7 ms·

No Sun, No Wind, Now What? Renewable Energy Storage

35 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

poutine 4y ago
This is a great summary. Advocates of renewables really need to focus on the storage issue. Solving this at scale will be key. Until then it’s all about nukes.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  There is no "storage issue". It just has not been built out yet. It has not been built out yet because that would be stupid use of capital before there is generating capacity to charge it from.
ashtami8 4y ago
Paraphrasing from the article: ----- a kilogram of gasoline gives you about 13 kWatt-hrs, a kilogram of coal a little less, about 8 kWatt-hrs, a kilogram of lithium ion battery can store only 0.2 kWatt-hrs, and, a kilogram of water at 1 km altitude is just 0.0027 kWatt-hrs. On the other hand, a kilogram of Uranium 235 gives you 24000 kWatt-hrs!! There’s a lot of energy in Uranium 235! ----- So, barring antimatter, U235 is the ULTIMATE BATTERY. Most fusion research seems to be focused on fusing the lightest elements, usually isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium and occasionally lithium to produce energy. I wonder how much research has been done on the fusion of heavy elements such as lead (Pb)? If it were possible to reverse the fission of U235, i.e., fuse the fission end products such as Pb back into U235 in an energy efficient manner, and with a very low carbon footprint [1], that would solve the energy storage problem. [1] Also from the article: "CO2 emissions resulting from current storage technologies range from 104 to 407 kg per Mega Watt-hour of delivered energy. Compare this with coal, which releases almost a 1000 kg of CO2 per Mega Watt-hour produced. " This is the CO2 emissions created in the construction and maintenance of the energy storage facility averaged over the total energy stored and delivered during its lifetime.
adityamwagh 4y ago
Nuclear energy has so much potential. Pretty sad people are scared of it. It's clean, it's energy dense, and we can make a lot of it. France gets most of it's energy from Nuclear plants.
- fragmede 4y ago
  It is sad that proliferation of material for nuclear weapons is that scary. Not that I'm arguing that it isn't. But the nuclear waste that's radioactive for 200,000 years doesn't have to be. Breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing can reduce that to hundreds of years. Yeah that's still longer than a couple human lifetime generations, but nowhere near trying to put up warning signs that will continue to scare away people through the rise and fall of several civiliations.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Nuclear is dead not because people are afraid of it. Nuclear is dead because it is way more expensive than alternatives. Always was, and getting moreso as renewables cost continues on down. In the foreseeable future, nukes will be mothballed long short of their design life just because nobody will want to pay enough for their power to enable continuing to operate them. Geothermal might suffer the same fate. When a nuke is mothballed early, every kWh it ever produced will suddenly be found to have cost much more than had previously been reckoned.
  - realusername 4y ago
    It's only more expensive if you don't factor external costs due to renewables. At the moment, renewables still can't compete on pricing with 70s nuclear designs...
    - Lutzb 4y ago
      citation needed
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Nuclear as base load is rather price efficient. And with enough units it can deliver at that price every hour of the year. Not as cheap as renewables, but still very affordable.
ncmncm 4y ago
Somewhat disappointing... Would have liked for her to call out NRGV as the actual investment scam it is, rather than just pathetically inadequate. Would have preferred for mineshaft gravity storage to be mentioned, which is not a scam, in place of NRGV. Would have liked for her to cite ammonia along with hydrogen as chemical storage media. And to mention recent, radical improvements in hydrogen electrolysis efficiency. Would have liked for pumped hydro not to be described as if it were necessarily dependent on rivers. Or on hills (i.e. mention deep underground cavities as storage volumes). Would have liked for variant battery tech to have been mentioned, particularly iron, zinc-bromide, and molten-metal chemistries. But I am happy to see mention of very substantial compressed-air storage systems in production use. Would have liked for her to mention undersea buoyancy storage as the dark horse. But I understand why she would not be aware of it. Disappointed that she brought up nukes without mentioning that they are wholly unable to compete with renewables, on cost. Finally, it would have been very helpful for her to have noted that for now and well into the future, money is overwhelmingly better spent on building out renewable generating capacity than on storage.
- janef0421 4y ago
  How can you claim nuclear cannot compete on costs? We have no idea how much any of these things you're talking about will cost, because they either don't exist, exist only in research labs, or have never been deployed at the necessary scale.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
- tuatoru 4y ago
  > money is overwhelmingly better spent on building out renewable generating capacity than on storage. Yes, the world uses about 18 TW (continous). If we wanted to provide all that with PV at 20% capacity factor and with a lifetime of 20 years, we need to be producing 5 TW of PV panels per year.* Currently we're making around one percent of that. * Actually we don't need all that. The 18 TW is based on "primary energy supply" which ignores the two-thirds energy losses with fossil fuel based supply. In terms of delivered, useful power, we only probably need 8-ish TW currently.
tuatoru 4y ago
