)
- sesuximo 5y ago
  > renewables + grid scale batteries are already cheaper than new nuclear I wish this were true, but it’s not. There aren’t competitive grid scale batteries.
  - eloff 5y ago
    I think this is a question of what is grid scale. Is the Tesla facility in Australia grid scale? Why not? What about the large facilities being planned currently with lithium ion batteries?
    - sesuximo 5y ago
      My source for my previous comment is Bill gates’ book. Aside, I think a big battery in Australia makes a lot of sense because they have lots of sun year round and lots of unused space. So you are pretty much just storing for night time and can easily build solar panels. In many other places, you have to store for much longer term which means you need much bigger batteries (and bigger generating plants). This is to say I think the cost in a place like Australia may be 100s of times less than places in most of the USA (which is where I live).
      - eloff 5y ago
        > In many other places, you have to store for much longer term. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. Overbuild and interconnect rather. You can't do things like store summer solar energy for the winter. But there are plenty of places in the US where the sun is nearly always shining. If you can share that energy across the county you're in good shape. Likewise with the wind. Again it helps you have solid baseload power. It's just nuclear is so expensive and takes so long to build that you can build twice the capacity in solar and wind plus a battery, plus a gas plant for a backup in less time and for a similar price.
        sesuximo 5y ago
        I don’t think you can interconnect over very long distances. I know of experimental projects, but nothing proven
        eloff 5y ago
        There are five existing transmission lines in the world of 2000km and up (all in Brazil and China.) I think a cross USA interconnect is within the reach of current technology.
- lutorm 5y ago
  The big unknown to me here is the impact of the interconnects. It's obvious that the intermittency problem gets smaller with better transmission infrastructure. What I can't recall seeing is actual studies of how much transmission capacity would be needed to average the renewable input over large enough an area so that existing storage solutions are adequate. Also, not all renewables are intermittent. Apart from hydro, geothermal comes to mind. (Although with climate change-induced changes in rainfall it's not clear that hydro will be reliable on the timescales we talk about either....)
bertil 5y ago
> "bunch of energy storage" is 100% unfeasible to provide power from renewables without blackouts Telsa’s prototype in Australia was able to prove you can stabilise a grid at scale, profitably and with simple enough technology. In addition to Li-ion (that provides good response) you can have gravity-based capacity (essentially a crane), heat-storage (rocks kept at 4000ºC feeding a thermal power plant) and liquid-metal batteries. Two of those are mostly century-old tech redesigned for a word with cheap intermittent energy; the third seems like the best, most reliable, simplest, most scalable idea out of MIT from the last decade. I have the impression that these represent enough options, with enough evidence that it will be profitable within a short lifespan, so I’m not even sure you want government support. But if they can facilitate permits, access to the grid, etc. why not get the help? All those will stabilise the grid no matter what source of power we have, so why not implement what we can at scale, see how it helps, and double it six months later if it works? After five years, we should have enough to tell how much wind and sun it can cover but I can’t see why it wouldn’t handle 100% of demand. All of those ideas can be any size, from a hand to a large city; all have many alternative elements to adapt to circumstances, price point; there are complementary and work well together.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Are you sure that any of them is feasible at grid scale? How much it would cost to store 451 GWh (one day of electricity production in Poland if I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Poland right)? How large overbuilt of renewables would be needed to avoid blackouts during windless snowy winter months?
  - bertil 5y ago
    Individual projects? No idea. But Poland has a lot of mines, so a lot of room for gravity-based storage. My suggestion is to build: * 1 GWh capacity of those gravity-fed; and * 1 GWh of concentrated solar heat storage — it won’t be as effective in winter but let’s try; and * 1 GWh of Li-ion batteries; and * 1 GWh of hydro-storage; and * 1 GWh of liquid metal storage. And see which one scales, and what cost, with what retention, reactivity, how is the maintenance. All should, there’s no reason a larger pile of rocks doesn’t retain heat any less well than a smaller pile, or that what you can’t get from one mine shaft doesn’t work in another mine shaft. If you think that’s too much for Poland, let’s try one in Arizona, Iceland, Australia, Kazakstan, Hawaii, and see which one works best and adapts to Polish climate. I’ve never seen an inventor that didn’t iterate from a working prototype (which we have for all these) to a larger one, to a larger still, until they hit scaling issues. And I don’t know of currently salient scaling issues in any of those (that haven’t been addressed recently — there were targeting problems with concentrated solar that found a solution recently for instance). “Will it scale?” isn’t the questions that an engineer would ask on any of those at this stage of the project, but rather: "How fast can we make one twice bigger?" When we hit roadblocks that can’t be fixed, we can ask about scale, but right now, all those have a clear path. "Overbuilt" assumes that renewable capacity doesn’t adapt to winter condition but it might: cooler external temperature could mean that geo-power, or heat stored from the summer represent a higher differential, and more energy. Or it assumes that capacity is expensive, which has never really been the case with variable prices: not for gas plants, not for renewables that are not constrained by context. If you are worried about European winter overall, that makes sense, but the solution for that is rather obvious — enormous, but so much cheaper than anything else comparable: giant capacities in North Africa, big cable through Spain and France. From there, the extra capacity in Europe can serve Northern Europe. Scandinavia continues enjoying their massive boost in renewable hydro in winter, and the winds in the North Sea will definitely need exporting too. “Windless winter” isn’t apparently a common thing there. That might require more international solidarity, but people will do that quite keenly if there’s money to be made.

