In a few large companies I observed the same phenomenon – over here are corporate dreams and over there is reality. Team – your job is to move reality over to where corporate dreams are.
It wasn’t worded like that. Anyway, reality won each time. Reality is pretty stubborn. Of course, refusal to accept “reality” is what has created great inventions and companies. It’s not always clear what is reality and what is today’s lack of vision vs tomorrow’s idea that just needs lots of work to make a revolution. So ideas should be challenged to find “reality”. But reality itself is hard to change.
I starting checking on Carbon Brief via my blog feed a few months back. It has some decent articles although they are more “reporting press releases or executive summaries” than any critical analysis. But at least they lack hysterical headlines and good vs evil doesn’t even appear in the subtext, which is refreshing. I’ve been too busy with other projects recently to devote any time to writing about climate science or impacts, but their article today – In-depth: How a smart flexible grid could save the UK £40bn – did inspire me to read one of the actual reports referenced. Part of the reason my interest was piqued was I’ve seen many articles where “inflexible baseload” is compared with “smart decentralized grids” and “flexible systems”. All lovely words, which must mean they are better ways to create an electricity grid. A company I used to work for created a few products with “smart” in the name. All good marketing. But what about reality? Let’s have a look.
The report in question is An analysis of electricity system flexibility for Great Britain from November 2016 by Carbon Trust. The UK government has written into legislation to reduce carbon emissions to almost nothing by 2050 and so they need to get to work.
What is fascinating reading the report is that all of the points I made in previous articles in this series show up, but dressed up in a very positive way:
We’re choosing between all these great options on the best way to save money
For those who like a short story, I’ll rewrite that summary:
We’re choosing between all these expensive options trying to understand which one (or what mix) will be the least expensive. Unfortunately we don’t know but we need to start now because we’ve already committed to this huge carbon reduction by 2050. If we make a good pick then we’ll spend the least amount of money, but if we get it wrong we will be left with lots of negative outcomes and high costs for a long time
Well, when you pay for the report you should be allowed to get the window dressing that you like. That’s a minimum.
The imponderables are that wind power is intermittent (and there’s not much solar at high latitudes) so you have some difficult choices:
- Demand management? (see XVIII – Demand Management & Levelized Cost)
- Storage? (see Renewable Energy I and XIV – Minimized Cost of 99.9% Renewable Study)
- Massive interconnectors to other countries? (see VIII – Transmission Costs And Outsourcing Renewable Generation and XII – Windpower as Baseload and SuperGrids)
- More gas fired power station backup? (see IV – Wind, Forecast Horizon & Backups and XIII – One of Wind’s Hidden Costs)
- Maximum peak penetration of renewable energy onto the grid? (See V – Grid Stability As Wind Power Penetration Increases)
- Nuclear power (see the end section of XVIII – Demand Management & Levelized Cost)
I’ll just again repeat something I’ve said a few times in this series. I’m not trying to knock renewable energy or decarbonizing energy. But solving a problem requires understanding the scale of the problem and especially the hardest challenges – before you start on the main project.
As a digression, there is a lovely irony about the use of the words “flexible” for renewable energy vs “inflexible” for conventional energy. Planning conventional energy grids is pretty easy – you can be very flexible because a) you have dispatchable power, and b) you can stick the next power station right next to the new demand as and when it appears. So the current system is incredibly flexible and you don’t need to be much of a crystal ball gazer. That said, it’s just my appreciation of irony and how I can’t help enjoying the excitement other people have in taking up inspirational words for ideas they like.. anyway, it has zero bearing on the difficult questions at hand.
As the article from Carbon Brief said, there’s £40bn of savings to be had. Here is the report:
The modelling for the analysis has shown that the deployment of flexibility technologies could save the UK energy system £17-40 billion cumulative to 2050 against a counterfactual where flexibility technologies are not available
Ok, so it’s not £40bn of savings. The modeling says getting it wrong will cost £40bn more than picking better options. Or if the technologies don’t appear then it will be more expensive..
What are these “flexible grid technologies”?
