Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage.
Hydrogen as Fuel
Provided that there’s a supply of water nearby, turbines, solar farms, or even excess electricity on the grid, hydrogen can be produced by electrolysis. This hydrogen could then be transported for use as a fuel, thus decoupling the need for a renewable resource like a wind farm to be physically connected to the bulk electric grid. Often wind resources are extremely far from population centers so an alternative energy delivery system that doesn’t involve building long transmission lines could make sense in some situations. Some experiments find that hydrogen can be pumped in much the same way that natural gas currently is, although it doesn’t have the same energy content per unit volume. Hydrogen could alternatively be used locally as an energy storage method as well, using excess energy to produce hydrogen during situations where the dispatcher would otherwise curtail the wind farm, with the hydrogen stored and used later to generate electricity at a time when the wind isn’t blowing. This could be a viable alternative to battery storage at wind farms, especially as current forecasts expect a significantly large percentage of all new batteries to be used in electric vehicles.
Producing hydrogen by electrolysis is not currently done on a large scale because it’s not the most efficient way of producing hydrogen, but there are two reasons for that which are slowly becoming less relevant. First, with an arbitrarily large amount of free renewable energy the cost of that energy becomes less of an issue. Second, most industrial hydrogen is currently produced using fossil fuels, which is not a great long-term method when it comes to climate change. But this may be an increasingly useful avenue of exploration in the years to come.
Hydrogen as an Intermediary
Hydrogen does have a number of downsides, though. The obvious issues of dealing with flammable gasses aside, hydrogen molecules are extremely tiny and are thus difficult to contain in traditional storage vessels. Any small imperfection will cause the gas to leak out much more rapidly than other fuels. Much to Toyota’s chagrin, as they are deeply invested in hydrogen technology with little to show for it, there is also no developed hydrogen infrastructure largely because electricity is far superior as a energy transportation method. To mitigate these problems, however, a hydrogen-producing wind or solar farm could be put to use producing ammonia instead, with the electrolytic hydrogen only used as an intermediary instead of using it as a fuel source directly. This “green ammonia” can be burned directly or used in fuel cells for electricity production, and is much less of an escape artist than pure hydrogen.
Another downside to generating hydrogen or ammonia with renewable energy is that it requires a large amount of water, which may be less available as climate change progresses in a concerning number of areas other than the open ocean. However, in areas with enormous reserves such as the Great Lakes region in North America, the Amazon River Basin in South America, or the Lake Baikal area in Siberia, this could be a drop in the bucket. Not every place on earth lends itself to wind or solar energy production, but in general wind may be preferred because it tends to have a higher capacity factor than solar and uses less land area.
Other Uses for Renewable Energy
Wind turbines can still be put to more direct use than generating fuel or electricity, as any 17th century Netherlander would be able to confirm. They’re often used to directly pump water from wells for livestock in places without electricity just as they once pumped water to create the iconic Dutch polders. They can also be used to directly generate heat with no electric intermediary stage, which we covered briefly in this article. Although this is not in widespread use, it’s a conceivable future where wind technology is more easily-accessible and heating needs aren’t able to be met by more traditional sources.
Of course, as a global society we’ve largely settled on electricity as an energy transportation method for good reason instead of using flammable gasses like hydrogen. It’s instantaneous, efficient, and versatile, so anything looking to generate energy in other forms is going to be an extreme outlier. But as we hopefully transition to a post-fossil society, electrolytic hydrogen production methods may gain more widespread adoption.
>Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it.
This is technically always, since wind or solar simply don’t respond to demand – except by turning off when there isn’t any.
>for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed
This is almost all the time, and for most of the energy. If you look at the peak-to-average ratio of wind and solar on the grid scale, you get peaks that regularly exceed 5-8 times the average output. Once these peaks grow large enough, they exceed what the grid can use, store, or export to other grids. That limit is is reached when the average output of renewable power on the grid reaches about 15-25%. That is to say, about 80% of your energy will always come from somewhere else than renewable power directly, unless you can sink massive amounts of excess power somewhere.
For very tiny countries that live next to very large countries, like Denmark, the nominal amount of renewable energy on the grid can reach higher percentage points without doing anything special, but that’s only by accounting because the whole system works by the fact that you have a 5 million people country sitting in the junction point of a grid with capacity for 500 million consumers. If all the neighboring countries were doing the same, the European synchronous grid would collapse on itself.
For example, if you look at the peak sun hours of your location, you can calculate roughly how much of the time solar power is producing. Example, Berlin, Germany: 1,626 hours per year. That is, the sun is up and not covered by clouds for about 18% of the time.
