Discussion for article #236267
The article misses one important synergy for replacing oil: electric car batteries could potentially provide much of the storage to deal with variability in electricity production from renewables. Current batteries donât provide enough charge cycles for this to be economic but that will probably change in the near future.
I donât understand this point:
âIn Germany, the nuclear phaseout, which ends in 2022, means that the coal phaseout will start in 2023,â says Morris.
âAt that point, there is nothing left to protect coal in the power sector, so the coal phaseout will begin that year with or without an official policy.â
While you point to the aggressive posture taken by Germany, you neglect to mention that German CO2 emissions have increased while those of the US have decreased (the latter because of gas substitution for coal). Germany is also now busy building lignite-powered power plants - the very worst source possible from the perspective of CO emissions.
Why so much emphasis in the first half of this article on the need for utility-scale storage for renewables to grow? Utility-scale storage will of course contribute to the growth of renewables, but it is by no means the sine qua non that this article seems to suggest.
Instead of storage, orchestrating complementary renewable sources works quite well, as demonstrated in this short video from the Rocky Mountain Institute, The storage necessity myth: how to choreograph high-renewables electricity systems
RMIâs recommendations are reflected in the conclusions of the National Renewable Energy Labâs Renewable Energy Futures Study, which found that the U.S. could receive 80% of its energy needs from renewables by 2050 using todayâs technology - including todayâs storage technology, and in the work of Stanford professor Mark Jacobsen who modeled how Californiaâs energy load could be met with 100% renewable energy with very little utility-scale storage required. The NREL study, in particular, is worth examining. It is the most substantial attempt to date to model the potential of renewables to supplant fossil fuels in the U.S. energy mix. Their conclusions were a bit more optimistic than those presented in this article.
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To the extent you meet variability by over-capacity, then the owners of the renewable sources need to accept that most of the time (when there is excess capacity) they wonât get paid much for their power.
With true variable pricing for both consumers and suppliers (including âsurgeâ pricing a la Uber), de-centralized storage solutions will naturally emerge.
Electric energy storage is a big issue. I agree that utility-scale storage is not the only means to address storage needs. But I donât think the answer is as straightforward as relying on a distributed network of car batteries.
Itâs my understanding that utilities use (and make their plans for) storage based on load management. They want storage as a way to briefly transition loads as (typically) gas turbines are turned on or off. In other words, utilities think of batteries as storage for minutes of time. Thatâs why they mostly talk of storage in power units (MW or GW) and not in capacity units like megawatt-hours. But for renewables - think solar as the quintessential example - itâs not storage rates that matter as much as capacities, because demand goes on for hours after production tapers off and finishes for the day. Wind can blow at all hours of course, but in many places wind also tapers off at night.
I see a problem relating to baseline demand. Should renewables start becoming significant in the total electric energy source mix (the article mentions 40%, which is a decent milestone to consider), their time variable character really requires a lot of storage capacity - again not in GW but in GWh, which is a whole different ballgame. Electric car batteries today are marketed as being recharged at night, so thereâs a full charge available for the morning commute. But if car batteries are used as a distributed storage medium instead, theyâll be drained at night as the renewable sources taper down (wind) or are off (solar). To avoid that, we would want a clean non-fossil fuel reliable baseline source, which would be what? Hydro is great, if youâve got it; what if not? Nuclear? Thatâs a whole can of worms.
My point here is that storage is a huge deal. While it would be wonderful if everyone had a solar rooftop and a Tesla battery module installed in their home, I donât see that widely happening in a practical sense, financially, logistically, and politically. I envision todayâs energy companies morphing (gracefully I hope, but unfortunately doubt) into energy storage companies. And that means huge scale storage.
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I think that gets back to the infrastructure challenge. Every electric car would require a âsmartâ plug where itâs parked at night and where itâs parked during the day.
Youâd also need some consumer controls so they were assured they wouldnât get âtheirâ power drained when they need it, maybe the smart plugs only pull on the top 20% of the battery life or you time the batter to get to 100% charge 20 minutes before the end of your work day.
Could an editor please put the stray commas out of their misery? Like the last one in â[o]il, natural gas, and coal, have endured steady price declinesâ. Itâs very jarring and makes the piece (which I otherwise find very worthwhile) unnecessarily difficult to read.
Take a financial accounting perspective on the transition. The US electric utilities industry have a massive sunk cost in generating capacity that is now predicted to depreciate significantly in value. When renewable generating capacity is cheaper than existing capacity it forces revaluation of the existing assets to the lower current market value.
Instead of being able to depreciate these assets over a 30 or 40 year useful life - they are marked to market at a lower replacement cost, which flows through as a hit to earnings. Utilities are about to become much less secure to the extent that they own generating capacity and independent generating corporations will face an even more wild ride.
If investors (bond holders, really) thought that the Energy Future Holdings bankruptcy was disruptive, the next few years may be much more turbulent.
Well the utilities in Germany basically collapsed over the past few years.
The issue for merchant generators is that renewables have a zero marginal cost, so they will always be first in line for utilization. That serves to flatted some (but not all) of the peaks where power companies make most of their money. Itâs the same logic whereby lower natural gas prices in the US unintuitively lead to lower profits overall for utilities even though natural gas is a cost for them.