Demand Management
The first one is the effectively untested idea of demand management (see XVIII – Demand Management & Levelized Cost) which allows the grid operator to shift peoples’ demand to when supply is available. (Remember that the biggest current challenge of an electricity grid is that second by second and minute by minute the grid operators have to match supply with demand – this is a big challenge but has been conquered with dispatchable power and a variety of mechanisms for the different timescales). I say untested because only small-scale trials have been done with very mixed results, and some large-scale trials are needed. They will be expensive. As the report says:
Demand side response has a key role in providing flexibility but also has the greatest uncertainty in terms of cost and uptake
However, with a big enough stick you get the result you want. The question is how palatable that is to voters and what kind of stomach politicians have for voter unrest. For example, increase the cost of electricity to £100/kWhr when little is available. Once you hear that a few friends received a £10,000 bill that they can’t get out of and are being taken to court you will be running around the house turning everything off and paying close attention to the tariff changes. When the tariff soars, you are all sitting in your house in your winter coats (perhaps with a small bootleg butane heater) with the internet off, the TV off, the lights off and singing entertaining songs about your favorite politicians.
I present this not in parody, but just to demonstrate that it is completely possible to get demand management to work. Just need a strong group of principled politicians with the courage of their convictions and no fear of voters.. (yes, that last bit was parody, if you are a politician you have to be afraid of voters, it’s the job requirement).
So the challenge isn’t “the technology”, it’s the cost of rolling out the technology and how inflexible consumers are with their demand preferences. What is the elasticity of demand? What results will you get? And the timescale matters. If you need people to delay using energy by one hour, you get one result. If you need people to delay using energy by two days, you get a completely different result. There is no data on this.
Pick a few large cities, design the experiments, implement the technology and use it to test different time horizons in different weather over a two year period and see how well it works. This is an urgent task that a few countries should have seriously started years ago. Data is needed.
Storage
Table 26 in the appendices has some storage costs, which for bulk storage “Includes a basket of technologies such as pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage” and is costed in £/kW – with a range of about £700 – 1,700/kW ($900 – 2,200/kW). This is for a 12 hour duration – typical daily cycle. These increase somewhat over the time period in question (to 2050) as you might expect.
For distributed storage “Based on a basket of lithium ion battery technologies” ranges from £900 – 1,300/kW today falling to £400 – 900/kW by 2050. This is for a 2 hour duration (and a 5-year lifetime). Meaning that the cost per unit of energy stored is £450 – 650/kWhr today falling to £200 – 450/kWhr by 2050. So they don’t have super-optimistic cost reductions for storage.
The storage calculations under various scenarios range from 10-20GW with a couple of outliers (5GW and 28GW).
My back of the envelope calculation says that if you can’t expand pumped hydro, don’t build your gas plants, and do need to rely on batteries, then for a 2-day wind hiatus and no demand management you would spend “quite a bit”. This is based on the expected energy use (below) of about 60GW = 2,880 GWhr for 48 hours. Converting to kWhr we get 2,880 x 106 and multiplying by the cost of £300/kWhr = £864bn every 5 years, or £170bn per year. UK GDP is about £2,000bn per year at the moment. This gives an idea of the cost of batteries when you want to back up power for a period of days.
Backup Plants
The backup gas plants show as around 20GW of CCGT and somewhere between 30-90GW of peaking plants added by 2050 (depending on the scenario). This makes sense. You need something less expensive than storage. It appears the constraint is the requirement to cut emissions so much that even running these plants as backup for low wind / no wind is a problem.
Expected Energy Use
The consumed electricity for 2020 is given (in the appendix) as 320-340 TWhr. Dividing by the number of hours in the year gives us the average output of 36-39 GW, which seems about right (recent figures from memory were about 30GW for the UK on average).
In 2050 the estimate is for 410-610 TWhr or an average of 47-70GW. This includes electric vehicles and heating – that is, all energy is coming from the grid – so on the surface it seems too low (current electricity usage is about 40% of total energy). Still, I’ve never tried to calculate it and they probably have some assumptions (not in this report) on improved energy efficiency.
Cost of Electricity in 2050 under These Various Scenarios
n/a
Conclusion
The key challenges for large-scale reductions in CO2 emissions haven’t changed. It is important to try and identify what future cost scenarios vs current plans will result in the most pain, but it’s clear that the important data to chart the right course is largely unknown. Luckily, report summaries can put some nice window-dressing on the problems.
As always with reports for public consumption the executive summary and the press release are best avoided. The chapters themselves and especially the appendices give some data that can be evaluated.
