I wonder if co-located batteries will help this? If you can put them between the wind or solar and the inverters you are using the same grid connection as the RE project, and if appropriately sized,can even have more RE capacity for the same grid connection, which will get used a larger fraction of the time. It seems to me the correct location for near term batteries is there, as it would help the bottleneck in projects more than anywhere else. Of course only batteries of the realistic storage technologies likely work co-located.
Rationally solar and wind producers would be required to have minimum 24hrs on site storage and have to bid on the next day market same as any other small producers with serious penalties if they fail to deliver. No other subsidies, mandates or exemptions other than a revenue neutral carbon fee & dividend that equally benefits all low carbon sources. They won't do that no matter how equitable and fair because they know solar and wind will die a quick death if they did.
While ibget where you are coming from that is both too blunt and doesn't get what you really need. For day ahead predictability you don't necessarily need to supply full power for 24hrs straight, nor would you want to push battery driven sources to do that. 4-8 hours would probably be enough given weather forecast reliability 24hrs out to deliver what you comit to, with that commitment scaled to expected generation with some margin. As for a penalty, most straight-forward would be to be on the hook for delivering your shortfall at the spot rate. If you are a one off blip, it won't be that big a penalty, if you bid to aggressively and the grid is very tight, the sky is the limit.
What we really need is capacity commitments well ahead of time so that you know there is enough capacity available to meet the expected requirement far enough in advance to do somethi g about it. Could do something like a hourly capacity commitment a year ahead. For simplicity could do a week or month worth at a time. Each hour has a different capacity expected and this would let batteries try to fill in gaps without needing to fill a whole day. In the future we also expect more time shiftable or curtailable demands, things like EV charging can be time shifted, and hydrogen production can soak up a certain amount of production over actual demand. These should be partially or fully excluded from the hourly capacity auction. Maybe add a daily Ober and above hourly to ensure time shift able but required loads are covered, and fully curtailable laods would be outside the capacity market, but would not pay for the capacity either.
With this the capacity winners would get first crack at delivering power. Everyone else would sell to the spot market, where curtailable demand buyers would pick up whatever is available up to the price they are willing to pay.
VRE without battery would only be able to play in this last market (or hope that actual demand goes above bid capacity or someone is unable to deliver and needs to pay spot). VRE with battery could allocate a portion of their output to capacity, anything above that would be left for spot. There would be a design case for something that looks like a 1GW grid connection having 3-5 GW or VRE with 4-8hrs (4-8GWh) storage, and 0.5GW local curtailable load. This could probably bid on 0.5GW capacity for most of the day and then be able to cover up to 0.5 GW spot, with unused power spot going into Hydrogen production. This is my best case for something that actually integrates well long term.
Doing what you said would still make wind & solar non-competitive in anywhere but a diesel grid unless there was additional subsidies, mandates & exemptions. Everything you said could be done far more efficiently & far lower cost by making most generation high efficiency baseload CCGT, supercritical Coal, conventional Hydro & Nuclear. Improved even more by EV charging which by all logic would be done mostly at night on surplus, low cost baseload generation. With OCGT & CCGT covering the daytime peak and also reserve capacity/backup. And not wasting batteries stupidly on improving wind & solar. Intermittent, seasonal, unreliable wind & solar have no place and no value in that efficient grid. They just push electricity costs up while doing zip for emissions.
And hydrogen is a nutty scam pushed by grifters for the past 25yrs. No rational person would support this hydrogen energy carrier let alone storage fantasy.
There is a linear price relationship between wind/solar grid penetration and price of electricity by Ken Gregory, P.Eng, graph Euro/kwh by country 2019: Conclusion: European Wind Plus Solar Cost 6 Times Other Electrical Sources
To have a net zero case, Coal will need CCS, and large scale CCS is not likely to be helpful, that and CCS is much harder off of coal than NG sources (higher CO2 load and dirty tail gas). My view is coal has no place long term.
Hydrogen I don't think will be used directly for anything but industrial uses, that being said current world H2 use is 87 million tons, which to make as electrolyser source would be 500GW ar 100% CF. This will go up substantially for steel, chemical feedstocks and synfuels for aviation, shipping etc. These users (along with local physical and maybe baytery storage, depending on the capaex balance of VRE and electrolysers) will be more tolerant to reducing consumption during peak demand periods than say home heating will be.
