6 ms·

This paper proposes converting California's power generation over to wind and solar, with electric vehicles and electrically generated hydrogen vehicles replaci

by beloch 12y ago

This paper proposes converting California's power generation over to wind and solar, with electric vehicles and electrically generated hydrogen vehicles replacing all others. All use of fossil fuels and nuclear power is to be phased out. Notably, it suggests that hydroelectric power should be used to balance loads. i.e. It proposes that California's power grid be stabilized with only hydroelectric power as an on-demand source of generation. Firstly, in 2013 California imported 32.7% of it's electricity. California has little control over how this is generated. Of the power used by California, 40.8% is from Natural Gas, 8.1% is hydroelectric, 6.0% is Nuclear, 4.3% is from wind power, 4.2% is geothermal, 2.1% is from biomass, and 1.4% is solar[1]. Natural Gas and Nuclear power are both excellent on-demand sources of power, and currently meet 46.8% of California's electricity requirements. If these power sources are to be phased out, they must be replaced with energy sources that are on-demand. Wind and solar do not fit this description. Hydro does, but quintupling California's hydroelectric capacity will have a huge impact on the environment. This paper greatly underestimates how much on-demand power generation capacity a power grid needs in order to be stable. Side note: California currently derives little of it's electricity from wind or solar power. Electric vehicle batteries carry a high environmental cost to produce, so it is imperative that the energy they are charged with be of renewable origin for any net environmental benefits to be reaped. Given that 40.8% of California's electricity currently comes from natural gas, it's clear that anyone plugging their EV's into California's grid is doing the environment no favors. [1]http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electricity_gen_1983-2013.xls http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electricity_gen_1983...