For wind power, depending on your local wind speed distribution, the typical case is that you get 50% of the energy output in 15% of the running hours, Those are the peak wind hours and the other half of production happens gradually over time at a fraction of the power output.
It’s because renewable power is both non-dispatchable and extremely “peaky” that other generators need to be running constantly, occasionally dipping down to let renewable power into the grid instead. This is why renewable power is so difficult to integrate into the grid in greater amounts.
Yes, it’s not as easy to integrate as doing the same old thing again, but that’s the thing – wind and solar can compete despite playing catch-up. They’re of course *more* competitive with the advantage of being allowed to sell as much as possible, or especially with the kind of rich-get-richer power agreements where rooftop solar is highly advantageous if you can afford to install it. But even without that they’re not doing badly lately. And it’s not like we haven’t given fossil fuels the advantage of not having to fully remediate the effects of their use.
At least while the weather can make the power unstable, it’s not as dependent on what is happening on the other side of the world – as long as we sort out the battery situation. And for the life of the installation you don’t have to spend as much effort on keeping things going. With fuels you have everyone having to spend a bunch of effort on finding it, making it usable, breathing the results of using it, and keeping the whole chain working. Even without considering how someone is eventually going to have to remove all that CO2 or deal with the consequences, it’s a lot shorter of a chain of dependencies if in addition to building solar you build some dispatchable loads and some nonspecific energy storage methods in the same general area. The most volatile prices are often food and fuel; it’d be great if we could be more independent so that we weren’t as affected when someone on another continent decides to fight someone else.
>as long as we sort out the battery situation
Yes. Let’s. Still waiting for that cheap miracle battery that solves everything.
More like, we feel like we will with some effort and groaning be able to sort out the grid because anything cost-effective works there, but we need to try harder at securing specifically portable batteries for electronic devices and electric vehicles if we don’t want to be dependent on the lowest bidder overseas. A miracle would be nice, but it’s not necessary.
> And it’s not like we haven’t given fossil fuels the advantage of not having to fully remediate the effects of their use.
We don’t do that with wind or solar either. What do we do with the 15 year-old solar panels that are now useless? How to you dispose of a field of 20-story wind turbines? What is the environmental impact of strip-mining rare minerals in third-world countries to produce solar panels and all the batteries needed to make them useful?
I like renewable energy, but wind and solar are not really suited to be the main energy solution. Nuclear (while obviously having its own set of impact challenges) is a much better direction. And the climate community agrees: https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-declaration-triple-nuclear-energy-capacity-2050-recognizing-key
The panels aren’t useless, they’re usually just degraded. Even if one is impossible to reuse, many of them are pretty inert or harmless compared to most trash. Some have had small amounts of lead, probably because someone decided to use leaded solder. Otherwise you can make a perfectly good panel that’s like second-rate / impure glass as far as what you can do with it once you’ve taken the aluminum frames and copper wires away. Impure glass is useful as a filler, it’s just cheap enough not to incentivize a high rate of recycling panels when there’s better options.
The blades might be awkward for you or me to figure out how to deal with, but at the end of the day they’re still just simple solid waste rather than all sorts of fun volatile chemicals and greenhouse gases floating around. I’m not anti-nuclear, but rejecting the thing with no moving parts that turns light into power while being mostly made of sand seems a bit much. Water and windmills have been around for so long because they can be useful if you’ve got a suitable location, and you can make them out of whatever’s got good structural properties, you don’t need unobtanium.
Even the impact of some crappy mining practices until and unless we end up changing to a different source of battery materials isn’t as bad an outcome as some of the outcomes we’ve already had from fossil fuels over the course of history, even apart from climate change itself. Oil spills, smog and poor air quality from exhaust, exposure to the emissions in refineries that somehow manage to go unnoticed when they’re being tested even though everyone can feel them when they breathe… Impacts of fracking, impacts of mining for coal and then burning it… Didn’t someone say there’s more radiation exposure living near a coal plant than a nuclear plant?
The one thing you forget there is with how cheap to build and run solar and wind are it doesn’t matter if the peak is stupidly above and beyond requirement so you are shutting some of it down (infact being able to do that is probably a good thing for scheduling the rolling maintenance and putting the majority of bearing wear on the easier to service turbines when you have that choice).
What you are after is a grid that is effectively run largely or even entirely on the renewables, as ditching fossil fuels is usually the stated goal. Which means targeting the modal or mean average of your renewable output at something closer to average of demand (with things like the scale of pumped hydro and battery storage allowing a fair degree of wiggle in supply to demand matching). That those panels/turbines can produce substantially more power than that average in the right conditions really isn’t relevant, what matters is they are (across a wide enough grid) reliably at least in the right ballpark.