It’s clear that large-scale interconnectors across the country are needed to deliver power from places where high wind exists (e.g. west coast of Scotland) to demand locations (e.g. London). But it’s not clear that inter-connecting to Europe will solve many problems because most of northern and central Europe will be likewise looking for power when their wind output is low on a cold winter evening. Perhaps inter-connecting to further locations, as reviewed in XII – Windpower as Baseload and SuperGrids is an option, although this wasn’t reviewed in the paper.
It wasn’t clear to me from the report whether gas plants without storage/demand management/importing large quantities of European electricity would solve the problem except for too aggressive CO2 reduction targets. It sorted of hinted that the constraint of CO2 emissions forced the gas plants to less and less backup use, even though their available capacity was still very high in 2050. Wind turbines plus interconnectors around the country plus gas plants are simple and relatively quantifiable (current gas plants aren’t really optimized for this kind of backup but it’s not peering into a crystal ball to make an intelligent estimate).
The cost of electricity in 2050 for these scenarios wasn’t given in this report.
Articles in this Series
Renewable Energy I – Introduction
Renewables II – Solar and Free Lunches – Solar power
Renewables III – US Grid Operators’ Opinions – The grid operators’ concerns
Renewables IV – Wind, Forecast Horizon & Backups – Some more detail about wind power – what do we do when the wind goes on vacation
Renewables V – Grid Stability As Wind Power Penetration Increases
Renewables VI – Report says.. 100% Renewables by 2030 or 2050
Renewables VII – Feasibility and Reality – Geothermal example
Renewables VIII – Transmission Costs And Outsourcing Renewable Generation
Renewables IX – Onshore Wind Costs
Renewables X – Nationalism vs Inter-Nationalism
Renewables XI – Cost of Gas Plants vs Wind Farms
Renewables XII – Windpower as Baseload and SuperGrids
Renewables XIII – One of Wind’s Hidden Costs
Renewables XIV – Minimized Cost of 99.9% Renewable Study
Renewables XV – Offshore Wind Costs
Renewables XVI – JP Morgan advises
Renewables XVII – Demand Management 1
Renewables XVIII – Demand Management & Levelized Cost
Renewables XIX – Behind the Executive Summary and Reality vs Dreams
Thank you – it’s nice to get a reasonably objective (and only somewhat cynical 🙂 ) look into a source that allows better (albeit still somewhat tenuous) source that allows some hope of deriving ‘ballpark’ figures for such systems. ||
Comment only: The given cost of Lithium cell based backup can be translated into cost/kWh given some assumptions. For “£450 – 650/kWhr today falling to £200 – 450/kWhr by 2050.” and a 5 year lifetime -> If we assume one cycle/day (about 2000 cycles say (which is in the order of right for eg current LiFePO4 technology) then the cost per kWh is 23 – 33 p/kWh now and 10 – 23 p / kWh by 2050. The current cost is somewhat higher than small volume few-kWh cells so is presumably meant to handle the whole storage system with perhaps longer lifetimes for some major non-battery components. If the system allows eg 2 cycles/day with the same lifetime $/kWh about halve and start to become almost bearable – ie probably still somewhat higher than the wholesale consumer market costs per unit of the supplied energy. Without such a ‘2+ cycles per day’ capability at those costs and lifetimes, the unspecified 2050 costs per unit appear to be liable to either be dominated by storage costs – or somewhat lower, with the gas stations getting substantially more use than they currently hope.
One of the references in the report analyzed was: Value of Flexibility in a Decarbonised Grid and System Externalities of Low-Carbon Generation Technologies, For the Committee on Climate Change, October 2015.
A few extracts:
And a very interesting comment:
By flexibility they mean:
– low cost storage (let’s hope)
– demand management (let’s test and see)
– interconnection to other grids (let’s ask them if they will provide energy when we need it)
Yet another confirmation that levelized cost is not an accurate metric for wind and solar. When someone tries to tell you that wind or solar is cheaper than nuclear or even fossil fuel generation, consume large quantities of salt.
I respectfully suggest the following change to your summary:
We’re choosing between all these expensive options trying to understand which one (or what mix) will be the least expensive. Unfortunately we don’t know but we need to start now because we’ve already committed to this huge carbon reduction by 2050. If we make a good pick then we’ll spend the least amount of a lot of money and will be left with the fewest negative outcomes, but if we get it wrong we will be left with many more negative outcomes and even higher costs for a long time.