There are side issues I wish some people would talk about. For example, Iâm still puzzled by the phaseout of nuclear by Germany. I donât exactly object to it, but it seemed the nuclear sector could have been phased out much more slowly by allowing reactors to largely finish their life cycles. That has made the phaseout of coal a slower process, though at least the process is proceeding (though one should notice that improving residential, office and industrial energy efficiency is also part of the mix in Europe). Germany will be a key country to watch since its leading on many of these issues and will be among the first to transition away from fossil fuels.
Itâs ironic that Republicans in the United States are so pro-fossil fuel and insist on policies that are to some extent national rather than state-oriented. The transition to alternative energy is going to have surprises, bumps and breakthroughs as other technological changes have had. The more these transitions can happen at the state and/or regional level, the more systems the U.S. can try out, with help hopefully provided at the national level where needed and where promising. As it is, not all solutions are going to work for all states.
It occurs to me that not all projects have to run 24/7 even if they are capable of doing so. There may be projects, particularly in partnership with a state or regulated business where itâs possible to use a project something like a battery. As just an example, it might be possible to build several small desalination plants (small being easier on the environment) that provide needed water in California but that can be constructed to easily put on low power for internal uses while being used as a regional power source when needed. Of course the water doesnât have to be used immediately. It can be sent on for use by a hydropower dam first, thus replenishing another kind of battery.
There was a time, now getting a bit distant, when Republicans and Democrats would join on promoting ideas and technology in real ways. President Obama has been resourceful, and money for ideas in many cases has paid off well. Weâre at a time when we need new technology. I hope Hillary Clinton pushes for the new funding of ideas that we so obviously need.
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Interestingly, I go into some detail on the Jacobson (2014) study on powering California solely on renewables (or as the study puts itâon wind, water, and sunlight â WWS) in the upcoming and final installment in this series, Part V, to be published in the next week or two. I actually spent the entire flight from Portland to DC reading that paper quite carefully. Itâs big, with lots of data.
Itâs not clear that we disagree, about the necessity of storage. But let me clarify where my position on storage is today, based on my discussions with power professionals in Europe and the US, and also in the light of the Jacobson paper. In short, thereâs a cranky group of renewable naysayers who are wrong about the necessity of storage as we move from 0% to 40% renewables in the system. In Europe and in the US, over-generation is already being re-routed effectivity.
But even the most renewable friendly power professionals and academics agree that some sort of significant infrastructure will be needed at higher levels of renewables penetration. I think we disagree that the Jacobson paper models a 100% California without storage. Perhaps it would be better to characterize the paper as insufficiently addressing storage, and its costs. This was a problem with previous Jacboson models/papers. Though in the 2014 paper his team does project a roughly 1.1 trillion capital outlay on new energy infrastructure which does include storage.
Just to step back here, this does not mean that we are fated to bow down before the hurdle of storage as presently conceived. Indeed, there may be tech, relay, routing, and other clever methods to exploit existing infra, such that when we are out in the years 2025 or 2030, we discover that we can exploit many battery-like systems already in place, and our need to build storage as typically defined, falls. I have talked to entrepreneurs who are already thinking about this form of utilization.
However, I must assert that the very best professionals from MIT to Carnegie Mellon, to various think tanks and pros in this area are looking at the spikes that are inevitable in future generation from renewables and those spikes are not going to be efficiently re-routed to other demand domains in the system we have today.
FWIW, as I will show in the upcoming article, the conversation has almost completely changed with regard to the cost and potential of 100% renewables energy systems. Further, I absolutely agree with a key feature of the Jacboson model for which heâs been criticized: his systemic savings to health and life quality are included as an offset to the cost of the infra buildout. As I am friendly to environmental economics, I am in fully agreement that the economy is a subset of the environment, not the other way around.
All best,
Gregor
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Yes, if one is going to model a 100% renewable system without âstorageâ (and remember, what we call storage today may be different than what we call storage in the future when we may be able to leverage existing infraâthus saving costsâto the task of storage) then the long-term ROI of renewables power generation is going to fall. Indeed, as most understand, capturing over-generation and storing it is an absolute must to make cost-models work for building out the renewable generation in the first place. If we lose volumes of over-generation, then the payback time lengthens.
Iâm all for having two distinct discussions about storage at the same time: In one, we model the cost of storage as part of out overall costs given the landscape we have today, and in another, we model some quantity of excellent savings based on tech improvements to storage.
Best,
G
Agreed. I touch upon the potential for using existing infra, like car batteries, in the next article. Tech innovation is almost certainly going to tie in many disparate systems together, driving efficiencies and time-shifting loads so that when wind or solar over-generation takes place, home and car battery infra will be at-the-ready to download those kW.
Best,
G
. The integration of major efficiencies into the German built-environment, affecting everything from building construction standards to transport, has been underway for years even as Germany has added enormous volumes of wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal.
To what extent does energy efficiency ameliorate the need for grid storage solutions? Is investment in EE less expensive than investing in storage capacity? If so, how much excess demand is created through inefficient use of energy now, whatever itâs source? Your analysis of the impact of large scale renewable generation on the grid clearly demands smart solutions, I am just wondering how to value the energy we consciously donât use when analyzing the macro-economics of energy usage.
Since the series began, outlets like Bloomberg have done a run of stories on the changing mix of US power generation. I wanted to note the latest media property to tell this story is Politico, which ran a big piece today: âInside the War on Coalâ http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/inside-war-on-coal-000002
I disagree with the headline. In fact, if you read through the text, youâll note the author admits itâs not the lawyers that were mainly the reason for coal retirements, but rather many of the factors Iâve laid out in this series: old plants, cheap natural gas, and the rise of renewables.
All best,
G
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