eloff 5y ago

I'll turn that around and ask specifically why that's not possible. It would require a better interconnected grid, overbuilt renewables, and plenty of storage with some level of on demand generation like gas. A good percentage of baseload power like hydro and nuclear certainly help, but it's not required. It's just a matter of how much are you willing to spend as opposed to something that's physically impossible. I believe renewables + grid scale batteries are already cheaper than new nuclear and much lower risk and much faster to deploy. The momentum is in favor of widening that gap.

matkoniecz 5y ago
Currently power storage is tiny, even largest hydropower projects would be insufficient to provide backup power in most places. And just 2x renewables overbuilt would regularly run below demands - sadly solar/wind is not acting on demand. And during drought also hydropower may be unable to work. And in most places hydropower, geothermal is unable to provide enough power. (please correct me if I am wrong! But last time I checked nearly no place can run on renewables without relying on importing fossil-based power, and places that succeed have ideal places for hydropower/geothermal)
sesuximo 5y ago
> renewables + grid scale batteries are already cheaper than new nuclear I wish this were true, but it’s not. There aren’t competitive grid scale batteries.
- eloff 5y ago
  I think this is a question of what is grid scale. Is the Tesla facility in Australia grid scale? Why not? What about the large facilities being planned currently with lithium ion batteries?
  - sesuximo 5y ago
    My source for my previous comment is Bill gates’ book. Aside, I think a big battery in Australia makes a lot of sense because they have lots of sun year round and lots of unused space. So you are pretty much just storing for night time and can easily build solar panels. In many other places, you have to store for much longer term which means you need much bigger batteries (and bigger generating plants). This is to say I think the cost in a place like Australia may be 100s of times less than places in most of the USA (which is where I live).
    - eloff 5y ago
      > In many other places, you have to store for much longer term. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. Overbuild and interconnect rather. You can't do things like store summer solar energy for the winter. But there are plenty of places in the US where the sun is nearly always shining. If you can share that energy across the county you're in good shape. Likewise with the wind. Again it helps you have solid baseload power. It's just nuclear is so expensive and takes so long to build that you can build twice the capacity in solar and wind plus a battery, plus a gas plant for a backup in less time and for a similar price.
      - sesuximo 5y ago
        I don’t think you can interconnect over very long distances. I know of experimental projects, but nothing proven
        eloff 5y ago
        There are five existing transmission lines in the world of 2000km and up (all in Brazil and China.) I think a cross USA interconnect is within the reach of current technology.
lutorm 5y ago
The big unknown to me here is the impact of the interconnects. It's obvious that the intermittency problem gets smaller with better transmission infrastructure. What I can't recall seeing is actual studies of how much transmission capacity would be needed to average the renewable input over large enough an area so that existing storage solutions are adequate. Also, not all renewables are intermittent. Apart from hydro, geothermal comes to mind. (Although with climate change-induced changes in rainfall it's not clear that hydro will be reliable on the timescales we talk about either....)