> But then there’s the dunkelflaute and its evil brother, cold dunkelflaute. ... It’s a shame there aren’t any umlauts in the word, otherwise it’d make a great name for a metal band. That made me laugh. Sabine is absolutely right that storage is the key, and it's a presently unsolved problem. The technologies she lists mostly can't scale up to world scale: pumped hydro and CAES need particular geography/geology, flywheeels and falling blocks have too low energy storage density, and lithium is needed for mobile applications. Thermal storage can work for durations of a day or so, but it's very capital intensive and has all the problems of thermal engines. Not really confidence-inspiring. There are a couple of infant/ancient technologies that Sabine doesn't mention. Iron is plentiful and rechargeable iron-based batteries could supply energy at week-long duration. Ammonia is under active research as an energy storage medium. That could supply seasonal storage. We have well over a century of experience with both materials, and they are already produced at the necessary scale for the rapid scale-up we need in energy storage. Both storage technologies are near commercial deployment. I also think that Sabine may be focusing a little too much on efficiency. This is because I expect the price of PV production to drop fairly quickly to low single cents per watt, so PV plus storage could end up in the low double-digit cents per watt.[1] At these prices we could perhaps our relax efficiency requirements a little. Synthesis of methane from air-captured carbon is one possibility if we do that. That has the advantage of using existing storage and distribution structures, already present at the required scale. The recent ESA proposal for space-based solar[2], though, is just sad. The fact that it even exists shows that European officials have not yet faced up to the reality of their situation, and they are still expecting the technology fairy to wave her magic wand to rescue them by lifting a million tonnes of PV satellite into orbit in less than a decade, more or less for free. Such passivity is very disappointing. 1. The path to this is via PV cells printed on flexible plastic film laid directly on the ground, with the strips laid side by side and bonded together. (Think greenhouse plastic strips hundreds of meters long, and with hundred-meter widths). No panel glass covers or aluminum frames, no galvanised steel stand mounts bedded in concrete, no inter-panel wiring, avoiding looming bottlenecks in glass, aluminum, and copper production. Minimal site prep and construction labor, and good land-use efficiency. (Legacy panel farms are only around 50% covered by panels because of shading and the need for access to fix wiring problems or replace panels with broken glass.) Erthos is half-way to this installation design, but still uses legacy panels. Perovskites are this year at the point where roll-printed PV cells are feasible. 2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/european-space-chief-says-continent-will-lead-in-space-based-solar-power/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/european-space-chief...
credit_guy 4y ago
What if we don't need anything fancy? We can reduce our fossil fuel dependency by more than 90% if we switch to renewables, and just use natural gas plants when they don't produce enough energy. No need for any new storage. The current natural gas storage will be many times more than enough. But isn't natural gas bad? Doesn't it mean we still emit CO2? We can offset that with trees. And even if we don't, I don't think there's any climate scientist who will say if you reduce emissions by 100% by 2050 we'll all be fine, but if we reduce by 90% we'll be doomed.
- natmaka 4y ago
  France is (by far) the world leader when it comes to the fraction of nuclear-produced electricity and always produces around 9% of its electricity thanks to fossil fuel, because building enough reactors to satisfy peaks and to load-follow would be way too expensive (as most would be idling most of the time). 9% of a year is approximately 33 days, therefore we know how to cope with a Dunkelflaut. https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/edition-numerique/chiffres-cles-energie-2021/15-electricite https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi... Moreover a continental mix (wind, solar, geothermal...) reduces intermittency. Wind: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... Moreover modern gas turbines are able to burn (up to 100% of) hydrogen, therefore feeding them green hydrogen (obtained during over-production periods) will lower emissions. https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf https://www.get-h2.de/en/project-lingen/ https://www.get-h2.de/en/project-lingen/ Moreover storage has many gorillas in the room, mainly V2G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
- bequanna 4y ago
  Sure. How many natural gas plants do you reckon we will need? Following your idea, it seems like we will need to replace almost all existing base load with a stable options like nat gas. But then why bother investing in these unreliable “sustainable” sources at all? So we can collectively pat ourselves on the back while paying much more for electricity? At some point, perhaps we should start asking why we are replacing base load with intermittent sources when we have no good ways to store energy at scale.
8bitsrule 4y ago
Article failed to mention that wind/solar storage can be usefully teamed-up with the another (renewable) energy source, the heat in the ground ... which is nearby many of our houses. Today's heat pumps can work well for many down to outdoor temperatures of about 5 degrees F (-15C). They'll bring down the cost of using the other sources. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEHFsO-XSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEHFsO-XSI]
up2isomorphism 4y ago
This “water battery”, “hydro pump” scam never dies. It is damn hydropower, for gods sake. Please don’t act like you discover something new.
perilunar 4y ago
Lol: "to pump water up a hill you need a hill, which is more than some countries have"

