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Are solar + batteries feasible to heat every house in Minnesota with electricity when it's below -20F (-30C) for a week, we have <9 hours of daylight per day, a

Are solar + batteries feasible to heat every house in Minnesota with electricity when it's below -20F (-30C) for a week, we have <9 hours of daylight per day, and failing power literally means death? I genuinely don't know. Like I said, having a variety of solutions is the best outcome so we can choose the right one & have backups. > just show your math. I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica; Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).

rootusrootus 4y ago
I wonder if we should seriously consider moving people away from such cold climates and towards warmer ones. Air conditioning is cheaper and coincidentally happens at about the same time as maximum solar power.
- coldpie 4y ago
  This might work with post-Surak Vulcans, but it's not gonna fly here on Earth with humans :)
- finnh 4y ago
  We are doing that actually, but the other way: rather than moving the people, we are moving the climate.
hadlock 4y ago
I honestly wonder if large scale population of the northern areas is feasible without carbon fuels. Historically chopped wood was used to heat northern homes and camps, later coal and oil and I guess now to some extent electricity, but as you say, renewable energy doesn't apply there. If places like Minnesota are a net negative for green/renewable energy, their costs may be much higher to offset generation in more favorable climates.
- VaxWithSex 4y ago
  Minnesota can use wind, which is also cheaper.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    Minnesota has anticyclones, which are periods lasting over a week with almost no wind.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  Cold can be mitigated a lot by enhanced R-value insulation in a single application. Northern states have higher levels of insulation. https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_problems_you_want_fix/diy_checks_inspections/insulation_r_values https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_p... I don't really see a hot/cold stratification in this chart- https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-the-highest-energy-costs/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-the-... And even then, the difference in costs seems quite small. Alaska is $332 and Georgia is $310.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  Not are carbon fuels are carbon negative - biofuel pulls down carbon from the atmosphere when it's created, so is considered carbon neutral. I think it's highly likely we'll be burning a lot of algae fuel in the coming decades in situations where the energy density of carbon fuels is necessary.
- tacocataco 4y ago
  The birds fly south for the winter. Then again, the birds dont have to worry about who owns the land wherever they eventually land.
megaman821 4y ago
Only if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders. Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the process of being built out now. Medium term storage is still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?). Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable than fusion in the next few decades.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.
  - megaman821 4y ago
    Bad news then. You most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses. Relying on solar electricity from Texas or Arizona traveling through a long wire isn't going to change the status quo much.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what it’s worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the Dakotas and Iowa. These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national discourse. [1] https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electricalgeneration-summary.pdf https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electricalgenera... [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=MN https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=MN
      - 4y ago
elurg 4y ago
Why do we need to cover the worst case with 100% renewables? The goal is to reduce emissions so it would be great even if we can just stop burning coal in the summer.
- Spivak 4y ago
  I think because it's the learned defensive reaction. What ends up happening is that you have someone who really hates fossil fuels who is more than willing to back policies that require a quality of life drop or a massive cost shift onto individuals to achieve 100% renewables. So whenever it comes up anything positive you say about renewables has to be come with the explicit caveat that it's not yet a 1-1 replacement. It's one of those issues the overwhelming majority of people are on the same page about what we should do but at the ends you have "my livelihood depends on coal" on one end and "my life is insulated against the downsides of full-renewables so I'm privileged enough to have out of touch opinions" on the other and that's who shows up in comment sections.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Eventually we have to get to zero net carbon emissions. But the worst case is just to create carbon based fuels from CO2 extracted from the atmosphere and use it in places/for uses which cannot be covered by renewable electricity directly (the far north, airplaines, ...)
