4 ms·

Of course those capacity factors hide one important bit, the dispatchability. While the capacity factor is the same in this list for wind and hydro, the wind an

Of course those capacity factors hide one important bit, the dispatchability. While the capacity factor is the same in this list for wind and hydro, the wind and solar generation are naturally capped by nature. When demand exceeds the natural availability of these, you need to dispatch some extra generation. Hydro and natural gas are well suited for this, coal can do it even if dirtily. Nuclear generation could be made dispatchable, but due to the essentially zero marginal cost of running it all the time instead of limiting generation, it seldom is used in this fashion. Electricity demand could be elastic too, but there's a limit to that. It's not always feasible to limit or shut down industrial processes for the few hours of expensive power. And home consumers are loath to not use their stoves when they want. There's potential in elastic demand though.

hef19898 3y ago
Take a close look at the title again, second word after "solar", you have to pass by "and" to get there.
- Maakuth 3y ago
  I guess I earned the snark for not mentioning the batteries. Weirdly the news item doesn't tell what sort of energy storage capacity these battery installation have, only the peak power output of 14.3 GW for this year's addition. While that is certainly a gigantic addition no matter what the energy capacity of these battery installations is going to be, running the whole grid on batteries over the periods of low renewable generation is going to require still orders of magnitude more batteries. I suppose there's enough lithium in the ground for this, but elastic demand and dispatchable generation are probably going to be part of the equation for economical reasons.
  - randunel 3y ago
    Plenty of batteries in the US are built out of water. They pump the water up during the day and it generates electricity at night. No lithium involved. > Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, the United States Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database reports that PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW, of which about 29 GW are in the United States, and a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh, of which about 250 GWh are in the United States. I recently visited this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianelli_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianelli_Power_Plant
    - Maakuth 3y ago
      Pumped storage is a type of grid storage, but I don't think TFA includes it in battery storage. Pumped storage is a fine technology, but is there a lot of build potential left for it?
      - Alpha3031 3y ago
        > Pumped storage is a fine technology, but is there a lot of build potential left for it? "A lot" is probably subjective, but the two best known global estimates are Hunt et al. (2020) [1] from IIASA and Stocks et al. from ANU re100 (who incidentally also have some interactive maps [3]) which with different cost targets put potential at 17.3 and 23 PWh respectively, which works out to about 2 MWh per person. For comparison, for the past decade, the US ahs consumed about 13 MWh of electricity per person per year, down from a peak of slightly under 14 in 2000 and 2005. With very high levels of electrification, that could potentially rise to 24 to 28 MWh per person per year, or 8 or 9 PWh/yr for the whole country. Total primary energy use is a lot higher, around 90 MWh per person–year or 30 PWh total, this is because both not everything could be practically electrified and the things that could easily be electrified tend to be much more efficient when done electrically. Energy efficiency is also usually assumed to increase slightly in general. The US specifically is actually above the world average at about 4.5 MWh per capita according to the ANU team's estimates. That's 1.5 PWh per year roughly. In any case, I would expect that there is likely to very likely sufficient potential in most (if not all) grids for pumped hydro to be a significant part of medium duration energy storage (if not all of it), though whether it actually would depends on the costs of other technologies as well. [1]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14555-y https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14555-y [2]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.11.015 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.11.015 [3]: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/ https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/
      - lowkey 3y ago
        There have been some concepts proposed for gravity based pumped storage that do not rely on existing terrain. I find the concept compelling as it is incredibly simple but it hasn't yet been proven at scale. https://gravity-storage.com https://gravity-storage.com
  - Ringz 3y ago
    A misconception I often read on YouTube, Reddit, HackerNews is that everyone equates batteries with lithium ion batteries. A battery is a chemical storage device for energy and there are already many different types. 1. There are also functioning batteries without lithium, for example with salt, which are now already being tested in Swiss and German households and bring some advantages compared to lithium batteries. Not least the price. One should always remember that the lower energy density is a problem for an electric vehicle, but it doesn't matter if we install a battery in a cellar. Here, the energy density plays a subordinate role because there is enough space. 2. Would it make more sense to talk about *energy storage* in general instead of just batteries (which are by definition chemical energy storage) Kinetic, chemical, thermal and so on. Lithium ion batteries should not be considered for back-up alone. We definitely need more choices and we have them, mostly with today's technology and definitely easier and faster to develop and install than any new nuclear reactor technology. 3. You need different types of batteries short term storage, medium term storage and long term storage. There are different concepts for each use. Batteries, compressed air storage, pumped storage, thermal storage as well as power-to-x systems are able to absorb the increasing summer power from solar, autumn wind, etc. and make the energy available again in the short term, medium term or seasonally shifted. Examples: 1. https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/445597 2. https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/newsportal/news/meilenstein-in-der-energy-transition-scientists-at-the-tu-dresden-build-unique-energy-storage (German) 3. https://www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/hybrid-and-storage/thermal-energy-storage-with-etes-switch 4.The best approach, however, is to build a decentralised grid, which is also intercontinently connected. This is the perfect way to compensate for any "dark lulls". There is research on this at some universities around the world that is already out of laboratory status.