Yes some pretty significant energy that could have been captured won’t be as there is no way to get it to the demand, or no unserviced demand at all, but with the durability and cheapness of solar you will still massively outpay the costs of upgrading the grid to be able to ship more electricity past the current bottlenecks and creating these ‘excess’ of solar panels. While also being worth mentioning the extra cheap energy with a high degree of regularity such a setup of ‘excess’ renewables in a widely spread mesh spiking somewhere is good for everyone – all those industry* that can stack production for the glut of cheap energy will love it, so even if your electric supplier doesn’t let you have that varied rate yourself the goods you buy likely get cheaper and the fixed rate you are on shouldn’t be nearly as high as the peak cost of energy.
Also as it stands in nearly every fossil fuel powerplant vast amounts of energy that could be used are wasted – its rather rare for the waste heat, which really is a substantial resource to be used rather than dumped into cooling towers. So you can argue its not even a real change there, both concepts have a serious efficiency flaw if you want to measure it that way. Or just work really well once built if you want to measure it another – with the case in point for the excess of renewables being a good enough solution being all the folks that have been able to meet 100% of their own needs even as a very localised source so when the weather is bad they just have to deal with it, as the sun as far as they care for this situation isn’t shining anywhere else either.
*I’d suggest bulk hydrogen via electrolysis is a likely solution to co-habitat with the offshore wind for instance – source of salt water, and that potential for a massive excess of power right on the doorstep. While creating a product that really helps bridge the gap between fossil fuels and greener power options in the places battery etc don’t suit.
you forgot that – here in the UK at at least – when wind is over producing they are paid the units electricity to turn it off. That’s why it is cost-effective to build them, but the more we build the more expensive it will be for everyone to keep turning them off.
And they won’t be over producing electric that can’ t be dispatched anywhere near as often if the grid could actually shift it all to the SE where so much of the demand is… There has been a need for more N-S connections in the UK for ages.
Though the way the market is currently priced is clearly bonkers, with subsidy and cost breaks for absolute everything in some way or other often built in for decades and no real plan to provide a market that actually makes sense…
Something cheap enough that anyone could do it, even at home, is to save up resistive heat in the day to use at night. Inherently you need something oversized to consume the energy faster for the limited time it’s cheap/free, so you have to pick things that can be cheaply scaled up such as resistors. If nothing else, using the water heater just with a changed out thermostat or something works for that, thousand degree “sand batteries” aren’t the only way to do heat storage. Air conditioning is harder to gain a big advantage on; the day is already the hottest time and you’re not going to keep a massive system idle just to turn on when the power gets free. You could still put a bit of logic in your thermostat to gain some savings though, and technically you could probably get the cost numbers to work out right if you used a big thermal mass and (again very cheap) resistive heat to power an absorbtion cooler, which is too inefficient for normal use but wouldn’t need to be oversized unlike the power input by resistor.
While I hate the wastefulness of crypto mining the rest of the time, they have a point to the limited extent that marketing cheap cloud compute that runs off solar during daytime and switches off or increases its rates at night could be useful for long-running projects to save money. It could even let 8-5 operations save a bit of money on their cloud usage, I guess. And you could globalize to chase the sun if you don’t need low latency.
You missed the other part of that solution which you kind of glossed over in your examples. If you have very large grids interconnected, it may not be bright and sunny where you are, but it is when you drive 5 hours away, or the same with wind. Although they tend to try installing wind turbine farms in locations where they can extend them up out of the local wind effects where there is much more consistent wind.
It’s the most interesting political puzzle ever: If a global or continental scale grid is to be built to provide renewable energy 24/7 to everyone, this means trust and cooperation from everyone, as everyone needs everyone for some part of the day. I don’t know a precedent to a situation like this in history.
Of course, if you limit the power of wind turbines to about 20-25% of the maximum output and design the turbines to spin in slower wind speeds, you get power much more steadily, but you get half as much and it will be twice as expensive. You’d have to cost-optimize heavily to be competitive.
Likewise for solar, you can angle your panels east and west, but that again cuts your total energy output by a large amount and doubles or triples the cost of power (or payback time).
These measures are not supported by any subsidy policies, since subsidies are paid on every kWh produced or sold and you don’t get paid if you play nice and limit your output, so the incentives make it harder to integrate more renewable power on the grid.
Well….