Well done as always. I also should note that everything you say about the situation in the UK is replicating itself in New York State.
“For example, increase the cost of electricity to £100/kWhr when little is available.”
C’mon that’s a ridiculous example. There’s no need to charge anything like that. We already have Economy 7 pricing in the UK which successfully diverts a large amount of space and water heating demand to the off peak on the basis of a ~7p/kWh differential.
People won’t be sitting around in the dark shivering and singing songs to each other. Within about a decade virtually all lighting should be LED, mobile devices use bugger all and have batteries and TVs will still cost a few pennies an hour to watch at peak prices. If we’re going to electrify space heating then we’ll need to have got our act together on thermal efficiency and our homes would stay toasty throughout the peak without any heat input. You would avoid doing your laundry and baking at the peak but surely that’s not too arduous?
But only relatively modest amounts of electricity are going to be shifted in our homes. Electric vehicles and hot water will be the heavy lifters. A typical electric car uses about 2,000 to 2,500kWh per year, costing about £300 per year at standard tariff prices. You’re not going to want to charge your car at the peak that much when you can cut that cost to a fraction of that by doing the bulk of your charging overnight.
JamieB wrote: “If we’re going to electrify space heating then we’ll need to have got our act together on thermal efficiency and our homes would stay toasty throughout the peak without any heat input.”
This can not be done overnight. 2050 is pretty close to overnight, when it come to building stock. Also, you are assuming power production from nuclear and fossil fuel, as explained below.
JamieB wrote: “You would avoid doing your laundry and baking at the peak but surely that’s not too arduous?”
JamieB wrote: “But only relatively modest amounts of electricity are going to be shifted in our homes. … You’re not going to want to charge your car at the peak that much when you can cut that cost to a fraction of that by doing the bulk of your charging overnight.”
You are implicitly assuming power production from nuclear and fossil fuel. With such conventional production, the diurnal cycle in demand is a major issue in matching electricity production and use. But with solar and wind, everything changes. You won’t have any solar at night, so if that is a big part of production, it will be nighttime when rates are high. Then when do you charge your electric car? But rates will be really high when you have a week with no sun and little wind. Then you will have little choice but to stay home and shiver in the dark.
Not at all. Solar will only ever be able to supply about 10%, maybe 15% of the UK’s electricity supply. Wind will provide the bulk and I wouldn’t turn down tidal even though it is very expensive. We’ll likely need nukes and gas (possibly even unabated gas if CCS proves too expensive / impossible) to get us through the lulls. High penetrations of renewables are eminently feasible; the key will be to get our demand down.
JamieB,
The point of the extreme example is to demonstrate that demand management can accomplish exactly what you need if you raise the prices “enough”.
The point wasn’t to say that this is the value that will get the result that you want.
The important data is not yet available.
Your optimism is not shared by many who have studied it – like the link which has some extracts from Paul Joskow. I’ll give one of his comments here:
There is a big question when we think about running largely off wind and trying to make use of “smart grid technologies” (demand management is one of these technologies):
– Can you cut demand by 20% for days in a row with demand management?
– Can you cut demand by 50% for days in a row with demand management?
– Can you cut demand by 80% for days in a row with demand management?
Perhaps you think – “yes, it’s easy”. I doubt it without a big painful stick (very high price).
Perhaps you think – “that’s not necessary”. If you look at some of the wind studies back in this series you will see that even with extensive (geographically speaking) wind networks, like from Maine all the way to the Florida Keys you can still get a week with very low wind power.
I doubt that demand management will achieve days with low power, without a stick that is too painful.
What are its limits? How much benefit can demand management achieve?
The reality needs to be tested.
I haven’t seen any suggestions that demand management will be used to cut demand for days at a time. That’s not really the point of it. Demand management will predominantly be used to shift demand in the order of minutes or hours, possibly up to a day or so. For extended calm periods, other sources of supply will need to be brought into play.
For me the most intriguing aspects of demand management are less about reducing demand at the peak and more about being able to dispatch demand (especially EVs) during off peak periods and periods of very high generation. This will reduce the need for curtailment and should allow a considerably higher penetration of variable sources than would otherwise be possible.