    - Maakuth 3y ago
      Very good points. I do think the grid battery capacity being added this year is going to be mostly li-ion.
      - Ringz 3y ago
        Thats (sadly) true! I think the transition to a diverse heat and electricity storage landscape will take time. Citing from "Handbook Energy Storage SCCER" https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597 https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597: "The SCCER has proven in numerous demonstra- tions that storage technologies are essentially available and usable. Now it is necessary, above all, for political decisions to be taken in the inter- ests of a coherent energy policy in order to re- duce the regulatory obstacles that currently im- pede or make impossible the economical use of energy storage. This can guide business models and investment decisions necessary to advance the technologies developed in the SCCER and bring them from the laboratory into the ultimate energy system of the Energy Strategy 2050."
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    > no matter what the energy capacity of these battery installations is going to be, running the whole grid on batteries over the periods of low renewable generation is going to require still orders of magnitude more batteries. I live in CA (Bay Area) the solar people just wandered up to my front door to "sell me" the other day. I do want to go solar in light of my PGE bill. The sales guy was super sharp and addressed one of the concerns I had (I have an unusual roof) and we got very nerdy. Because PGE has time dependent pricing, their model is to use battery to not only power the house in these windows but dump back to the grid during them too (and charge off solar when power is cheap). SO an independent installer is pitching a system to me (the end consumer) in response to the market price conditions that are going to push "more battery" for "peak demand" into the market. Now do the economics of that system and their sales pitch make sense? I dont know, Im still crunching those numbers (and they are some hard numbers to figure out), but at first blush im inclined to say "yes" cause fuck giving money to PGE.
    - Maakuth 3y ago
      At least a rooftop PV installation breaks even* here in Finland with scarce sun and cheap power. Batteries are not there yet. If you don't need the battery as a UPS, I would wait still a few years before going for a home battery. *: Easily half of the cost is the installation labor. If you can DIY at least parts of it, you can get decent ROI.
      - zer00eyz 3y ago
        Here (bay area), the power prices are so obscene that I almost makes sense to install batteries first. Those with homes with solar are going to end up saturating the grid (duck curve) to the point where renters can buy batteries and "coast", through the peaks of power cost.
        Maakuth 3y ago
        Are spot electricity contracts available, so that you can do it like that? Makes sense then. And of course the installation cost of battery is way smaller than for a PV plant as no roof work is required.
  - dmurray 3y ago
    > Weirdly the news item doesn't tell what sort of energy storage capacity these battery installation have, only the peak power output of 14.3 GW for this year's addition. As a rule of thumb, the capacity will be a few hours worth. So if the power rating is 14 GW, maybe that will be 60 GWh of capacity. That's almost enough to smooth over the most regular fluctuations in solar power: the day-night cycle (especially when you remember that demand drops at night). Not close to being economical for storing power from summer through to winter. A source [0]: > The most common grid-scale battery solutions today are rated to provide either 2, 4, or 6 hours of electricity at their rated capacity [0] https://www.energysage.com/business-solutions/utility-scale-battery-storage/ https://www.energysage.com/business-solutions/utility-scale-...
- callalex 3y ago
  Please say what you mean.
olau 3y ago
The problem with running nuclear in a dispatchable fashion (apart from technical problems) is not the marginal cost, but the upfront capital cost. Dispatchable capacity needs to have relatively low upfront cost, because it's seldomly used. The marginal cost is less important. Nuclear has a high capital cost, it's a really complex tech.
patall 3y ago
Technically, solar and wind are dispatchable as well, and much better than even natural gas at that. Grids were both are regulated on the sub-second scale are much more even than is otherwise possible. The thing is just that we consider that as lost energy, even though it is simply the same as running any other power plant at full power. If wind were three times cheaper than natural gas and we hence build three times as much of it, the achievable capacity factor would not look that bad.
mbgerring 3y ago
More on-site batteries can fix the need for dispatchable power on the grid side, and the cheaper batteries get, the more attractive such solutions start to look.
- graemep 3y ago
  It is also resilient to grid failures. Even better if you add on-site generation.
afpx 3y ago
I've been out of the industry for a few years, but it used to take 9 hours to turn a coal generator on.
Qwero 3y ago
The German energy market and therefore me as a consumer had to pay billions for dispatch operations. The energy market got plenty of inefficiency through the fast build out of renewable that the battery projects, calculating with this excess are getting build but not fast enough. There are already a few projects at old coal plants were they have connectivity. And with the ev batteries alone there will be used but still very good batteries hitting this market very soon. Equivalent to the whole water energy storage of Germany

hef19898 3y ago

Take a close look at the title again, second word after "solar", you have to pass by "and" to get there.