Yes you’re right in context you’re trying to push, but as a reasonable person you should convert everything to electric ( CARs are power hungry beasts compared to MODERN WELL BUILD buildings ) and you also have to think about nuclear plants, they have to be shut down periodically for maintenance and having them shut off in summer because everyone have surplus energy and electric car battery which can supply your house in night….. provides you path for renewables to be REALLY useful and making sense. ONLY thinking about it, in old pre 2000s way of thinking, does not provide anybody a solution. Also a lot of youtubers ( or other influencers ) are intentionally WRONG on so many things, just so people comment under videos to correct them ( engagement is WHY are they paid ) . So it is weird time to be alive when 1% of population is intentionally spreading misinformation just so they get paid by algorithm and 99% of people will pay real price for listening to them. Instead of 100% of people doing right thing and that way it will be cheaper for everybody.
European union, NATO have multiple documents, analysis, calculations, overviews, based on REAL LIFE data showing renewables made sense 15 years ago ( IN PAST ). But media are constantly saying we have to wait for something ….. Ridiculous.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a manipulative propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults.
Exit matrix of FUD, welcome to reality of REAL LIFE DATA. ( data is open source, so you can search for it, just look for official documents, official data portals. )
Electric cars don’t solve the fundamental issue, and cars all told aren’t even enough to make a big difference in the whole scale of this problem.
>it is weird time to be alive when 1% of population is intentionally spreading misinformation
Unwarranted hype and blind optimism is also misinformation, and you get that a lot more since it slips the tone police more easily for being positive. Example: “This wind turbine can power 2,000 homes.”, where by “home”^ you actually mean enough power to run a tea kettle, and by “powering” you mean “when it is running in maximum wind speed”.
A common home uses between 16 – 25 MWh per year all told, but the common trick in reporting is to use the average electricity consumption only, not all of the energy that a home needs to run. The missing bit comes from gas, fuel oil, etc.
It’s because of this sort of reporting that the public has wildly distorted conceptions about the efficacy of renewable power, and how far along we actually are in doing anything with it.
Do you mean 0.16 – 0.25 MWh per year as 16 – 25 seems a bit too much (1.3 – 2 MWh per month)?
A.M. My household uses about 82 kWh/day in the worst months of the year and half that in the best months. That would be lower if we had any gas appliances or if we were able to install better insulation, and winter would be better if we didn’t need to use a heater in the wellhouse and other places to keep from freezing sometimes. I plan to get a heat pump at least, but still, the higher figure is more reasonable for a cheap all-electric house without efficiency minded design. A more efficient house without all the other stuff and with gas heating/cooking/etc in a cooler climate might be closer to your number.
While I’m not a fan of how often ‘enough for x homes’ type concept is used and often without further numbers to go with it for those that want to know it is a measure that makes sense to use as it is relatable enough in a way saying huge numbers of Wh is not- the general public know this is an electric supply and how much electric they use. Probably have a good idea from the odd conversation with parents/siblings/friends what other households use as well…
Doesn’t matter if the households still tend to use other forms of energy as well, as that has no bearing on their electric consumption, which when talking about electric generation is the thing that is actually related. So as long as these ‘enough for x homes’ reporting evolve as the common home use changes with things like heatpump replacing gas heating it remains a useful yardstick for the common person.
@spaceminions: on a little farm I know they had a storage room which was kept from freezing over by a bath tub with water in it next to the entrance. They just had to toss out the ice that formed on the surface daily and eventually add some water. It worked quite well.
You’re completely right in your remarks. However, you don’t account for many “small” devices on grid, like those that captures it when energy is cheap (hydro storage, heat generation & capture, human activity that’s mainly on the day). In the end, I’ve heard about the collapsing of the grid for maybe 20 years and I’ve yet to observe it. The grid get smarter, energy consumption now starts to deal with temporary opportunities (like charging the EV cars with low peak rate, better insulated building that can shift heating for 8h to 10h, etc…).
I think the real question isn’t “Is renewable energy going to collapse the grid if they are predominant ?” but “How the grid user can deal with sporadic energy ?”
The actors are now find solutions for the latter and it’s going quite well, IMHO.
We’re only only starting to reach the point where the grid is being destabilized. Most countries are now reaching the 10-15% integration level, which is the beginning of problems and the start of skyrocketing costs.
The reason you’ve been hearing of it for 20 years is because these problems were predicted 20 years ago when this whole circus started. They said it would happen, and now it is happening – we’re getting wildly fluctuating power flows and power prices, and the grids are stretching to their limits in transmitting the power from one market to the next.