- _ea1k 4y ago
  We don't need to do that. But the media focuses on things like that and turns everything into some sort of weird argument that renewables are literally going to freeze gramma to death. Its overwhelmingly about emotion. Its the same as what we see with EVs, tbh. Oh noes, what if you get caught in a snowstorm!? Imagine if 80% of the cars were EVs and they got stuck and there were... no chargers! Picture yourself freezing to death because of "those people". Real world performance and goals are not correlated well with media hyperbole.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    This site has changed a lot in the past year. Its been strange to watch.
_ph_ 4y ago
There are plenty of other renewables usable than solar. Wind power would be the obvious one, as wind is often a great complement to solar anyway. Then there are long-distance transmission lines, water power, energy from biomass. Finally, if everything else fails, create hydrocarbons from CO2 in sunny places, ship those "eFuels" to Minnesota.
selimthegrim 4y ago
I think UMN did a study with 4 hour storage plus solar on the grid a few years back. https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid-an-economic-analysis-of-energy-storage-opportunities/ https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid...
- coldpie 4y ago
  Thanks, this was informative. It wasn't clear to me, but I think the study does not account for switching heating from burning NG in the dwelling to electricity. I don't have numbers, but I'm pretty sure that's going to introduce an enormous load on the system, and is my main source of skepticism for wind/solar/storage as a solution for all electricity generation in places like Minnesota.
hedora 4y ago
In central California with ideal conditions, one day’s worth of storage roughly doubles the price of a solar system that is correctly sized for net zero production in November (assuming a wood stove is supplementing a heat pump). I don’t think storage will be feasible in places like Minnesota. The following makes far more economic sense: - Double solar / wind production by buying 2x more panels vs. “normal” states. - Go all electric (heat pump / induction) for appliances and vehicles. - Buy 8-24h worth of house batteries. - Use a fossil fuel generator to top off batteries during outages (this more than doubles the generator’s end to end efficiency) - Sell excess electricity to the grid, where it is used for subsidized carbon capture. This should be completely resilient against storms and power outages, and extremely carbon negative. It would cost about 2x as much as best case renewables.
_ea1k 4y ago
To keep warm, I'm estimating 2,628 kwh for a month for a home for a family of 3. In our magical Minnesota where everyone lives in houses with 3 people and only electric heat pumps, we'd have 1,900,000. This means, we'd need 4,993,200,000 kwh in the coldest month (4.993 Twh). 500,000 kilowatt of panels would produce ~33 gwh in the worst month (January). So, we'd need 151 times that many to have a good chance of doing this with purely solar. That'd mean 75,500,000 kw of solar panels. Assuming that we could install these for $1.50/w, that'd cost 113,250,000,000 and there's still a chance that we'd freeze people to death. To mitigate that risk, we'd want to add ~500 gwh of batteries (just guessing as to needed capacity here). At a price of ~150/kwh, we'd be looking at ~75,000,000,000 in energy storage prices. Feel free to check my math, as I did that pretty quickly. The figures are absurdly high due to scaling for the worst case type scenarios. Summer months would correlate with lower demand and more than double the supply. Sensibly speaking, noone would try to do this. Its like building an offgrid home. You can get 90% of the way there and add a generator, or you can spend 10x more be truly offgrid. Almost everyone chooses the former. Maybe even 80%. Solar is great and very cost effective, but the returns diminish the deeper one goes.
- coldpie 4y ago
  Nice. I just looked up last February's bill for my ~1700sqft detached SFH in Saint Paul. It was apparently 6.8 therms/day (12 deg F average temp for the month). That maths out to about 5916 kWh for the coldest month (6.8 therms * 29 kwh/therm * 30 days), or a little more than double your estimate. March was 5.9 therms/day and Jan was 5.4 therms/day. So I think your costs are on the conservative side of things... or possibly my home is very inefficient :) E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG boiler.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    Yes, I pulled the estimate for really efficient heat pumps. To convert to all electric heat like that estimate, we'd have to replace a lot of gas heat with electric. Might as well go for the most efficient thing. Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.
pfdietz 4y ago
We can look at how solar/wind/storage compete with putative fusion. Fusion is a baseload source, so let's see how they would do to provide "synthetic baseload". https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Selecting the state of Minnesota, 2011 weather data, and 2030 cost assumptions, this would be about 70 Euro/MWh. The cost optimized solution would involve 222 hours of hydrogen storage, 5 hours of battery storage, 4.2x peak power of solar and 2.4x peak power of wind.