JamieB,
Good luck with that when you’re switching to electric vehicles and electric heating. To keep EV charging demand relatively constant, you’re going to need charging stations at every parking place. Otherwise, those with day jobs are all going to plug in at the same time. In the winter, that will also coincide with the electric heat pumps using more power.
By the way, where’s the estimate for the cost to the public of retrofitting/building new housing with heat pumps and much better, i.e. some, insulation?
JamieB wrote: “For me the most intriguing aspects of demand management are less about reducing demand at the peak and more about being able to dispatch demand (especially EVs) during off peak periods and periods of very high generation. This will reduce the need for curtailment and should allow a considerably higher penetration of variable sources than would otherwise be possible.”
That is pie-in-the-sky. People are not going to let utilities draw power from their EV batteries unless they have the option of leaving the EV in the garage and using their gasoline powered vehicle. So that will never amount to much.
Mike M.,
They might if they were paid enough. £100/kWh ought to get some participants.
[…] The United Kingdom has legislation in place to make similar reductions as proposed by Cuomo. The post itself notes that “solving a problem requires understanding the scale of the problem and […]
Just like to point out that the challenges are very dependent on what country you are in. I dont envy the challenges that the UK faces and frankly think that nuclear is a sensible choice. On other hand, I dont anticipate too many hiccups getting to 95% renewable generation here in NZ (where blessed with large resources and small population).
Phil,
That’s a good point. In a previous article – XIV – Minimized Cost of 99.9% Renewable Study, I cited Budischak et al (2013):
This last sentence is a key point.
And as I’m still deriving entertainment from people using the engaging and positive term: “flexible” for renewables, while using the sad and negative term: “inflexible” for conventional electricity generation I can’t help but point out that you have a lot more “flexibility” in building a grid in any given country with “inflexible conventional generation”. You are more constrained in general in a particular country if you want to build a “flexible” renewable grid.
Technical note – this point applies not to adding a small amount of renewables. That is easy. It’s just if you want to have a mostly renewable grid then the challenges are harder.
And I repeat in case people read this comment and think I’m promoting fossil fuel generation over renewable. No, I’m just trying to assess the challenge in a realistic fashion while indulging my own individual taste in irony.
What struck me initially but I didn’t pursue it in the article.. the estimated £40bn “saving” to 2050 seems like a very low number.
It equates to a little over £1bn per year. With a population of 60M approximately, this is £16 per person per year. It’s a few cheese sandwiches a year, a couple of drinks down at your local.
If making the wrong choice or the right choice in entirely converting the UK energy system (not just the current electricity grid) over to renewable is just a £40bn mishap over 33 years then the UK government and population really has nothing to worry about.
Consequently, given the scale of the challenge, I doubt that this “saving” or “likely extra cost” is in fact anything close to reality. Or possibly all solutions are deemed to be just about equally expensive..
Which inspires me to dig for the actual estimates for the total challenge.
On demand management I expect that large scale trials will reveal graphs of this form:
The numbers are only indicative. The idea is that reducing demand by quite a lot for an hour is easy. Reducing demand by quite a lot for a day or two is hard. Put up the tariff and you get a much better result.
Over time, with high tariffs, consumers realize they are here to stay and go and buy better insulation, knit more woolly hats (hat tip Norman Tebbit), get jobs closer to home (or vote out politicians).
The slope of the lines are surely in the direction shown on my graph and the two lines are surely correctly placed relative to each other. And colder nights will produce different results from warm days.
Aside from that we have no idea what results we will get.
I see the plan to ban the sale of gasoline and diesel powered cars by 2040 and ban them from the roads by 2050 in the UK has raised questions about whether the grid will be ready for it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/25/new-diesel-petrol-cars-banned-uk-roads-2040-government-unveils/
The ten new power stations refers to stations with the size of the Hinkley Nuclear Power Stations. In the article they also say or 10,000 new wind turbines. I suspect that’s nameplate capacity, so a fairly large underestimate.