When a sixth of all the power on your grid just comes and goes daily or even hour by hour, it is not a trivial thing to manage. The energy consumption is adapting, because people just can’t afford to pay 50 cents a kWh – and that is not a good thing.
Yes decades ago folks said this bad thing would happen, with areas of the grids being saturated transmitting power from A to B and in those decades how many capacity upgrades to the grid to correct these predicted bottle necks or open up entirely new sinks have been built?
The answer is so far almost none – but the plans to build them have been around for ages – in more than a few cases long before renewables even really came on the scene as connecting between your EU neighbours lets everyone not build quite so many power plants and run them at their most efficient… But some of these upgrades will start getting built now as even though it should have been built in advance of the need (as everyone saw that need was coming) the demand for higher capacity connections really exists now. Remember the Grid isn’t some static thing built 100 years ago that never ever evolves, so even if its slower than it should be on issues like this it will get there.
Mandatory reading: “Smelling Land – The Hydrogen Defense Against Climate Catastrophe” by David S. Scott.
https://www.amazon.com/Smelling-Land-Hydrogen-Catastrophe-Enhanced/dp/0980967406
Converting water to hydrogen would a great way to counter rising sea levels!
B^)
In that case governments should consider mandating ice maker for every household… :)
Yes, the hydrogen can be pumped into depleted gas and oil fields, and it will lift the land up slowly, keeping us ahead of sea level rise
I can’t imagine nuclear power can ever be considered dispatchable power generation. 1) nuclear is expensive to build (and maintain), all costs are expected to offset with revenue from running 100% 2) nuclear includes some spool up/down time making it a poor choice for reactive power demands (only predictive) 3) IMHO nuclear waste doesn’t significantly change with uptime and/or generation.
1) “all costs are expected to offset with revenue from running 100% ”
This is weird point in way how it works, 50% of energy of big power plants are emitted thru cooling towers as a water vapor / steam, wasted. So by using small modular nuclear reactors you can use that local heat for heating, manufacturing, hot water, growing plants in cold … Which on itself lowers electricity needs ….. And this heat is NOT calculated in that price you mean, so this heat is possible ADDITIONAL revenue from power plant ! ! ! ! ! ! ! now try to calculate it again with this heat, which is generated anyway…
Nice addition! This additional usage of waste heat also needs to be predicable. Turning up/down nuclear power generation in response to variable solar & PV availability will impact secondary usage and revenue. As such, I think that using nuclear as a dispatch power source is unlikely.
You just need a big enough buffer for immediate demand to be trivial compared to your capacity and for your average storage rate to be sufficient to fill the capacity. Something as simple as heating a bunker filled with sand during the summer and cycling a facility’s cold air return through the bunker during the winter to turn luke warm air into hot air for heating. Of course this doesn’t sound exciting to power companies because they don’t get to bill for it.
Exactly, and in winter you have most of ENERGY already used for heating ….
If i remember correctly US is using 3 times as much gas in winter then in summer…
So if people would really think about it, just only converting appliances to electricity can reduce overall energy demand at least half. ( not counting solutions as a PV which can totally cover your needs for heat at least 6 months of year on top of that… )
Or pumping heat into old gas and oil wells in texas so oil magnates can have additional revenues… ( not sure if realistic heat has to be stored locally )
In many areas of the US today, nuclear is the baseline power source with gas and coal plants being the ones brought online when needed. Winds and solar are not very good at either role since their output is not predictable and not stable enough to be baseline power without storage. The one thing few people mention is that storage is pretty inefficient and costly when you check the actual numbers. I notice a lot of the articles also seem to concentrate a lot on areas with high cooling needs in the summer. I have yet to see an article that discusses wind and solar power grids in areas where heating is the main factor like the entire Midwest and northern tier. That is because anyone in these areas already knows that electric heat in somewhere like Chicago or New York is unthinkably expensive unless electric rates drop at least by 70% or so. Not to mention that switching these areas over to electric heating systems would necessitate complete grid replacement all the way to the home. In Chicago very few homes even have electrical service that would support an all electric energy supply. Will 100 amp or at most 200 amp service charge your car, cook your dinner, heat your water and heat your home in Chicago? No way. Even in areas where politics has mandated all electric vehicles, the states have not done anything to build the grids neeeded to support the loads. It is easy to mandate comsumers and auto manufacturers do things than it is to actually build a modern power grid. Unfortunately our environment in the Modwest does not look great for solar power in the winter. When sunny days happen is not when we need the energy and the grid is not sized for electric heating or all electric cars.