While I generally agree that heavy renewables do not help grid reliability or cost as it stands, they MAY be cost effective for this kind of non-prompt demands. And if you build out that capacity, you could potentially take the most reliable slice of this capability and use it to support the grid with similar reliability as current conventional sources. (Which do suffer technical failures occasionally). This MAY be a cost effective way of reliably covering some of the grid demand. The proposed market mechanism would be a potential way to let have all generation methods compete on a level playing field considering carbon impact, direct cost and reliability impact.
Overbuilding VRE generation enough to cover grid demand and curtail the excess will not be economic (basically the current high penetraiton approach), but with productive alternative sinks it may be a valuable contributor. We cannot afford to preemptively remove methods now without giving them a chance to prove themselves. Note this argument applies just as well to nuclear...
Seems like the obvious answer to decarbonization is nuclear power. If new plants took a big share of baseload and helped kill coal and eventually more gas, it'd be much easier to have enough renewables + storage than if the goal is to replace everything and have baseload by based on these intermittent technologies.
Much better to use a good part of that supply of batteries to electrify transportation, instead of using so many batteries for stationary storage that EVs are now more expensive and the transition takes longer.
right now I don't know what's more politically tractable, building more nuclear or building enough storage to transition to solar/wind. if storage is politically easier to unblock, then intermittent renewables are the easier path to decarbonization, even if that's more expensive than nuclear.
but without *some* policy change, my guess is decarbonization just doesn't happen.
It's hard to know because the future is uncertain and things can change fast. f.ex. the invasion of Ukraine has changed the discourse on nuclear pretty quickly.
IMO for a fraction of the exra money spent on trying to brute-force storage + renewables + higher cost of EV transition, you can probably have a quite effective campaign to educate and convince people and politicians that nuclear isn't what they think it is (I wrote about how the average person probably imagines that inside a nuclear power is a mini-nuclear-bomb explosion that has to be contained by the plant... of course it's scary when you think about it like that and don't understand the facts of it!).
That's exactly right, wasting good batteries and the materials to make them on storage for wind & solar is literally insane. It will take balls-to-the-walls battery & battery materials production to hopefully transition to an all electric transportation system (except aircraft) in 40yrs. It would take 4x that many batteries just to supply a meager 24hrs storage for wind & solar. And you still need a full fossil/nuclear/hydro grid to buffer the wind/solar for when they crap out for longer than 24hrs.
So the best wind & solar can do is theoretically replace some fuel when they are operating. But fuel cost is only about 1/10th the electricity price you pay. Most of the rest is grid costs. So to have that meager fuel savings you essentially have to have two parallel grids operational at all times. To add misery to madness induced cycling and economic inefficiencies in the buffering fossil/nuclear generators mean in reality negligible fuel is actually saved by the wind & solar. Even if the Wind Turbines or Solar Panels were free they would still be far too expensive to be practical except in areas on diesel generation (very expensive fuel) and with a large reservoir Hydro resource or for off-grid homes.
End result is after spending over $4 trillion worldwide on wind & solar total, World Primary energy supply is unchanged at 90% combustion fuel as it was 10yrs ago. In spite of improved efficiency of replacing conventional coal with supercritical coal, OCGT with extreme efficiency CCGT, coal/gas with hydro, LED lighting, substantial improvements in transportation efficiency, improved building insulation, heat pumps. Wind/solar hasn't even nearly been able to cover the growth in fossil consumption never mind actually replace fossil. Wind/solar already been a dismal failure in Europe, leading to high energy prices, electricity & heat supply shortages and steep price increases, dependence on Russian energy & energy blackmail.
As further evidence, a survey of 68 nations over the past 52 years done by Environmental Progress and duplicated by the New York Times shows conventional hydro was quite successful at decarbonization, nuclear energy was also very successful and both wind and solar show no correlation between grid penetration and decarbonization. In other words wind & solar are not replacing fossil, they are a complete waste of money. They only succeed in increasing energy prices which does reduce emissions only by creating energy poverty.