An article I read recently about an Alberta wind farm that was being decommissioned after 20 years crystallized for me the problem of relying on LCOE. When asked why the owner’s existing investment in land and infrastructure didn’t make installation of new advanced wind turbines at the site an attractive option, the owners said: “No one wants to purchase electricity in Alberta when the wind is blowing”. This is the law of supply and demand at work; something the LCOE doesn’t take into account. The owners were waiting for the government to guarantee a market and price for electricity from his farm before investing in new turbines – electricity that will mostly be delivered when it is least needed and least valuable, when the wind is blowing strongly.
If I were the owner of an isolated grid, I’d want to purchase electricity to meet peak demand from a plant with the lowest fixed cost (mostly capital cost), because the owners of that plant need to recover their fixed costs from what they charge for operating part-time perhaps 25 or 50 days a year. Their variable fuel cost would be relatively unimportant. Such peaker plant are often open-cycle natural gas because they are the cheapest to building, but have the highest fuel cost per MWh produced. Such plants don’t make economic sense on a LCOE basis.
On the other hand, I want to purchase electricity to meet base load demand from a plant that has the lowest variable costs, because I will be paying those costs 300-365 days per year. Since the capital cost is spread over nearly a whole year, the capital cost is less important. Nuclear power is only economical only when plants are run almost continuously.
When I’m purchasing power from a generator about 50% of the hours per year, an intermediate mix of fixed and variable costs may be best. I don’t want to pay the high fixed costs of nuclear power or the high fuel costs of a peaker plant.
In the past, in a somewhat competitive local power market, the existing mix of generating technologies was probably shaped by these LOCAL economic forces that aren’t properly taken into account by LCOE. If one technology were locally best in terms of both fixed and variable cost, the others probably wouldn’t exist.
What happens when we added non-dispatchable renewable generation to an existing local mix of technologies? With high fixed cost and low variable cost, renewables are competing in the base load demand segment of the marketplace. They reduce the total payments that other base load producers receive, driving up their high fixed cost charges. However, since renewables are non-dispatchable, the grid operator can’t avoid paying the fixed costs of the conventional generators needed to meet demand 24/7/365.
Consequently, governments need to still need to provide increasing incentives to increase the penetration of renewables: 1) A requirement that X% of power be purchased from renewable sources. 2) Or feed-in tariffs that guarantee a fixed price. This is placing economic strains on other technologies that compete in the high-fixed cost segment of the marketplace, particularly nuclear, which is already being squeezed by cheap natural gas. Driving out nuclear doesn’t reduce carbon emissions. Since natural gas and coal have more variable cost than fixed cost, they are hurt less by government incentives for renewables.
I read a couple more of the referenced reports and have a little more insight into how they are thinking about demand management. (I think the report was Understanding the Balancing Challenge For the Department of Energy and Climate Change, August 2012).
It seems that demand management isn’t expected to do the heavy lifting of picking up the slack of, say, a 2-day hiatus in wind energy. That’s a good thing because “demand management” is then code for “no power” or “buy your own damn storage if you want power”.
That also leaves me a little puzzled. Why?
Because if you want supply to match demand and you primarily have wind power then your longest outage determines the backup requirements (or, instead of backup, “demand management” to reduce demand).
So to ensure no blackouts you need gas plant backup to cover your long duration outages. And in this case, the only benefit of expensive storage, or possibly expensive demand management, is to minimize gas usage for short outages.
That is, your demand management or your storage (they are seen as complementary/alternatives in one of the referenced report) is only covering short duration drops in power.
So you spend a little less on gas, and you have a little less OPEX/slightly longer lifetime of CAPEX assets due to minimizing usage of these gas plants.
Very hard to see how this could be a cost-effective solution with the high cost of storage and demand management, but of course we can’t see their models or working data.
Back to the data presented in these reports:
1. The difference between getting it hopelessly wrong and wonderfully right is a few cheese sandwiches per person per year, so “no regrets” either way.
2. As of 2017, running up lots of on-shore wind farms is well understood. No game changers needed. Benefits will come with reduced cost due to economies of scale and bigger and better turbines.
3. As of 2017, running up lots of backup gas plants is well understood. No game changers needed, just some fine-tuning of the plant design to minimize capex + opex for more stop/starts (or “for the stop start profile that we envisage”).
So the future is easy. Lots of wind farms and lots of gas plants for backup. Still haven’t found the bill (only deltas are reported).
And if the reverse plasma proton anti-gravity drive gets invented in 2040 with virtually free energy for all then some regrets on cash spent but lots of positives for the future.