Maakuth 3y ago
I guess I earned the snark for not mentioning the batteries. Weirdly the news item doesn't tell what sort of energy storage capacity these battery installation have, only the peak power output of 14.3 GW for this year's addition. While that is certainly a gigantic addition no matter what the energy capacity of these battery installations is going to be, running the whole grid on batteries over the periods of low renewable generation is going to require still orders of magnitude more batteries. I suppose there's enough lithium in the ground for this, but elastic demand and dispatchable generation are probably going to be part of the equation for economical reasons.
- randunel 3y ago
  Plenty of batteries in the US are built out of water. They pump the water up during the day and it generates electricity at night. No lithium involved. > Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, the United States Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database reports that PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW, of which about 29 GW are in the United States, and a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh, of which about 250 GWh are in the United States. I recently visited this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianelli_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianelli_Power_Plant
  - Maakuth 3y ago
    Pumped storage is a type of grid storage, but I don't think TFA includes it in battery storage. Pumped storage is a fine technology, but is there a lot of build potential left for it?
    - Alpha3031 3y ago
      > Pumped storage is a fine technology, but is there a lot of build potential left for it? "A lot" is probably subjective, but the two best known global estimates are Hunt et al. (2020) [1] from IIASA and Stocks et al. from ANU re100 (who incidentally also have some interactive maps [3]) which with different cost targets put potential at 17.3 and 23 PWh respectively, which works out to about 2 MWh per person. For comparison, for the past decade, the US ahs consumed about 13 MWh of electricity per person per year, down from a peak of slightly under 14 in 2000 and 2005. With very high levels of electrification, that could potentially rise to 24 to 28 MWh per person per year, or 8 or 9 PWh/yr for the whole country. Total primary energy use is a lot higher, around 90 MWh per person–year or 30 PWh total, this is because both not everything could be practically electrified and the things that could easily be electrified tend to be much more efficient when done electrically. Energy efficiency is also usually assumed to increase slightly in general. The US specifically is actually above the world average at about 4.5 MWh per capita according to the ANU team's estimates. That's 1.5 PWh per year roughly. In any case, I would expect that there is likely to very likely sufficient potential in most (if not all) grids for pumped hydro to be a significant part of medium duration energy storage (if not all of it), though whether it actually would depends on the costs of other technologies as well. [1]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14555-y https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14555-y [2]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.11.015 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.11.015 [3]: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/ https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/
    - lowkey 3y ago
      There have been some concepts proposed for gravity based pumped storage that do not rely on existing terrain. I find the concept compelling as it is incredibly simple but it hasn't yet been proven at scale. https://gravity-storage.com https://gravity-storage.com
- Ringz 3y ago
  A misconception I often read on YouTube, Reddit, HackerNews is that everyone equates batteries with lithium ion batteries. A battery is a chemical storage device for energy and there are already many different types. 1. There are also functioning batteries without lithium, for example with salt, which are now already being tested in Swiss and German households and bring some advantages compared to lithium batteries. Not least the price. One should always remember that the lower energy density is a problem for an electric vehicle, but it doesn't matter if we install a battery in a cellar. Here, the energy density plays a subordinate role because there is enough space. 2. Would it make more sense to talk about *energy storage* in general instead of just batteries (which are by definition chemical energy storage) Kinetic, chemical, thermal and so on. Lithium ion batteries should not be considered for back-up alone. We definitely need more choices and we have them, mostly with today's technology and definitely easier and faster to develop and install than any new nuclear reactor technology. 3. You need different types of batteries short term storage, medium term storage and long term storage. There are different concepts for each use. Batteries, compressed air storage, pumped storage, thermal storage as well as power-to-x systems are able to absorb the increasing summer power from solar, autumn wind, etc. and make the energy available again in the short term, medium term or seasonally shifted. Examples: 1. https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/445597 2. https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/newsportal/news/meilenstein-in-der-energy-transition-scientists-at-the-tu-dresden-build-unique-energy-storage (German) 3. https://www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/hybrid-and-storage/thermal-energy-storage-with-etes-switch 4.The best approach, however, is to build a decentralised grid, which is also intercontinently connected. This is the perfect way to compensate for any "dark lulls". There is research on this at some universities around the world that is already out of laboratory status.
  - Maakuth 3y ago
    Very good points. I do think the grid battery capacity being added this year is going to be mostly li-ion.
    - Ringz 3y ago
      Thats (sadly) true! I think the transition to a diverse heat and electricity storage landscape will take time. Citing from "Handbook Energy Storage SCCER" https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597 https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597: "The SCCER has proven in numerous demonstra- tions that storage technologies are essentially available and usable. Now it is necessary, above all, for political decisions to be taken in the inter- ests of a coherent energy policy in order to re- duce the regulatory obstacles that currently im- pede or make impossible the economical use of energy storage. This can guide business models and investment decisions necessary to advance the technologies developed in the SCCER and bring them from the laboratory into the ultimate energy system of the Energy Strategy 2050."
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  > no matter what the energy capacity of these battery installations is going to be, running the whole grid on batteries over the periods of low renewable generation is going to require still orders of magnitude more batteries. I live in CA (Bay Area) the solar people just wandered up to my front door to "sell me" the other day. I do want to go solar in light of my PGE bill. The sales guy was super sharp and addressed one of the concerns I had (I have an unusual roof) and we got very nerdy. Because PGE has time dependent pricing, their model is to use battery to not only power the house in these windows but dump back to the grid during them too (and charge off solar when power is cheap). SO an independent installer is pitching a system to me (the end consumer) in response to the market price conditions that are going to push "more battery" for "peak demand" into the market. Now do the economics of that system and their sales pitch make sense? I dont know, Im still crunching those numbers (and they are some hard numbers to figure out), but at first blush im inclined to say "yes" cause fuck giving money to PGE.
  - Maakuth 3y ago
    At least a rooftop PV installation breaks even* here in Finland with scarce sun and cheap power. Batteries are not there yet. If you don't need the battery as a UPS, I would wait still a few years before going for a home battery. *: Easily half of the cost is the installation labor. If you can DIY at least parts of it, you can get decent ROI.
    - zer00eyz 3y ago
      Here (bay area), the power prices are so obscene that I almost makes sense to install batteries first. Those with homes with solar are going to end up saturating the grid (duck curve) to the point where renters can buy batteries and "coast", through the peaks of power cost.
      - Maakuth 3y ago
        Are spot electricity contracts available, so that you can do it like that? Makes sense then. And of course the installation cost of battery is way smaller than for a PV plant as no roof work is required.
- dmurray 3y ago
  > Weirdly the news item doesn't tell what sort of energy storage capacity these battery installation have, only the peak power output of 14.3 GW for this year's addition. As a rule of thumb, the capacity will be a few hours worth. So if the power rating is 14 GW, maybe that will be 60 GWh of capacity. That's almost enough to smooth over the most regular fluctuations in solar power: the day-night cycle (especially when you remember that demand drops at night). Not close to being economical for storing power from summer through to winter. A source [0]: > The most common grid-scale battery solutions today are rated to provide either 2, 4, or 6 hours of electricity at their rated capacity [0] https://www.energysage.com/business-solutions/utility-scale-battery-storage/ https://www.energysage.com/business-solutions/utility-scale-...
callalex 3y ago
Please say what you mean.