There is a linear price relationship between wind/solar grid penetration and price of electricity. See Ken Gregory, P.Eng, graph Euro/kwh by country 2019: Conclusion: European Wind Plus Solar Cost 6 Times Other Electrical Sources
> There is a linear price relationship between wind/solar grid penetration and price of electricity.
Correlation does not imply causation. If you were trying to make money selling electricity, would you want to put your renewable plant where electricity prices are high, or where they are low?
Correlation does imply causation. It is a necessary condition for causation but it is not a sufficient condition for causation. In addition to correlation you also need some scientific mechanism that would justify that correlation. And that is well established. Wind & solar are just an added cost to the grid while not replacing significant fuel.
The only logical place to put wind & solar is in areas on diesel generation, due to the high fuel cost and the high flexibility of diesel matches well with fluctuating wind & solar.
Actually you can have causation without correlation. The amount of fuel consumed by my furnace causes the temperature in my home to be about 70 degrees Farenheit, but the amount of fuel consumed is completely uncorrelated with the roughly constant temperature inside.
No it doesn't. The temperature in your home directly correlates to the fuel consumption of your furnace. Your thermostat has a deadband, it is not a constant temperature. That is absolutely a good example of correlation.
We're getting dangerously close to technical details of statistical analysis here, but in general a control system (such as a thermostat) will at least appear to have causation without correlation.
Hi Sarah! Important topic, thanks for focusing on it. Note that "they" estimate that around 3x as many wH of li-ion will be deployed with wheels around it as without over the next decade, and load-shifting is already happening. Electrolyzers are, per the ACESP project you tweet about, scaling rapidly. Generally, I think "excess" renewables is a problem markets are extremely well suited to solve—latent value will draw entrepreneurs. We still have to do it, though ...
Nice fantasy but entirely impractical. For a low carbon grid they are already developing high temperature liquid sodium and molten salt nuclear reactors with an added molten salt energy storage that can supply daytime peak energy at a lower cost than any battery tech.
I wonder if co-located batteries will help this? If you can put them between the wind or solar and the inverters you are using the same grid connection as the RE project, and if appropriately sized,can even have more RE capacity for the same grid connection, which will get used a larger fraction of the time. It seems to me the correct location for near term batteries is there, as it would help the bottleneck in projects more than anywhere else. Of course only batteries of the realistic storage technologies likely work co-located.
it looks like lots of co-located batteries are happening already! (mostly solar + battery.)
Rationally solar and wind producers would be required to have minimum 24hrs on site storage and have to bid on the next day market same as any other small producers with serious penalties if they fail to deliver. No other subsidies, mandates or exemptions other than a revenue neutral carbon fee & dividend that equally benefits all low carbon sources. They won't do that no matter how equitable and fair because they know solar and wind will die a quick death if they did.
While ibget where you are coming from that is both too blunt and doesn't get what you really need. For day ahead predictability you don't necessarily need to supply full power for 24hrs straight, nor would you want to push battery driven sources to do that. 4-8 hours would probably be enough given weather forecast reliability 24hrs out to deliver what you comit to, with that commitment scaled to expected generation with some margin. As for a penalty, most straight-forward would be to be on the hook for delivering your shortfall at the spot rate. If you are a one off blip, it won't be that big a penalty, if you bid to aggressively and the grid is very tight, the sky is the limit.
What we really need is capacity commitments well ahead of time so that you know there is enough capacity available to meet the expected requirement far enough in advance to do somethi g about it. Could do something like a hourly capacity commitment a year ahead. For simplicity could do a week or month worth at a time. Each hour has a different capacity expected and this would let batteries try to fill in gaps without needing to fill a whole day. In the future we also expect more time shiftable or curtailable demands, things like EV charging can be time shifted, and hydrogen production can soak up a certain amount of production over actual demand. These should be partially or fully excluded from the hourly capacity auction. Maybe add a daily Ober and above hourly to ensure time shift able but required loads are covered, and fully curtailable laods would be outside the capacity market, but would not pay for the capacity either.
With this the capacity winners would get first crack at delivering power. Everyone else would sell to the spot market, where curtailable demand buyers would pick up whatever is available up to the price they are willing to pay.