What am I missing?
My suspicion is that they’ve wildly underestimated the peak and possibly total demand for electricity with no fossil fuels allowed. According to the Telegraph article I linked above, electric cars alone will need a 50% increase in peak generating capacity, an additional 30GW, by 2040. That will continue to increase until 2050 when fossil fuel cars are banned entirely.
SoD wrote: “So to ensure no blackouts you need gas plant backup to cover your long duration outages. And in this case, the only benefit of expensive storage, or possibly expensive demand management, is to minimize gas usage for short outages.”
I think that is the point. The whole exercise is about minimizing CO2 emissions, not minimizing cost.
SoD wrote: “So you spend a little less on gas, and you have a little less OPEX/slightly longer lifetime of CAPEX assets due to minimizing usage of these gas plants.”
And they are probably assuming low capital cost open cycle gas plants.
SoD wrote: “Very hard to see how this could be a cost-effective solution with the high cost of storage and demand management, but of course we can’t see their models or working data.”
I suppose you are being nice by saying “very hard” rather than “impossible”. To me, this is a red flag that they are indulging in funny bookkeeping.
SoD wrote: “The difference between getting it hopelessly wrong and wonderfully right is a few cheese sandwiches per person per year, so “no regrets” either way.”
If you believe that they are not engaged in funny bookkeeping. I find it hard to imagine having tens of billions in assets sitting around with staff and dong nothing except to wait for a long wind outage. I have little doubt that such assets will be cut to the bone and will prove inadequate when an extreme event occurs. The cost of that will be a lot more than a few cheese sandwiches.
After writing that, I realize that the authors of the report are likely designing to some unreasonably low level of reliability, like 99%.
[…] Buchanan ”From the Inside Looking Out” quote via CH * Hayek vs Hobbes and the theory of law * Renewables XIX – Behind the Executive Summary and Reality vs Dreams – […]
[…] Buchanan ”From the Inside Looking Out” quote via CH * Hayek vs Hobbes and the theory of law * Renewables XIX – Behind the Executive Summary and Reality vs Dreams – […]
[…] Buchanan ”From the Inside Looking Out” quote via CH * Hayek vs Hobbes and the theory of law * Renewables XIX – Behind the Executive Summary and Reality vs Dreams – […]
M.Z. Jacobson is suing PNAS and the authors of a paper rebutting Jacobson, et. al., 2015 for $10M in damages. The Jacobson paper claimed that it would be relatively easy for the US grid to be 100% powered by renewables. The catch, expanding US hydroelectric power capacity by 1000%. Of course he filed in D.C., just like Mann v Steyn. More details at Climate Etc.
I saw that. I read Jacobson’s paper and also the rebuttal – Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar, Christopher Clack et al, PNAS (2017) – and even started writing an article about the two. Not sure if I will get to complete it.
Here was my (draft) conclusion:
Here is an extract from Clack et al:
And in the “Significance” box:
Any reasonable person would sue for maximum damages given this kind of harsh language.
As Mork would say: “Oh, humor! Ar! Ar!”
I would probably put a /sarc tag after that just to be sure.
SOD writes: “The best way to introduce a new idea is for it to be tried, and for lessons learnt to be learnt and incorporated into the next version.”
The first place one might find 100% renewable power is on islands. Apparently one of the Spanish Canary Islands is running on a combination of wind and pumped hydro, including a desalination plant.
https://www.ecowatch.com/5-islands-leading-the-charge-toward-100-renewable-energy-1882082979.html
No, the article didn’t mention how much electricity costs there.
Frank wrote: “The first place one might find 100% renewable power is on islands. … No, the article didn’t mention how much electricity costs there.”
Small islands typically have to rely on diesel for electricity. That is very expensive, so renewables make a lot more sense than on the mainland. That is especially true if the island is in the tropics with highly consistent patterns of wind and sun. In comparison with burning diesel, electricity storage is practical if all you have to deal with is a mismatch of a few hours between production and demand. But in mid-latitudes, you can have mismatches of days, or even a weak or more. That is a massive problem.