BTW, nuclear power units are often throttled during operation and have been since they began service. Also, no they don’t produce the same amount of waste regardless. When you slow the reaction you burn less fuel, nuclear included. More output, shorter fuel life. When you compare nuclear waste you also cannot ignore lithium battery waste and mining pollutants that go with that. You also cannot ignore solar cell porduction waste streams. They are admittedly less dangerous than nuclear waste but there sure is a lot more of it and you don’t know where it all goes. At least me know where most high level nuclear waste is.
Resistive heat is very cheap, it’s the power that’s sometimes expensive, so even in winter if solar and wind spike enough there will be a period of time where it can make sense to dump a bunch of resistive heat into a thermal mass for later.
As long as you’re not on a very low amp service of course, but then in cities you have to hope you have utilities that make up for the lack of ability to do things on your own, and if you’re in a poorly insulated rural farmhouse with poor wiring/electric service, I think you probably had better just cut trees down to feed your woodstove rather than think about all these other options.
2) not a problem, in most European union countries ( every country calls it different name so i will be generic ) we have mechanism which can disconnect water heaters ( electric boilers ) selectively so instead of regulating power of reactor you modulate consumption of residencies , it is generic mechanism you can connect any big load which can be shut off, this does not shut of electricity to your house it just turns off your water boiler. ( electricity distribution can shut off whole region, just one village, just one circuit just to lower load if necessary. etc ) . some countries have multiple tariffs per day with different electricity price. so you have multiple ways ALREADY working to modulate electricity demand in EEA. We just need to add more renewables and we will be good.
I think we’re looking at too sides of the same coin. The article purports that nuclear should be part of the solution to the variability of wind & PV solutions. Your point and mine are inline: we need/have solutions to this variability problem including demand management (to both increase and decrease usage). Variable production from nuclear is not likely to be a primary part of the solution/
Well… depends what kind of loads / ramp ups you mean. Modern nuclear power plant can lower its output HALF in circa 15 minutes…… So that is plenty to regulate offshore wind , because wind is predictable mostly to days, to hours occasionally. And if solar is collocated with energy accumulation ( heating water for houses, LI-ION… )…
Not enough energy is hard problem.
Peak shaving is SIMPLE problem ( in most cases already solved just people do not know about it ).
( tidal turbines outpu can be predicted to MILLENNIA, moon movement…. )
Also, most forgotten thing people do not consider is that you do not damage PV panel if you disconnect it / do not use power it generates… and second is that you can adjust voltages not by using electronics but by rewiring loads from series to parallel and vice-versa…..
Tidal is not renewable energy. If only 5% of the current electrical consumption of the humanity was produced by tidal energy, then Earth would be tidally locked to the sun in 1000 years. Yes, you read that right, only a millennia from a day of 24h to a day of infinite duration.
Are you saying that if a PV panel is exposed to sunlight, but you don’t use the output, then it doesn’t degrade?
I’d like a source on that 5% power =tidallly locked in a Millennium that seems highly dubious to my sleep deprived brain
Sweethack I have said this before but that is a faulty calculation driven by the idea that we experience sustained growth in power usage of some percentage for 1000 years, and it’s exposed as ridiculous the moment you consider that we’d all have about a postage stamp worth of land to stand on if we kept reproducing at a similar rate for that length of time, and we’d use more power than is emitted by the entire sun after something like 1400 years if I remember correctly. A dyson sphere worth of power is a number that tells you you’ve made some faulty assumptions.
>you modulate consumption of residencies
That’s fine, but residences only account for about a fifth of all energy users on the grid, and hot water boilers again account for only a fraction of that.
The industry and commerce is far bigger, and when you start running down factories because power is getting too expensive, it has a huge impact on your GDP and overall cost of production. Without cheap reliable energy to run the industries, you lose jobs, which doubles the impact of high energy prices on the people. That’s what’s called energy poverty.
So much energy is for heating and resistive heat is so comparatively simple that it seems like we may find ourselves incentivizing industry to store up resistive heat in thermal masses during the peak supply times.
Also,
having renewable + nuclear and small amount of fast reacting gas power plants is cheaper, more environmentally friendly, more robust, resilient
then having only gas and nuclear, so yes you’re kinda right but you’re not seeing how that can (is) work in different parts of world.
For example even Africa will have more solar then Russia, soon. Just because there is no economic incentive to enable Russians by their government, they are hostages of regime. But they do not even know it, because they think our electric grid is same as theirs, so there are multiple subtle differences which are complicated to explain and because of that not understood properly.
Weird case for European way of thinking about electricity is 2021 Texas power crisis, mismanagement and absolute disregard for any form of strategy thinking, just pure greed lead to disaster, capitalism and energy can work together harmoniously, which European union clearly shows, so USA should be little less toxically capitalistic and try to think strategically, to start provide value to customers not only thinking about exploiting customers.