schainks 12y ago
I'd like to clear up your terminology a little bit, since the way you use "on demand" actually means two different use-cases. You're referring to "spinning reserve" versus "on-demand" sources of power. "Spinning reserves" are plants that we keep online in a "ready" state, but disconnected from the grid until we need them. "Spinning reserves" are kept online in the case of a failure elsewhere on the grid, or to adapt to load changes throughout the day. These plants are cost-effective for this use case. "On-demand" facilities are plants that have very fast spin-up time, and so they can be brought "online" from a powered-off very quickly. These kinds of plants are also cost-effective to cycle between both states. Natural Gas Combustion Turbines happen to have fast startup time (fast=minutes), and are cost efficient to keep running, so they're used on the grid for both "on demand" and "spinning reserve applications", as it's cheap to cycle them between both states and cheap to keep them spinning (as long as natural gas is cheap). Even better "on demand" sources of power are batteries, since they can be flipped on/off the grid like a lightswitch, but I digress. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, are awful for "on demand" applications since they take many days, weeks or months to fully power on/power off, and it costs a lot of money to do so. But, they are good as "spinning reserve" facilities, since they produce very cheap electricity once they are online.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  More on generating responsiveness, as I understand it. Natural gas plants can be "spun up" in about 15 minutes. This is because they run as directly-fired turbines, so there's no time required to build up a head of steam. Standby diesel generators can be fired up even more quickly (a couple of minutes), though these are expensive and somewhat less efficient. Hydroelectric power also has an activation response measured in single-digit minutes, or even seconds -- open a sluice gate, synchronize to the grid, and you're on. A fair amount of California's hydro power is used specifically to match against current demand and larger blocks of power bought from elsewhere. Geothermal is also fairly responsive, though it's got a limited total output. For California, The Geysers (among the largest geothermal generating plants in the world) has a total capacity of 725 MW (this is down from the peak largely due to groundwater exhaustion, with various re-injection schemes proposed and partially adopted). http://www.calpine.com/media/Geysers_Factsheet.pdf http://www.calpine.com/media/Geysers_Factsheet.pdf Coal (virtually unused in California) and nuclear (one plant, Diablo Canyon) have very long ramp-up periods, but can be operated as "spinning reserve" by wasting their unused thermal output. This is particularly expensive for
crdoconnor 12y ago
It is easy to ramp Natural Gas electricity generation, making it suitable for on demand power (known as peakers), but the same is emphatically NOT true for nuclear (known as a base load source) - which produces a steady output and is very hard to turn up and down (similar to coal). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... can be used as an alternative form of on demand form of power. This is already being done in Michigan and Virginia. Solar and wind power would substitute baseload power (provided by nuclear plants) and solar and wind power transferred to pumped storage could substitute peaker plants. The latter is not particularly efficient, but when you consider that solar and wind are dirt cheap these days, it still makes more sense to do that than use natural gas as peaker. > Given that 40.8% of California's electricity currently comes from natural gas, it's clear that anyone plugging their EV's into California's grid is doing the environment no favors. Actually, this isn't true at all. Only in Virginia & China and other coal-intensive regions is an electric car more polluting than a gas-guzzler.
- schainks 12y ago
  > The latter is not particularly efficient, but when you consider that solar and wind are dirt cheap these days, it still makes more sense to do that than use natural gas as peaker. Citation needed. Solar and wind are still way more expensive per KwH compared to nuclear or natural gas. Please show us figures demonstrating wind or solar production that costs less than $0.10/KwH The solar market in the US isn't going anywhere anytime soon now that subsidies are gone. I'm not anti-solar or anti-wind, but if they were cheap enough, we'd have MUCH more on the grid, and be planning for more on the grid. At the moment, we're still seeing isolated cases of experimental large-scale farms being built, but no "industry wide" construction rush like we're seeing with natural gas.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    >Citation needed. Citation provided: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/22/solar-and-wind-power-now-cheaper-than-coal-power-in-the-u-s/ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/22/solar-and-wind-power-n... >Solar and wind are still way more expensive per KwH compared to nuclear or natural gas. Natural gas? Hell no: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/13/solar-sold-less-5%C2%A2kwh-austin-texas/ http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/13/solar-sold-less-5%C2%A2k... Nuclear? Maybe, but there are still safety concerns. Plus, the nuclear liability cap subsidy is still FAR too low for me to be convinced that those safety concerns are invalid. > Please show us figures demonstrating wind or solar production that costs less than $0.10/KwH Solar power is apparently going to be sold to Austin Energy for a tiny bit less than 5¢/kWh under a new 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with SunEdison. >I'm not anti-solar or anti-wind, but if they were cheap enough, we'd have MUCH more on the grid, and be planning for more on the grid. At the moment, we're still seeing isolated cases of experimental large-scale farms being built, but no "industry wide" construction rush like we're seeing with natural gas. The difference is that natural gas has superior lobbying (it's also got some great PR teams who are 'greenwashing' it). This is why cheap solar panels get whacked by 30% tariffs despite pathetic evidence of dumping and why frackers are able to cause all manner of havoc with groundwater, earthquakes and mysterious illnesses and push the costs on to somebody else. At best they pay out token damages - http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/25/justice/texas-family-wins-fracking-lawsuit/ http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/25/justice/texas-family-wins-... - but more usually, nothing. Even in spite of that, the gas companies have been piling on debt to keep the fracking boom alive - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-30/shale-drillers-feast-on-junk-debt-to-say-on-treadmill.