[…] Renewables XIX – Behind the Executive Summary and Reality vs Dreams […]
For a prominent environmentalist/progressive’s evolving view of renewable energy, see the link below. The author, Michael Shellenberger, biography:
Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. My writings have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Nature Energy, and PLOS Biology.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/15/solar-and-wind-lock-in-fossil-fuels-that-makes-saving-the-climate-harder-slower-more-expensive/#4716c78c21d4
Solar and Wind Lock-In Fossil Fuels — And That Makes Saving the Climate Harder & More Expensive
“Cambridge’s David MacKay [author of “Without Hot Air”] understood this problem all too well.
After he said, “I have always tried to avoid advocating particular solutions” he then added — referencing his terminal cancer — “but maybe because time is getting thinner, I should call a spade a spade.”
MacKay proceeded to do just that. “There is this appalling delusion people have,” he said, “that we can take this thing [solar] that is currently producing one percent of our electricity and we can just scale it up.”
[…] I have paraphrased this language from the Behind the Executive Summary and Reality vs Dreams post from the highly recommended Science of Doom Renewable Energy […]
[…] would like to summarize where I think we are in New York State by paraphrasing language from the Behind the Executive Summary and Reality vs Dreams post (from the highly recommended Science of Doom Renewable Energy […]
Two recent papers on the reality of renewable electricity generation.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae102
Abstract: Power density is the rate of energy generation per unit of land surface area occupied by an energy system. The power density of low-carbon energy sources will play an important role in mediating the environmental consequences of energy system decarbonization as the world transitions away from high power-density fossil fuels. All else equal, lower power densities mean larger land and environmental footprints. The power density of solar and wind power remain surprisingly uncertain: estimates of realizable generation rates per unit area for wind and solar power span 0.3–47 We m−2 and 10–120 We m−2 respectively. We refine this range using US data from 1990–2016. We estimate wind power density from primary data, and solar power density from primary plant-level data and prior datasets on capacity density. The mean power density of 411 onshore wind power plants in 2016 was 0.50 We m−2. Wind plants with the largest areas have the lowest power densities. Wind power capacity factors are increasing, but that increase is associated with a decrease in capacity densities, so power densities are stable or declining. If wind power expands away from the best locations and the areas of wind power plants keep increasing, it seems likely that wind’s power density will decrease as total wind generation increases. The mean 2016 power density of 1150 solar power plants was 5.4 We m−2. Solar capacity factors and (likely) power densities are increasing with time driven, in part, by improved panel efficiencies. Wind power has a 10-fold lower power density than solar, but wind power installations directly occupy much less of the land within their boundaries. The environmental and social consequences of these divergent land occupancy patterns need further study.
These conclusions are somewhat misleading as they reflect the power density produced by all renewable generators, not the more efficient generation that is currently begin installed. Nevertheless these values are less than 2 W/m2 and 10 W/m2 cited in MacKay’s “Without Hot Air”. When wind turbines are placed too close together (to produce 2 W/m2), the turbulence produced by each turbine reduces the output of downwind turbines.
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30446-X
Abstract: We find that generating today’s US electricity demand (0.5 TWe) with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24°C. [Local warming at wind farms would be 0.55 °C.] Warming arises, in part, from turbines redistributing heat by mixing the boundary layer. Modeled diurnal and seasonal temperature differences are roughly consistent with recent OBSERVATIONS of warming at wind farms, reflecting a coherent mechanistic understanding for how wind turbines alter climate. The warming effect is: small compared with projections of 21st century warming, approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity generation, and large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity with wind. For the same generation rate, the climatic impacts from solar photovoltaic systems are about ten times smaller than wind systems. Wind’s overall environmental impacts are surely less than fossil energy. Yet, as the energy system is decarbonized, decisions between wind and solar should be informed by estimates of their climate impacts.
The authors say: “Wind’s warming can exceed avoided warming from reduced emissions for a century.” Others have looked at the data in this paper and said the global warming that could be avoided in 2100 by getting all US electricity by 2080 from wind power (0.1 degC) is less than the local and national warming from wind farms. This somewhat misleading statement reflects the fact that effects of CO2 emissions accumulate with time (as long as fossil fuel lasts), whereas the warming effect of a wind farm is immediate and localized to the US or the immediate vicinity of the wind farm. Since the US is only 3% of the planet, the global warming caused by US wind farms would be 0.007 degC, far less than the 0.1 degC of warming that would be caused by 80 more years of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel generators.