35 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

This is a great summary. Advocates of renewables really need to focus on the storage issue. Solving this at scale will be key. Until then it’s all about nukes.

ncmncm 4y ago
There is no "storage issue". It just has not been built out yet. It has not been built out yet because that would be stupid use of capital before there is generating capacity to charge it from.

ashtami8 4y ago

Paraphrasing from the article: ----- a kilogram of gasoline gives you about 13 kWatt-hrs, a kilogram of coal a little less, about 8 kWatt-hrs, a kilogram of lithium ion battery can store only 0.2 kWatt-hrs, and, a kilogram of water at 1 km altitude is just 0.0027 kWatt-hrs. On the other hand, a kilogram of Uranium 235 gives you 24000 kWatt-hrs!! There’s a lot of energy in Uranium 235! ----- So, barring antimatter, U235 is the ULTIMATE BATTERY. Most fusion research seems to be focused on fusing the lightest elements, usually isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium and occasionally lithium to produce energy. I wonder how much research has been done on the fusion of heavy elements such as lead (Pb)? If it were possible to reverse the fission of U235, i.e., fuse the fission end products such as Pb back into U235 in an energy efficient manner, and with a very low carbon footprint [1], that would solve the energy storage problem. [1] Also from the article: "CO2 emissions resulting from current storage technologies range from 104 to 407 kg per Mega Watt-hour of delivered energy. Compare this with coal, which releases almost a 1000 kg of CO2 per Mega Watt-hour produced. " This is the CO2 emissions created in the construction and maintenance of the energy storage facility averaged over the total energy stored and delivered during its lifetime.

adityamwagh 4y ago

Nuclear energy has so much potential. Pretty sad people are scared of it. It's clean, it's energy dense, and we can make a lot of it. France gets most of it's energy from Nuclear plants.