olau 3y ago

The problem with running nuclear in a dispatchable fashion (apart from technical problems) is not the marginal cost, but the upfront capital cost. Dispatchable capacity needs to have relatively low upfront cost, because it's seldomly used. The marginal cost is less important. Nuclear has a high capital cost, it's a really complex tech.

patall 3y ago

Technically, solar and wind are dispatchable as well, and much better than even natural gas at that. Grids were both are regulated on the sub-second scale are much more even than is otherwise possible. The thing is just that we consider that as lost energy, even though it is simply the same as running any other power plant at full power. If wind were three times cheaper than natural gas and we hence build three times as much of it, the achievable capacity factor would not look that bad.

mbgerring 3y ago

More on-site batteries can fix the need for dispatchable power on the grid side, and the cheaper batteries get, the more attractive such solutions start to look.

graemep 3y ago
It is also resilient to grid failures. Even better if you add on-site generation.

afpx 3y ago

I've been out of the industry for a few years, but it used to take 9 hours to turn a coal generator on.

Qwero 3y ago

The German energy market and therefore me as a consumer had to pay billions for dispatch operations. The energy market got plenty of inefficiency through the fast build out of renewable that the battery projects, calculating with this excess are getting build but not fast enough. There are already a few projects at old coal plants were they have connectivity. And with the ev batteries alone there will be used but still very good batteries hitting this market very soon. Equivalent to the whole water energy storage of Germany