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-30/shale-drillers-feas... - which is a story that usually doesn't end well. Solar/wind adoption has been growing very fast, but it's constantly being beset by political roadblocks like the 30% tariffs - usually erected at the behest of the carbon burning companies, who still wield vast political power in the US. We're very much at an inflexion point where current levels of technology is capable of providing a cleaner, greener future at a knock down price. it's just politics now that is preventing it from happening. Specifically, it's lobbying done by oil, natural gas & utility companies to hurt their greener competitors.
illumen 12y ago
Batteries in cars can be used to store excess energy (proven). Solar thermal can be used for base load (proven). The 12,000 people dying per year from pollution in California costs the health system billions. This saving can be used to fund projects. There are no technical, or financial reasons why this can't be done. It just comes down to competence and corruption.
- afafsd 12y ago
  >The 12,000 people dying per year from pollution in California costs the health system billions Even if that number were true, does the "billions" come from a proper study which takes into account the fact that they'll inevitably die of something else anyway? Also, air pollution from burning fossil fuels has been drastically reduced over the past few decades and will continue to be reduced as technology improves. >There are no technical, or financial reasons why this can't be done. It just comes down to competence and corruption One point one trillion dollars, in the presumably-optimistic case proposed. That's $30,000 for every man, woman and child in California.
  - illumen 12y ago
    From the abstract of the PDF we are reading... right at the top: "avoid $103 (31-232) billion/yr in health costs" 103 * 10 years == $1 trillion As you can see from the first paragraph in the article, the saved health care costs would cover it. "World Health Organization: Air pollution kills 7 million people a year" "Air pollution is behind nearly 200,000 early deaths every year in the United States, according to a new study by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology." "California, they found, topped the charts with an estimated 21,000 early deaths every year due to air pollution, largely as a result of road transportation and commercial and resident emissions." The article does NOT take into account recent advances like solar thermal in Australia (base load cost close to coal), and car batteries in Denmark (1000s of cars used to store power in the grid). It also doesn't include biofuels like are used in Germany for more than wind+solar currently.
    - VLM 12y ago
Brakenshire 12y ago
I'm not sure why you'd discuss this without mentioning the section of the linked article which addresses exactly this issue (maintaining a stable grid with 100% renewables, and current levels of hydroelectric power): > Here, we do not model the reliability of an optimized future California grid but discuss a recent optimization study in which 100% WWS in the California grid was modeled for two years. Hart and Jacobson[30] used a stochastic optimization model of system operation combined with a deterministic renewable portfolio planning module to simulate the impact of a 100% WWS penetration for California every hour of 2005 and 2006. They assumed near-current hydroelectric and geothermal but increased geographically-dispersed time-dependent wind, solar PV, and CSP with 3-h storage. They constrained the system to a loss of load of no more than 1 day in 10 years and used both meteorological and load forecasts to reduce reserve requirements. They found that, under these conditions, 99.8% of delivered electricity could be produced carbon-free with WWS during 2005/2006 > The result of Hart and Jacobson[30] suggests that, for California, a large part of the intermittency problem of wind and solar can be addressed not only by combining the two, but also by using hydroelectric and CSP with 3-h storage to fill in gaps. The remaining differences between supply and demand can likely be addressed with the inclusion of demand-response management; energy efficiency measures, CSP with storage longer than 3 h, additional pumped hydroelectric storage, distributed or large-scale battery storage, compressed-air storage, flywheels, seasonal heat storage in soil, out-of-state WWS resources, the addition of flexible loads such as electric vehicles, vehicle-to-grid methods, and oversizing the number of WWS generators to simplify matching power demand with supply while using excess electricity for district heat or hydrogen production. If you want to refute this, you need to start with Hart and Jacobsen, and work from there.
- Ntrails 12y ago
  Perhaps I am misreading, but are they including in their estimates on changed behaviour in the population resulting in the energy efficiency savings?
  - Brakenshire 12y ago
    I don't think so, I think they are only looking at balancing the supply side (making calculations using the demand patterns from 2005/06), demand-management is then another possibility that goes on top of that.