Can you help me understand under what circumstances you’d want to run a nuclear below capacity? _Some_ headroom is nice/required but not a significant amount. Peaker pants (NG, hydrogen, hydroelectric, batter…) seem more logical to me than holding back and reserving nuclear power to smooth out the wind and PV loads.
In EEA we run it under capacity ALL THE TIME so current costs already include running it below capacity. Cost of hydrogen is multiple times higher then nuclear even if running it 100% all the time… Making hydrogen from oil/gas not makes sense at all i think that is obvious to everyone. I am promoting adding multiple different capabilities. As i said in previous comment.
A LOT can be done on site of consumption IF you have clear path, strategy, consensus, planning… Stakeholders should be all relevant parties from all sorts of life, not only owners of power plants. Which should be part of every nations resiliency plan.
Nuclear fuel is not free, and it has significant per MWh variable costs: New fuel rods, spent fuel storage/disposal/reprocessing, reactor wear (neutron damage etc), refueling downtime etc.
Solar, wind and hydro have very small variable cost.
If you have built both, then it is always economically best to use all the renewables you can, and as little of the nuclear as you can.
This is one driver for new reactor designs like Moltex MSR than can deal with variable load much better (faster) than old PWRs
You mean like the way the oh so civilized Europeans blow up each others gas pipelines over territorial disputes. Exactly which green energy technology has Europe taken the lead in? Last time I checked it seemed to be mostly US developed and China produced.
3) nuclear waste “problem” is not a real problem in well regulated countries. Waste problem was solved a long time ago.
Right! So… reducing a nuclear plant’s production below 100% rarely, if ever, makes sense.
It makes sense if you have varying loads and no viable storage option for that much power. Are you going to boil water and then use the cooling towers to dissipate the excess heat or just insert the control rods to throttle down. Nuclear is no different than gas or coal in that if you slow the reaction you use less fuel hence longer operation between refueling. Come on people, if we are gonna reinvent energy generation at least learn how the system we have works today. We have been throttling reactors and bringing their power on and off grid for many decades.
Almost dirt cheap seasonal heat storage can be made with burnt lime, converting it to slaked lime in winter creating heat for water and room heating.
And baking it (recharging it ) in simple electric oven in summer. So, if you have photovoltaic surplus available in summer it can be used for baking it for free. ( lime is circular, you buy it only once, use for many decades ).
Scientific document for inspiration / as a jump off point, even for other interesting technologies :
” Possibility of Chemical Heat Pump Technologies, Yukitaka Kato. 31 January, 2011. High Density Thermal Energy Storage Workshop Hosted by Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E)”
This is dope! I had no idea. Are there commercial solutions at residential scale? This is the sort of thing I’d like to add to my zero export residential PV setup.
Appliance can be trivially simple, even homemade AND materials are low margin, reusable,
so there is not really economic incentive from profit seekers, to deploy such a appliance. ( no possibility of ecosystem lock-in of customers for manufacturer/service agency )
That is why i am trying to mention it everywhere i can, so people can build it themselves for their own profit. Similar thing was biodigesters in Africa, similar non viable idea from western point of view, but they do it themselves, diy, locally and it serves well.
materials = consumables ( consume in winter, regenerate back in summer )
Build Guide? YouTube Video? Hack A Day Article?
Nope don’t think so. If there was a cheap appliance sized device that was plug and play, every solar company would offer one and you would sell a zillion of them. The power companies would be building them at mass scale since power surges above base load is the most costly generation. In Chicago, the power companies even provide chilled water during the day using ice made off peak so if this were equally easy it would have been done. We have an incredible demand for hot water for heating so if the power company could pull a fraction of that business back from the gas company they would do it in a minute. Nobody in Chicago uses electric heat because it is WAY too expensive. I am talking about viably heating residences and commercial buildings when temperature is below freezing 24/7. I know this because I also have looked into off grid solutions for a 2000 sq ft shop building in Northern Wisconsin. Have not found anything financially viable yet. Looked at wind, solar, geothermal and have not found anything yet that has an ROI under 10 years and the reliability close to existing electric and gas. The weakness of wind and solar is storage and ampacity for up to 200 amps of load. Geothermal requires electric power for pumps that uses too much of the available power from off grid power systems. The load is highly intermittent so if there was cheaper battery storage that would change the math a lot.
