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Renewables do not solve the demand problem because the demand curve is not static. It is useless to have 100% of energy needs met when it is 200% during the day

Renewables do not solve the demand problem because the demand curve is not static. It is useless to have 100% of energy needs met when it is 200% during the day and 0% at night.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
Storage does that. And potentially a lot cheaper than nuclear can. We'll have a few decades to figure that out as current legacy production seems to be more than enough to deal with grid instability. There's probably more battery being added to grids than nuclear pretty soon.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- XorNot 3y ago
  Batteries are being added to grids because they have a very fast response rate - close to instant. This is good for grid stability, which depends on keeping frequency and voltage stable. This is necessary because solar and wind are intermittent and will slew their output very quickly due to ambient conditions. It's also helpful if a plant has to throw its breakers offline. It's only viable because if you have a good monitoring system, you can target the wholesale market at moments the demand curve spikes and you can service the spike faster then anyone else can come online. This makes you money, and makes the electrical infrastructure require less over-build and over-production because it means online generators have time to increase their output. It doesn't somehow make batteries viable as long term storage, because there's a big difference between servicing partial grid load for an hour, and servicing the entire grid load for 16 hours. If the grid actually fails - goes right down into a black start condition - it's potentially a multi-week exercise to bring it back up. And it takes everything else with it. So the question is, how much storage do you need? What level of overbuild do you need to accommodate for when you no longer have reliable generators (currently fossil fuels) on the grid? The sun shines every day and the wind always blows, but does it blow enough? How much battery capacity do you need to ensure there's functionally never a chance of prolonged under-production from driving you into rolling blackouts? I would suggest it's instructive to look at just how much water cities actually store, compared to their daily usage, and how low they're willing to let those resources get before they declare emergency measures - <80% is considered serious, <70% critical. Electricity is every bit as important - not least of which is because without it, there is no water delivery. EDIT: Keeping the cost of overbuild in mind, for example, it costs about AUD$0.08/kWh to deliver electricity from the cheapest LiFePO4's I can find on the market as a consumer. And that's being very generous about their cycle life.
  - Gwypaas 3y ago
    EIA disagrees with you. Batteries are increasingly being used to respond to price fluctuations, which means storage. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53199 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53199
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      From your link: > [batteries] can balance electricity supply and demand for periods ranging from a few seconds to a few hours
      - Gwypaas 3y ago
        The point being, the "few hours" can be at any time from when the solar panels stop filling the outbound power grid connection, or a trickle all night if that is what the market needs.
        Eisenstein 3y ago
        You want to run the grid on a few hours leeway? I think you have a profound misunderstanding of the scope of this.
        Gwypaas 3y ago
        Why are you putting words in my mouth? You have to differentiate the general case with the specific case. If the market solution is not satisfactory add something like Karlshamnsverket in Sweden. Oil power plant getting a tiny subsidy to be in standby during the winter months. Convert it to synthetic fuels when the paltry emissions a few of hours of runtime produces becomes significant in the grand scheme of things. https://www.uniper.energy/sweden/power-plants-sweden/karlshamn https://www.uniper.energy/sweden/power-plants-sweden/karlsha...
      - jillesvangurp 3y ago
        Days or weeks easily; it just depends on how much battery you have available. Batteries are currently being produced in the hundreds of gwh per year. That will soon cross over into twh per year. Some numbers to boggle your mind: 1 smallish EV is 50kwh of battery. 100 kwh is 2 EVs 20 EVs is 1 mwh 20,000 EVs is 1 gwh 200,000 EVs is 10 gwh 2,000,000 EVs is 100 gwh Tesla is producing around 2 million EVs/year right now. That's about 100 gwh of battery. Of course Teslas have larger batteries (60-90ish) so it's probably closer to 150 gwh of battery. That's aside from their mega packs and domestic storage of course, which is on track to becoming at least as big of a business as their car business currently is. Lets call it at around 200-250 gwh. Right now. Also, they plan to grow to 10 million vehicles produced per year. So, just Tesla should be producing well over a twh of battery per year pretty soon. That's just Tesla. They are quite big of course but other companies are catching up fast and Tesla actually buys a lot of battery from external suppliers. These batteries have thousands of cycles and last quite long. So, the cumulative battery capacity of this planet is going to range in the tens to hundreds of twh pretty soon. We'll soon have lots of trucks, buses, and other vehicles switching to batteries as well. Millions of them. Very large batteries. And of course grids are deploying batteries by the tens of mwh already. That's a lot of battery production. All that battery production adds up to some pretty significant capacity. Growing by the hundreds of ghw right now every year and thousands of gwh pretty soon. Relative to the total electricity production, that's getting close to potentially keeping up with that if you assume ~365 cycles per year for each battery (on the high side of course). The total electricity production globally is around 25 phw (1000 twh). 25000/365 ~= 70 twh per day. So having a few tens of twh of battery in the market is going to provide plenty of buffer for whatever severe electricity production dips might happen locally. Yes, 70 twh of battery wouldn't last long if you relied on that exclusively. But it won't have to because we can interconnect places with cables and there's always some wind somewhere and the sun comes out pretty reliably every day somewhere and it's not going to be cloudy everywhere at the same time. On average renewable production fluctuates a lot locally but not regionally or globally. We can plan for this with overcapacity, storage, and cables. The bottom line is that we'll have way more battery than we actually need pretty soon. And that's before we start considering long term storage that is also being developed. To be fair, using lithium ion batteries for that would be pretty inefficient from a cost point of view. But it seems we might have tens of twh of that deployed pretty soon anyway. My expectation is that most of that battery capacity will be just sitting there fully charged most of the time.