fragmede 4y ago
It is sad that proliferation of material for nuclear weapons is that scary. Not that I'm arguing that it isn't. But the nuclear waste that's radioactive for 200,000 years doesn't have to be. Breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing can reduce that to hundreds of years. Yeah that's still longer than a couple human lifetime generations, but nowhere near trying to put up warning signs that will continue to scare away people through the rise and fall of several civiliations.
ncmncm 4y ago
Nuclear is dead not because people are afraid of it. Nuclear is dead because it is way more expensive than alternatives. Always was, and getting moreso as renewables cost continues on down. In the foreseeable future, nukes will be mothballed long short of their design life just because nobody will want to pay enough for their power to enable continuing to operate them. Geothermal might suffer the same fate. When a nuke is mothballed early, every kWh it ever produced will suddenly be found to have cost much more than had previously been reckoned.
- realusername 4y ago
  It's only more expensive if you don't factor external costs due to renewables. At the moment, renewables still can't compete on pricing with 70s nuclear designs...
  - Lutzb 4y ago
    citation needed
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Nuclear as base load is rather price efficient. And with enough units it can deliver at that price every hour of the year. Not as cheap as renewables, but still very affordable.

ncmncm 4y ago

Somewhat disappointing... Would have liked for her to call out NRGV as the actual investment scam it is, rather than just pathetically inadequate. Would have preferred for mineshaft gravity storage to be mentioned, which is not a scam, in place of NRGV. Would have liked for her to cite ammonia along with hydrogen as chemical storage media. And to mention recent, radical improvements in hydrogen electrolysis efficiency. Would have liked for pumped hydro not to be described as if it were necessarily dependent on rivers. Or on hills (i.e. mention deep underground cavities as storage volumes). Would have liked for variant battery tech to have been mentioned, particularly iron, zinc-bromide, and molten-metal chemistries. But I am happy to see mention of very substantial compressed-air storage systems in production use. Would have liked for her to mention undersea buoyancy storage as the dark horse. But I understand why she would not be aware of it. Disappointed that she brought up nukes without mentioning that they are wholly unable to compete with renewables, on cost. Finally, it would have been very helpful for her to have noted that for now and well into the future, money is overwhelmingly better spent on building out renewable generating capacity than on storage.

janef0421 4y ago
How can you claim nuclear cannot compete on costs? We have no idea how much any of these things you're talking about will cost, because they either don't exist, exist only in research labs, or have never been deployed at the necessary scale.
- ncmncm 4y ago
tuatoru 4y ago
> money is overwhelmingly better spent on building out renewable generating capacity than on storage. Yes, the world uses about 18 TW (continous). If we wanted to provide all that with PV at 20% capacity factor and with a lifetime of 20 years, we need to be producing 5 TW of PV panels per year.* Currently we're making around one percent of that. * Actually we don't need all that. The 18 TW is based on "primary energy supply" which ignores the two-thirds energy losses with fossil fuel based supply. In terms of delivered, useful power, we only probably need 8-ish TW currently.