Heya Steve(n), think you are best at looking into additional insulation to solve your issue ;-0 best of luck
How much lime do I need to heat a home in Chicago for four months of below freezing weather? In the winter you have about 1.4 peak solar hours per day. Figure that out and you will have the answer as to why this is not viable.
You get about 1 kWh out of every 3 kg of burnt lime, so about 25 metric tons I would recon.
But you need temperatures exceeding 825 C to “burn” lime, so that’s not practically viable with home setups. Handling tons and tons of red hot caustic calcium hydroxide would probably also need some sort of a hazardous material handling license.
Uhh… Calcium Hydroxide in water is another way to say whitewash, and while it’s caustic it’s not even as bad as the lye used in home soapmaking. In that usage, it’s fine for a home. The temperature is in between baking and pottery temperatures, while being below typical metalworking temperatures, so it’s not going to be okay everywhere but it’s not the worst. I’m not saying if it’s a good plan, especially given the very high quantity of material if you’re planning to go underground for multiple months, but you’ve made it sound as if it’s quite a bit more dangerous than I think is fair.
Another way to store heat, which works at lower temperatures, is to store it in calcium or magnesium chloride. It releases some heat when you add water and will release the water when you add heat again. I’d not try to store a winter’s worth of heat for a poorly insulated barn in the north, but if you really wanted you could probably use a bunch of bulk containers and store heat for shorter periods, if your energy supply or its price varies short term and you don’t need that much of it anyway. Soda / fireless locomotives would be relevant for the figures on this.
This article lost me as soon as the words “free renewable energy” came up. Did I miss something about solar panels and wind power turbines are free now? If we are going to turn this into the green power push of the day site, at least be credible. Might also mention that hydrogen is one of the least power dense fuels available.
Completely true!
Well in many ways ‘Free’ is a fair description – you pre-paid and depending on the local energy prices and your consumption something like 1-3 years later everything after that point isn’t just free its actively making you money (assuming you can sell it back to the local grid). With an expected minimum useful lifespan of a few more decades after its paid back the upfront costs.
Or you can consider it purely from the excess to current demand terms – in which case all that excess energy every time the conditions are right is in effect ‘free’, cost you nothing extra to have it. You had that level of potential peak supply presumably for a reliable minimum output. So compared to a fuel burner that needs perpetual newly refined and shipped fuel inputs to generate anything and so you both won’t burn more to generate ‘free’ electric and it will cost you to run for its entirely lifetime, while also costing more to maintain…
Its much the same argument as Free in the open source world – its only ‘free’ if you look at it from the right frames of reference. Otherwise its just free adjacent…
Hydrogen is not a “fuel” as oil is, something that can be dug up fro. the ground or harvested anywhere. It is always an intermediate energy storage solution, e.g. a “battery” that needs to be “charged”.
Energy density doesn’t matter and varies with compression.
Most of the “alternative energy” hardware comes from China, of course… suckers.
China is building six times more new coal plants than (all) other countries (combined), report finds
2 Mar 2023
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin
“Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas,” she says. “We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined.”
UK power systems engineer: NetZero cannot be taken seriously – 24 Jul 2023
https://rumble.com/v321hj4-why-netzero-cannot-be-taken-seriously.html
https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Wind-Solar-Land-Required-Article.jpg
China is also in fairness a large consumer of Solar panels as well – but unlike much of the more economically developed world they are still in the rapidly advance from basically pre-industrial phase across the nation – so its not a shock they are using the same cheap fuels that fueled every developed nations growth as well – it is cheap, well established and reliable method. Not saying we should give them a pass for using coal, keep the pressure up on that front absolutely makes sense. But hypocritical to complain they are building new ones as they grow when the rest of the world already had a more developed grid powered by coal/gas and they largely need that energy so we can buy the cheaper crap from China…
I’d like one of Honda’s (1990s?) prototype natural gas home power stations myself. Heats the home, and the water, and powers home/charges the EV.
Saw a youtuber spend $100k bringing electricity in to run his shop (just the lines and the power company to install them). And he was going to heat the shop with it. I was aghast. There are 20kw generators for under $20,000 that use propane and an auto derived V8 running at 1,800rpm. He could have used the engines’ waste heat and the propane itself for heating, it would have been much more efficient. Not sure what he needed all the power for. If it was just heating and air-conditioning, eh.
In theory there is always a car where a human is (speaking from home), so use that battery as peak sink/soak would help.
All I read here are some sort of technical solutions to the energy production problem. Nuclear energy, EV’s, heat pumps and so on aren’t solutions, just an excuse to carry on as if we didn’t have a problem. The only solution is to use less, a lot less. That means changing habits. Our habits.