rootusrootus 4y ago

I wonder if we should seriously consider moving people away from such cold climates and towards warmer ones. Air conditioning is cheaper and coincidentally happens at about the same time as maximum solar power.

coldpie 4y ago
This might work with post-Surak Vulcans, but it's not gonna fly here on Earth with humans :)
finnh 4y ago
We are doing that actually, but the other way: rather than moving the people, we are moving the climate.

hadlock 4y ago

I honestly wonder if large scale population of the northern areas is feasible without carbon fuels. Historically chopped wood was used to heat northern homes and camps, later coal and oil and I guess now to some extent electricity, but as you say, renewable energy doesn't apply there. If places like Minnesota are a net negative for green/renewable energy, their costs may be much higher to offset generation in more favorable climates.

VaxWithSex 4y ago
Minnesota can use wind, which is also cheaper.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Minnesota has anticyclones, which are periods lasting over a week with almost no wind.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Mistletoe 4y ago
Cold can be mitigated a lot by enhanced R-value insulation in a single application. Northern states have higher levels of insulation. https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_problems_you_want_fix/diy_checks_inspections/insulation_r_values https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_p... I don't really see a hot/cold stratification in this chart- https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-the-highest-energy-costs/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-the-... And even then, the difference in costs seems quite small. Alaska is $332 and Georgia is $310.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
Not are carbon fuels are carbon negative - biofuel pulls down carbon from the atmosphere when it's created, so is considered carbon neutral. I think it's highly likely we'll be burning a lot of algae fuel in the coming decades in situations where the energy density of carbon fuels is necessary.
tacocataco 4y ago
The birds fly south for the winter. Then again, the birds dont have to worry about who owns the land wherever they eventually land.

megaman821 4y ago

Only if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders. Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the process of being built out now. Medium term storage is still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?). Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable than fusion in the next few decades.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.
- megaman821 4y ago
  Bad news then. You most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses. Relying on solar electricity from Texas or Arizona traveling through a long wire isn't going to change the status quo much.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what it’s worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the Dakotas and Iowa. These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national discourse. [1] https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electricalgeneration-summary.pdf https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electricalgenera... [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=MN https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=MN
    - 4y ago

elurg 4y ago

Why do we need to cover the worst case with 100% renewables? The goal is to reduce emissions so it would be great even if we can just stop burning coal in the summer.

Spivak 4y ago
I think because it's the learned defensive reaction. What ends up happening is that you have someone who really hates fossil fuels who is more than willing to back policies that require a quality of life drop or a massive cost shift onto individuals to achieve 100% renewables. So whenever it comes up anything positive you say about renewables has to be come with the explicit caveat that it's not yet a 1-1 replacement. It's one of those issues the overwhelming majority of people are on the same page about what we should do but at the ends you have "my livelihood depends on coal" on one end and "my life is insulated against the downsides of full-renewables so I'm privileged enough to have out of touch opinions" on the other and that's who shows up in comment sections.
_ph_ 4y ago
Eventually we have to get to zero net carbon emissions. But the worst case is just to create carbon based fuels from CO2 extracted from the atmosphere and use it in places/for uses which cannot be covered by renewable electricity directly (the far north, airplaines, ...)
_ea1k 4y ago
We don't need to do that. But the media focuses on things like that and turns everything into some sort of weird argument that renewables are literally going to freeze gramma to death. Its overwhelmingly about emotion. Its the same as what we see with EVs, tbh. Oh noes, what if you get caught in a snowstorm!? Imagine if 80% of the cars were EVs and they got stuck and there were... no chargers! Picture yourself freezing to death because of "those people". Real world performance and goals are not correlated well with media hyperbole.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  This site has changed a lot in the past year. Its been strange to watch.