tuatoru 4y ago

> But then there’s the dunkelflaute and its evil brother, cold dunkelflaute. ... It’s a shame there aren’t any umlauts in the word, otherwise it’d make a great name for a metal band. That made me laugh. Sabine is absolutely right that storage is the key, and it's a presently unsolved problem. The technologies she lists mostly can't scale up to world scale: pumped hydro and CAES need particular geography/geology, flywheeels and falling blocks have too low energy storage density, and lithium is needed for mobile applications. Thermal storage can work for durations of a day or so, but it's very capital intensive and has all the problems of thermal engines. Not really confidence-inspiring. There are a couple of infant/ancient technologies that Sabine doesn't mention. Iron is plentiful and rechargeable iron-based batteries could supply energy at week-long duration. Ammonia is under active research as an energy storage medium. That could supply seasonal storage. We have well over a century of experience with both materials, and they are already produced at the necessary scale for the rapid scale-up we need in energy storage. Both storage technologies are near commercial deployment. I also think that Sabine may be focusing a little too much on efficiency. This is because I expect the price of PV production to drop fairly quickly to low single cents per watt, so PV plus storage could end up in the low double-digit cents per watt.[1] At these prices we could perhaps our relax efficiency requirements a little. Synthesis of methane from air-captured carbon is one possibility if we do that. That has the advantage of using existing storage and distribution structures, already present at the required scale. The recent ESA proposal for space-based solar[2], though, is just sad. The fact that it even exists shows that European officials have not yet faced up to the reality of their situation, and they are still expecting the technology fairy to wave her magic wand to rescue them by lifting a million tonnes of PV satellite into orbit in less than a decade, more or less for free. Such passivity is very disappointing. 1. The path to this is via PV cells printed on flexible plastic film laid directly on the ground, with the strips laid side by side and bonded together. (Think greenhouse plastic strips hundreds of meters long, and with hundred-meter widths). No panel glass covers or aluminum frames, no galvanised steel stand mounts bedded in concrete, no inter-panel wiring, avoiding looming bottlenecks in glass, aluminum, and copper production. Minimal site prep and construction labor, and good land-use efficiency. (Legacy panel farms are only around 50% covered by panels because of shading and the need for access to fix wiring problems or replace panels with broken glass.) Erthos is half-way to this installation design, but still uses legacy panels. Perovskites are this year at the point where roll-printed PV cells are feasible. 2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/european-space-chief-says-continent-will-lead-in-space-based-solar-power/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/european-space-chief...

credit_guy 4y ago

What if we don't need anything fancy? We can reduce our fossil fuel dependency by more than 90% if we switch to renewables, and just use natural gas plants when they don't produce enough energy. No need for any new storage. The current natural gas storage will be many times more than enough. But isn't natural gas bad? Doesn't it mean we still emit CO2? We can offset that with trees. And even if we don't, I don't think there's any climate scientist who will say if you reduce emissions by 100% by 2050 we'll all be fine, but if we reduce by 90% we'll be doomed.

natmaka 4y ago
France is (by far) the world leader when it comes to the fraction of nuclear-produced electricity and always produces around 9% of its electricity thanks to fossil fuel, because building enough reactors to satisfy peaks and to load-follow would be way too expensive (as most would be idling most of the time). 9% of a year is approximately 33 days, therefore we know how to cope with a Dunkelflaut. https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/edition-numerique/chiffres-cles-energie-2021/15-electricite https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi... Moreover a continental mix (wind, solar, geothermal...) reduces intermittency. Wind: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... Moreover modern gas turbines are able to burn (up to 100% of) hydrogen, therefore feeding them green hydrogen (obtained during over-production periods) will lower emissions. https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf https://global.kawasaki.com/news_211209-2e.pdf https://www.get-h2.de/en/project-lingen/ https://www.get-h2.de/en/project-lingen/ Moreover storage has many gorillas in the room, mainly V2G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
bequanna 4y ago
Sure. How many natural gas plants do you reckon we will need? Following your idea, it seems like we will need to replace almost all existing base load with a stable options like nat gas. But then why bother investing in these unreliable “sustainable” sources at all? So we can collectively pat ourselves on the back while paying much more for electricity? At some point, perhaps we should start asking why we are replacing base load with intermittent sources when we have no good ways to store energy at scale.

8bitsrule 4y ago

Article failed to mention that wind/solar storage can be usefully teamed-up with the another (renewable) energy source, the heat in the ground ... which is nearby many of our houses. Today's heat pumps can work well for many down to outdoor temperatures of about 5 degrees F (-15C). They'll bring down the cost of using the other sources. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEHFsO-XSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEHFsO-XSI]

up2isomorphism 4y ago

This “water battery”, “hydro pump” scam never dies. It is damn hydropower, for gods sake. Please don’t act like you discover something new.

perilunar 4y ago

Lol: "to pump water up a hill you need a hill, which is more than some countries have"