bertil 5y ago

> "bunch of energy storage" is 100% unfeasible to provide power from renewables without blackouts Telsa’s prototype in Australia was able to prove you can stabilise a grid at scale, profitably and with simple enough technology. In addition to Li-ion (that provides good response) you can have gravity-based capacity (essentially a crane), heat-storage (rocks kept at 4000ºC feeding a thermal power plant) and liquid-metal batteries. Two of those are mostly century-old tech redesigned for a word with cheap intermittent energy; the third seems like the best, most reliable, simplest, most scalable idea out of MIT from the last decade. I have the impression that these represent enough options, with enough evidence that it will be profitable within a short lifespan, so I’m not even sure you want government support. But if they can facilitate permits, access to the grid, etc. why not get the help? All those will stabilise the grid no matter what source of power we have, so why not implement what we can at scale, see how it helps, and double it six months later if it works? After five years, we should have enough to tell how much wind and sun it can cover but I can’t see why it wouldn’t handle 100% of demand. All of those ideas can be any size, from a hand to a large city; all have many alternative elements to adapt to circumstances, price point; there are complementary and work well together.

matkoniecz 5y ago
Are you sure that any of them is feasible at grid scale? How much it would cost to store 451 GWh (one day of electricity production in Poland if I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Poland right)? How large overbuilt of renewables would be needed to avoid blackouts during windless snowy winter months?
- bertil 5y ago
  Individual projects? No idea. But Poland has a lot of mines, so a lot of room for gravity-based storage. My suggestion is to build: * 1 GWh capacity of those gravity-fed; and * 1 GWh of concentrated solar heat storage — it won’t be as effective in winter but let’s try; and * 1 GWh of Li-ion batteries; and * 1 GWh of hydro-storage; and * 1 GWh of liquid metal storage. And see which one scales, and what cost, with what retention, reactivity, how is the maintenance. All should, there’s no reason a larger pile of rocks doesn’t retain heat any less well than a smaller pile, or that what you can’t get from one mine shaft doesn’t work in another mine shaft. If you think that’s too much for Poland, let’s try one in Arizona, Iceland, Australia, Kazakstan, Hawaii, and see which one works best and adapts to Polish climate. I’ve never seen an inventor that didn’t iterate from a working prototype (which we have for all these) to a larger one, to a larger still, until they hit scaling issues. And I don’t know of currently salient scaling issues in any of those (that haven’t been addressed recently — there were targeting problems with concentrated solar that found a solution recently for instance). “Will it scale?” isn’t the questions that an engineer would ask on any of those at this stage of the project, but rather: "How fast can we make one twice bigger?" When we hit roadblocks that can’t be fixed, we can ask about scale, but right now, all those have a clear path. "Overbuilt" assumes that renewable capacity doesn’t adapt to winter condition but it might: cooler external temperature could mean that geo-power, or heat stored from the summer represent a higher differential, and more energy. Or it assumes that capacity is expensive, which has never really been the case with variable prices: not for gas plants, not for renewables that are not constrained by context. If you are worried about European winter overall, that makes sense, but the solution for that is rather obvious — enormous, but so much cheaper than anything else comparable: giant capacities in North Africa, big cable through Spain and France. From there, the extra capacity in Europe can serve Northern Europe. Scandinavia continues enjoying their massive boost in renewable hydro in winter, and the winds in the North Sea will definitely need exporting too. “Windless winter” isn’t apparently a common thing there. That might require more international solidarity, but people will do that quite keenly if there’s money to be made.