_ph_ 4y ago

There are plenty of other renewables usable than solar. Wind power would be the obvious one, as wind is often a great complement to solar anyway. Then there are long-distance transmission lines, water power, energy from biomass. Finally, if everything else fails, create hydrocarbons from CO2 in sunny places, ship those "eFuels" to Minnesota.

selimthegrim 4y ago

I think UMN did a study with 4 hour storage plus solar on the grid a few years back. https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid-an-economic-analysis-of-energy-storage-opportunities/ https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas-grid...

coldpie 4y ago
Thanks, this was informative. It wasn't clear to me, but I think the study does not account for switching heating from burning NG in the dwelling to electricity. I don't have numbers, but I'm pretty sure that's going to introduce an enormous load on the system, and is my main source of skepticism for wind/solar/storage as a solution for all electricity generation in places like Minnesota.

hedora 4y ago

In central California with ideal conditions, one day’s worth of storage roughly doubles the price of a solar system that is correctly sized for net zero production in November (assuming a wood stove is supplementing a heat pump). I don’t think storage will be feasible in places like Minnesota. The following makes far more economic sense: - Double solar / wind production by buying 2x more panels vs. “normal” states. - Go all electric (heat pump / induction) for appliances and vehicles. - Buy 8-24h worth of house batteries. - Use a fossil fuel generator to top off batteries during outages (this more than doubles the generator’s end to end efficiency) - Sell excess electricity to the grid, where it is used for subsidized carbon capture. This should be completely resilient against storms and power outages, and extremely carbon negative. It would cost about 2x as much as best case renewables.

_ea1k 4y ago

To keep warm, I'm estimating 2,628 kwh for a month for a home for a family of 3. In our magical Minnesota where everyone lives in houses with 3 people and only electric heat pumps, we'd have 1,900,000. This means, we'd need 4,993,200,000 kwh in the coldest month (4.993 Twh). 500,000 kilowatt of panels would produce ~33 gwh in the worst month (January). So, we'd need 151 times that many to have a good chance of doing this with purely solar. That'd mean 75,500,000 kw of solar panels. Assuming that we could install these for $1.50/w, that'd cost 113,250,000,000 and there's still a chance that we'd freeze people to death. To mitigate that risk, we'd want to add ~500 gwh of batteries (just guessing as to needed capacity here). At a price of ~150/kwh, we'd be looking at ~75,000,000,000 in energy storage prices. Feel free to check my math, as I did that pretty quickly. The figures are absurdly high due to scaling for the worst case type scenarios. Summer months would correlate with lower demand and more than double the supply. Sensibly speaking, noone would try to do this. Its like building an offgrid home. You can get 90% of the way there and add a generator, or you can spend 10x more be truly offgrid. Almost everyone chooses the former. Maybe even 80%. Solar is great and very cost effective, but the returns diminish the deeper one goes.

coldpie 4y ago
Nice. I just looked up last February's bill for my ~1700sqft detached SFH in Saint Paul. It was apparently 6.8 therms/day (12 deg F average temp for the month). That maths out to about 5916 kWh for the coldest month (6.8 therms * 29 kwh/therm * 30 days), or a little more than double your estimate. March was 5.9 therms/day and Jan was 5.4 therms/day. So I think your costs are on the conservative side of things... or possibly my home is very inefficient :) E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG boiler.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  Yes, I pulled the estimate for really efficient heat pumps. To convert to all electric heat like that estimate, we'd have to replace a lot of gas heat with electric. Might as well go for the most efficient thing. Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.

pfdietz 4y ago

We can look at how solar/wind/storage compete with putative fusion. Fusion is a baseload source, so let's see how they would do to provide "synthetic baseload". https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ Selecting the state of Minnesota, 2011 weather data, and 2030 cost assumptions, this would be about 70 Euro/MWh. The cost optimized solution would involve 222 hours of hydrogen storage, 5 hours of battery storage, 4.2x peak power of solar and 2.4x peak power of wind.