by beloch 12y ago

schainks 12y ago

I'd like to clear up your terminology a little bit, since the way you use "on demand" actually means two different use-cases. You're referring to "spinning reserve" versus "on-demand" sources of power. "Spinning reserves" are plants that we keep online in a "ready" state, but disconnected from the grid until we need them. "Spinning reserves" are kept online in the case of a failure elsewhere on the grid, or to adapt to load changes throughout the day. These plants are cost-effective for this use case. "On-demand" facilities are plants that have very fast spin-up time, and so they can be brought "online" from a powered-off very quickly. These kinds of plants are also cost-effective to cycle between both states. Natural Gas Combustion Turbines happen to have fast startup time (fast=minutes), and are cost efficient to keep running, so they're used on the grid for both "on demand" and "spinning reserve applications", as it's cheap to cycle them between both states and cheap to keep them spinning (as long as natural gas is cheap). Even better "on demand" sources of power are batteries, since they can be flipped on/off the grid like a lightswitch, but I digress. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, are awful for "on demand" applications since they take many days, weeks or months to fully power on/power off, and it costs a lot of money to do so. But, they are good as "spinning reserve" facilities, since they produce very cheap electricity once they are online.

dredmorbius 12y ago
More on generating responsiveness, as I understand it. Natural gas plants can be "spun up" in about 15 minutes. This is because they run as directly-fired turbines, so there's no time required to build up a head of steam. Standby diesel generators can be fired up even more quickly (a couple of minutes), though these are expensive and somewhat less efficient. Hydroelectric power also has an activation response measured in single-digit minutes, or even seconds -- open a sluice gate, synchronize to the grid, and you're on. A fair amount of California's hydro power is used specifically to match against current demand and larger blocks of power bought from elsewhere. Geothermal is also fairly responsive, though it's got a limited total output. For California, The Geysers (among the largest geothermal generating plants in the world) has a total capacity of 725 MW (this is down from the peak largely due to groundwater exhaustion, with various re-injection schemes proposed and partially adopted). http://www.calpine.com/media/Geysers_Factsheet.pdf http://www.calpine.com/media/Geysers_Factsheet.pdf Coal (virtually unused in California) and nuclear (one plant, Diablo Canyon) have very long ramp-up periods, but can be operated as "spinning reserve" by wasting their unused thermal output. This is particularly expensive for

crdoconnor 12y ago

It is easy to ramp Natural Gas electricity generation, making it suitable for on demand power (known as peakers), but the same is emphatically NOT true for nuclear (known as a base load source) - which produces a steady output and is very hard to turn up and down (similar to coal). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... can be used as an alternative form of on demand form of power. This is already being done in Michigan and Virginia. Solar and wind power would substitute baseload power (provided by nuclear plants) and solar and wind power transferred to pumped storage could substitute peaker plants. The latter is not particularly efficient, but when you consider that solar and wind are dirt cheap these days, it still makes more sense to do that than use natural gas as peaker. > Given that 40.8% of California's electricity currently comes from natural gas, it's clear that anyone plugging their EV's into California's grid is doing the environment no favors. Actually, this isn't true at all. Only in Virginia & China and other coal-intensive regions is an electric car more polluting than a gas-guzzler.

schainks 12y ago
> The latter is not particularly efficient, but when you consider that solar and wind are dirt cheap these days, it still makes more sense to do that than use natural gas as peaker. Citation needed. Solar and wind are still way more expensive per KwH compared to nuclear or natural gas. Please show us figures demonstrating wind or solar production that costs less than $0.10/KwH The solar market in the US isn't going anywhere anytime soon now that subsidies are gone. I'm not anti-solar or anti-wind, but if they were cheap enough, we'd have MUCH more on the grid, and be planning for more on the grid. At the moment, we're still seeing isolated cases of experimental large-scale farms being built, but no "industry wide" construction rush like we're seeing with natural gas.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >Citation needed. Citation provided: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/22/solar-and-wind-power-now-cheaper-than-coal-power-in-the-u-s/ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/22/solar-and-wind-power-n... >Solar and wind are still way more expensive per KwH compared to nuclear or natural gas. Natural gas? Hell no: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/13/solar-sold-less-5%C2%A2kwh-austin-texas/ http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/13/solar-sold-less-5%C2%A2k... Nuclear? Maybe, but there are still safety concerns. Plus, the nuclear liability cap subsidy is still FAR too low for me to be convinced that those safety concerns are invalid. > Please show us figures demonstrating wind or solar production that costs less than $0.10/KwH Solar power is apparently going to be sold to Austin Energy for a tiny bit less than 5¢/kWh under a new 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with SunEdison. >I'm not anti-solar or anti-wind, but if they were cheap enough, we'd have MUCH more on the grid, and be planning for more on the grid. At the moment, we're still seeing isolated cases of experimental large-scale farms being built, but no "industry wide" construction rush like we're seeing with natural gas. The difference is that natural gas has superior lobbying (it's also got some great PR teams who are 'greenwashing' it). This is why cheap solar panels get whacked by 30% tariffs despite pathetic evidence of dumping and why frackers are able to cause all manner of havoc with groundwater, earthquakes and mysterious illnesses and push the costs on to somebody else. At best they pay out token damages - http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/25/justice/texas-family-wins-fracking-lawsuit/ http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/25/justice/texas-family-wins-... - but more usually, nothing. Even in spite of that, the gas companies have been piling on debt to keep the fracking boom alive - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-30/shale-drillers-feast-on-junk-debt-to-say-on-treadmill.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-30/shale-drillers-feas... - which is a story that usually doesn't end well. Solar/wind adoption has been growing very fast, but it's constantly being beset by political roadblocks like the 30% tariffs - usually erected at the behest of the carbon burning companies, who still wield vast political power in the US. We're very much at an inflexion point where current levels of technology is capable of providing a cleaner, greener future at a knock down price. it's just politics now that is preventing it from happening. Specifically, it's lobbying done by oil, natural gas & utility companies to hurt their greener competitors.