Renewables do not solve the demand problem because the demand curve is not static. It is useless to have 100% of energy needs met when it is 200% during the day and 0% at night.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Storage does that. And potentially a lot cheaper than nuclear can. We'll have a few decades to figure that out as current legacy production seems to be more than enough to deal with grid instability. There's probably more battery being added to grids than nuclear pretty soon.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
XorNot 3y ago
Batteries are being added to grids because they have a very fast response rate - close to instant. This is good for grid stability, which depends on keeping frequency and voltage stable. This is necessary because solar and wind are intermittent and will slew their output very quickly due to ambient conditions. It's also helpful if a plant has to throw its breakers offline. It's only viable because if you have a good monitoring system, you can target the wholesale market at moments the demand curve spikes and you can service the spike faster then anyone else can come online. This makes you money, and makes the electrical infrastructure require less over-build and over-production because it means online generators have time to increase their output. It doesn't somehow make batteries viable as long term storage, because there's a big difference between servicing partial grid load for an hour, and servicing the entire grid load for 16 hours. If the grid actually fails - goes right down into a black start condition - it's potentially a multi-week exercise to bring it back up. And it takes everything else with it. So the question is, how much storage do you need? What level of overbuild do you need to accommodate for when you no longer have reliable generators (currently fossil fuels) on the grid? The sun shines every day and the wind always blows, but does it blow enough? How much battery capacity do you need to ensure there's functionally never a chance of prolonged under-production from driving you into rolling blackouts? I would suggest it's instructive to look at just how much water cities actually store, compared to their daily usage, and how low they're willing to let those resources get before they declare emergency measures - <80% is considered serious, <70% critical. Electricity is every bit as important - not least of which is because without it, there is no water delivery. EDIT: Keeping the cost of overbuild in mind, for example, it costs about AUD$0.08/kWh to deliver electricity from the cheapest LiFePO4's I can find on the market as a consumer. And that's being very generous about their cycle life.
- Gwypaas 3y ago
  EIA disagrees with you. Batteries are increasingly being used to respond to price fluctuations, which means storage. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53199 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53199
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    From your link: > [batteries] can balance electricity supply and demand for periods ranging from a few seconds to a few hours
    - Gwypaas 3y ago
      The point being, the "few hours" can be at any time from when the solar panels stop filling the outbound power grid connection, or a trickle all night if that is what the market needs.
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        You want to run the grid on a few hours leeway? I think you have a profound misunderstanding of the scope of this.
        Gwypaas 3y ago
        Why are you putting words in my mouth? You have to differentiate the general case with the specific case. If the market solution is not satisfactory add something like Karlshamnsverket in Sweden. Oil power plant getting a tiny subsidy to be in standby during the winter months. Convert it to synthetic fuels when the paltry emissions a few of hours of runtime produces becomes significant in the grand scheme of things. https://www.uniper.energy/sweden/power-plants-sweden/karlshamn https://www.uniper.energy/sweden/power-plants-sweden/karlsha...
    - jillesvangurp 3y ago
      Days or weeks easily; it just depends on how much battery you have available. Batteries are currently being produced in the hundreds of gwh per year. That will soon cross over into twh per year. Some numbers to boggle your mind: 1 smallish EV is 50kwh of battery. 100 kwh is 2 EVs 20 EVs is 1 mwh 20,000 EVs is 1 gwh 200,000 EVs is 10 gwh 2,000,000 EVs is 100 gwh Tesla is producing around 2 million EVs/year right now. That's about 100 gwh of battery. Of course Teslas have larger batteries (60-90ish) so it's probably closer to 150 gwh of battery. That's aside from their mega packs and domestic storage of course, which is on track to becoming at least as big of a business as their car business currently is. Lets call it at around 200-250 gwh. Right now. Also, they plan to grow to 10 million vehicles produced per year. So, just Tesla should be producing well over a twh of battery per year pretty soon. That's just Tesla. They are quite big of course but other companies are catching up fast and Tesla actually buys a lot of battery from external suppliers. These batteries have thousands of cycles and last quite long. So, the cumulative battery capacity of this planet is going to range in the tens to hundreds of twh pretty soon. We'll soon have lots of trucks, buses, and other vehicles switching to batteries as well. Millions of them. Very large batteries. And of course grids are deploying batteries by the tens of mwh already. That's a lot of battery production. All that battery production adds up to some pretty significant capacity. Growing by the hundreds of ghw right now every year and thousands of gwh pretty soon. Relative to the total electricity production, that's getting close to potentially keeping up with that if you assume ~365 cycles per year for each battery (on the high side of course). The total electricity production globally is around 25 phw (1000 twh). 25000/365 ~= 70 twh per day. So having a few tens of twh of battery in the market is going to provide plenty of buffer for whatever severe electricity production dips might happen locally. Yes, 70 twh of battery wouldn't last long if you relied on that exclusively. But it won't have to because we can interconnect places with cables and there's always some wind somewhere and the sun comes out pretty reliably every day somewhere and it's not going to be cloudy everywhere at the same time. On average renewable production fluctuates a lot locally but not regionally or globally. We can plan for this with overcapacity, storage, and cables. The bottom line is that we'll have way more battery than we actually need pretty soon. And that's before we start considering long term storage that is also being developed. To be fair, using lithium ion batteries for that would be pretty inefficient from a cost point of view. But it seems we might have tens of twh of that deployed pretty soon anyway. My expectation is that most of that battery capacity will be just sitting there fully charged most of the time.