VRE without battery would only be able to play in this last market (or hope that actual demand goes above bid capacity or someone is unable to deliver and needs to pay spot). VRE with battery could allocate a portion of their output to capacity, anything above that would be left for spot. There would be a design case for something that looks like a 1GW grid connection having 3-5 GW or VRE with 4-8hrs (4-8GWh) storage, and 0.5GW local curtailable load. This could probably bid on 0.5GW capacity for most of the day and then be able to cover up to 0.5 GW spot, with unused power spot going into Hydrogen production. This is my best case for something that actually integrates well long term.
Doing what you said would still make wind & solar non-competitive in anywhere but a diesel grid unless there was additional subsidies, mandates & exemptions. Everything you said could be done far more efficiently & far lower cost by making most generation high efficiency baseload CCGT, supercritical Coal, conventional Hydro & Nuclear. Improved even more by EV charging which by all logic would be done mostly at night on surplus, low cost baseload generation. With OCGT & CCGT covering the daytime peak and also reserve capacity/backup. And not wasting batteries stupidly on improving wind & solar. Intermittent, seasonal, unreliable wind & solar have no place and no value in that efficient grid. They just push electricity costs up while doing zip for emissions.
And hydrogen is a nutty scam pushed by grifters for the past 25yrs. No rational person would support this hydrogen energy carrier let alone storage fantasy.
There is a linear price relationship between wind/solar grid penetration and price of electricity by Ken Gregory, P.Eng, graph Euro/kwh by country 2019: Conclusion: European Wind Plus Solar Cost 6 Times Other Electrical Sources
friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=2550
To have a net zero case, Coal will need CCS, and large scale CCS is not likely to be helpful, that and CCS is much harder off of coal than NG sources (higher CO2 load and dirty tail gas). My view is coal has no place long term.
Hydrogen I don't think will be used directly for anything but industrial uses, that being said current world H2 use is 87 million tons, which to make as electrolyser source would be 500GW ar 100% CF. This will go up substantially for steel, chemical feedstocks and synfuels for aviation, shipping etc. These users (along with local physical and maybe baytery storage, depending on the capaex balance of VRE and electrolysers) will be more tolerant to reducing consumption during peak demand periods than say home heating will be.
While I generally agree that heavy renewables do not help grid reliability or cost as it stands, they MAY be cost effective for this kind of non-prompt demands. And if you build out that capacity, you could potentially take the most reliable slice of this capability and use it to support the grid with similar reliability as current conventional sources. (Which do suffer technical failures occasionally). This MAY be a cost effective way of reliably covering some of the grid demand. The proposed market mechanism would be a potential way to let have all generation methods compete on a level playing field considering carbon impact, direct cost and reliability impact.
Overbuilding VRE generation enough to cover grid demand and curtail the excess will not be economic (basically the current high penetraiton approach), but with productive alternative sinks it may be a valuable contributor. We cannot afford to preemptively remove methods now without giving them a chance to prove themselves. Note this argument applies just as well to nuclear...
Thanks for writing this up.
Seems like the obvious answer to decarbonization is nuclear power. If new plants took a big share of baseload and helped kill coal and eventually more gas, it'd be much easier to have enough renewables + storage than if the goal is to replace everything and have baseload by based on these intermittent technologies.
Much better to use a good part of that supply of batteries to electrify transportation, instead of using so many batteries for stationary storage that EVs are now more expensive and the transition takes longer.
yeah, clearly that's the sensible thing to do.
right now I don't know what's more politically tractable, building more nuclear or building enough storage to transition to solar/wind. if storage is politically easier to unblock, then intermittent renewables are the easier path to decarbonization, even if that's more expensive than nuclear.
but without *some* policy change, my guess is decarbonization just doesn't happen.
It's hard to know because the future is uncertain and things can change fast. f.ex. the invasion of Ukraine has changed the discourse on nuclear pretty quickly.
IMO for a fraction of the exra money spent on trying to brute-force storage + renewables + higher cost of EV transition, you can probably have a quite effective campaign to educate and convince people and politicians that nuclear isn't what they think it is (I wrote about how the average person probably imagines that inside a nuclear power is a mini-nuclear-bomb explosion that has to be contained by the plant... of course it's scary when you think about it like that and don't understand the facts of it!).