illumen 12y ago

Batteries in cars can be used to store excess energy (proven). Solar thermal can be used for base load (proven). The 12,000 people dying per year from pollution in California costs the health system billions. This saving can be used to fund projects. There are no technical, or financial reasons why this can't be done. It just comes down to competence and corruption.

afafsd 12y ago
>The 12,000 people dying per year from pollution in California costs the health system billions Even if that number were true, does the "billions" come from a proper study which takes into account the fact that they'll inevitably die of something else anyway? Also, air pollution from burning fossil fuels has been drastically reduced over the past few decades and will continue to be reduced as technology improves. >There are no technical, or financial reasons why this can't be done. It just comes down to competence and corruption One point one trillion dollars, in the presumably-optimistic case proposed. That's $30,000 for every man, woman and child in California.
- illumen 12y ago
  From the abstract of the PDF we are reading... right at the top: "avoid $103 (31-232) billion/yr in health costs" 103 * 10 years == $1 trillion As you can see from the first paragraph in the article, the saved health care costs would cover it. "World Health Organization: Air pollution kills 7 million people a year" "Air pollution is behind nearly 200,000 early deaths every year in the United States, according to a new study by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology." "California, they found, topped the charts with an estimated 21,000 early deaths every year due to air pollution, largely as a result of road transportation and commercial and resident emissions." The article does NOT take into account recent advances like solar thermal in Australia (base load cost close to coal), and car batteries in Denmark (1000s of cars used to store power in the grid). It also doesn't include biofuels like are used in Germany for more than wind+solar currently.
  - VLM 12y ago

Brakenshire 12y ago

I'm not sure why you'd discuss this without mentioning the section of the linked article which addresses exactly this issue (maintaining a stable grid with 100% renewables, and current levels of hydroelectric power): > Here, we do not model the reliability of an optimized future California grid but discuss a recent optimization study in which 100% WWS in the California grid was modeled for two years. Hart and Jacobson[30] used a stochastic optimization model of system operation combined with a deterministic renewable portfolio planning module to simulate the impact of a 100% WWS penetration for California every hour of 2005 and 2006. They assumed near-current hydroelectric and geothermal but increased geographically-dispersed time-dependent wind, solar PV, and CSP with 3-h storage. They constrained the system to a loss of load of no more than 1 day in 10 years and used both meteorological and load forecasts to reduce reserve requirements. They found that, under these conditions, 99.8% of delivered electricity could be produced carbon-free with WWS during 2005/2006 > The result of Hart and Jacobson[30] suggests that, for California, a large part of the intermittency problem of wind and solar can be addressed not only by combining the two, but also by using hydroelectric and CSP with 3-h storage to fill in gaps. The remaining differences between supply and demand can likely be addressed with the inclusion of demand-response management; energy efficiency measures, CSP with storage longer than 3 h, additional pumped hydroelectric storage, distributed or large-scale battery storage, compressed-air storage, flywheels, seasonal heat storage in soil, out-of-state WWS resources, the addition of flexible loads such as electric vehicles, vehicle-to-grid methods, and oversizing the number of WWS generators to simplify matching power demand with supply while using excess electricity for district heat or hydrogen production. If you want to refute this, you need to start with Hart and Jacobsen, and work from there.

Ntrails 12y ago
Perhaps I am misreading, but are they including in their estimates on changed behaviour in the population resulting in the energy efficiency savings?
- Brakenshire 12y ago
  I don't think so, I think they are only looking at balancing the supply side (making calculations using the demand patterns from 2005/06), demand-management is then another possibility that goes on top of that.