That's exactly right, wasting good batteries and the materials to make them on storage for wind & solar is literally insane. It will take balls-to-the-walls battery & battery materials production to hopefully transition to an all electric transportation system (except aircraft) in 40yrs. It would take 4x that many batteries just to supply a meager 24hrs storage for wind & solar. And you still need a full fossil/nuclear/hydro grid to buffer the wind/solar for when they crap out for longer than 24hrs.
So the best wind & solar can do is theoretically replace some fuel when they are operating. But fuel cost is only about 1/10th the electricity price you pay. Most of the rest is grid costs. So to have that meager fuel savings you essentially have to have two parallel grids operational at all times. To add misery to madness induced cycling and economic inefficiencies in the buffering fossil/nuclear generators mean in reality negligible fuel is actually saved by the wind & solar. Even if the Wind Turbines or Solar Panels were free they would still be far too expensive to be practical except in areas on diesel generation (very expensive fuel) and with a large reservoir Hydro resource or for off-grid homes.
End result is after spending over $4 trillion worldwide on wind & solar total, World Primary energy supply is unchanged at 90% combustion fuel as it was 10yrs ago. In spite of improved efficiency of replacing conventional coal with supercritical coal, OCGT with extreme efficiency CCGT, coal/gas with hydro, LED lighting, substantial improvements in transportation efficiency, improved building insulation, heat pumps. Wind/solar hasn't even nearly been able to cover the growth in fossil consumption never mind actually replace fossil. Wind/solar already been a dismal failure in Europe, leading to high energy prices, electricity & heat supply shortages and steep price increases, dependence on Russian energy & energy blackmail.
As further evidence, a survey of 68 nations over the past 52 years done by Environmental Progress and duplicated by the New York Times shows conventional hydro was quite successful at decarbonization, nuclear energy was also very successful and both wind and solar show no correlation between grid penetration and decarbonization. In other words wind & solar are not replacing fossil, they are a complete waste of money. They only succeed in increasing energy prices which does reduce emissions only by creating energy poverty.
There is a linear price relationship between wind/solar grid penetration and price of electricity. See Ken Gregory, P.Eng, graph Euro/kwh by country 2019: Conclusion: European Wind Plus Solar Cost 6 Times Other Electrical Sources
friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=2550
> There is a linear price relationship between wind/solar grid penetration and price of electricity.
Correlation does not imply causation. If you were trying to make money selling electricity, would you want to put your renewable plant where electricity prices are high, or where they are low?
Correlation does imply causation. It is a necessary condition for causation but it is not a sufficient condition for causation. In addition to correlation you also need some scientific mechanism that would justify that correlation. And that is well established. Wind & solar are just an added cost to the grid while not replacing significant fuel.
The only logical place to put wind & solar is in areas on diesel generation, due to the high fuel cost and the high flexibility of diesel matches well with fluctuating wind & solar.
Actually you can have causation without correlation. The amount of fuel consumed by my furnace causes the temperature in my home to be about 70 degrees Farenheit, but the amount of fuel consumed is completely uncorrelated with the roughly constant temperature inside.
No it doesn't. The temperature in your home directly correlates to the fuel consumption of your furnace. Your thermostat has a deadband, it is not a constant temperature. That is absolutely a good example of correlation.
We're getting dangerously close to technical details of statistical analysis here, but in general a control system (such as a thermostat) will at least appear to have causation without correlation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03118
Hi Sarah! Important topic, thanks for focusing on it. Note that "they" estimate that around 3x as many wH of li-ion will be deployed with wheels around it as without over the next decade, and load-shifting is already happening. Electrolyzers are, per the ACESP project you tweet about, scaling rapidly. Generally, I think "excess" renewables is a problem markets are extremely well suited to solve—latent value will draw entrepreneurs. We still have to do it, though ...
Nice fantasy but entirely impractical. For a low carbon grid they are already developing high temperature liquid sodium and molten salt nuclear reactors with an added molten salt energy storage that can supply daytime peak energy at a lower cost than any battery tech.