I can't help but believe that we would be better off (at least in the US) if utilities had embraced renewables 10 years ago. Rather than fight solar and wind, utilities could have played the role of solar installer/integrator and could have encouraged renewable installation and made appropriate investments in infrastructure to support their variability. Instead, many US utilities chose to fight back against renewables slow their adoption. Now the utilities complain that the grid cannot handle the variability and complain that their job of balancing the grid is getting harder. It's just unfortunate that many public utilities in the US chose to fight innovation rather using the benefits of their monopoly to embrace the change and try to profit from it and provide better service.
It's just unfortunate that many public utilities in the US chose to fight innovation rather using the benefits of their monopoly to embrace the change and try to profit from it and provide better service.
What monopoly embraces change? Only companies that are beleaguered embrace change. This even applies to petroleum conglomerates and the now mighty Apple computer. (The latter became overconfident, then faltered, innovated, then innovated to cannibalize itself, now is going through another cycle.) It applied to Microsoft and IBM in days when they seemed eternal and invincible.
Ones that are well-regulated?[0] Personal experience with this includes the electric utility where I used to live which was proactive in building an open fiber network using their existing conduits, and the effective land-line phone monopoly here which has been at the forefront of wiring everyone with increasingly high-speed fiber when they could just as well have gouged everyone with horrible DSL (there's barely any cable TV here to compete on data).
It'd be interesting to see some of the risk analysis they did before branching into fiber, particularly for those early cases like Chattanooga. But off the cuff, I'd imagine that there was very little risk to the move outside the capital outlays. By contrast, because renewables are forcing what's effectively a paradigm shift in power markets, it makes sense that monopolies--which by their nature are very risk averse--had trouble embracing major investment into renewables. Perhaps it's better to say that, at least when it comes to the primary activities that constitute their monopoly, monopolies are risk averse and embrace change as little as possible. And renewables are the sort of long-term suicide that scares the hell out of any self-respecting monopoly.
> appropriate investments in infrastructure to support their variability
Erm, why didn't you make appropriate investments in infrastructure?
Because it cost money. Why should you expect someone else to make an unprofitable venture if you yourself were unwilling to do so?
In any case, the variability in solar and wind is known. To keep the same level of electrical service will require a HUGE increase in energy storage.
The thing about coal / gas / even nuclear to some degree... you can "turn it off" if there's too much power being pumped into the grid... and you can "turn it back on" if there isn't enough power. That's why natural gas "Peaker Plants" continue to be built, despite the fact that they're much more expensive than Solar or Wind.
The enemy of "Peaker Plants" is cheap energy storage. Coal and Nuclear power is more efficient if you just keep it on 100% of the time and then store the energy anyway.
And believe me, utility companies HAVE been building cheap energy storage. They're called Pumped Hydro for the most part. Other solutions for cheap energy storage simply didn't exist until recently. Lithium Batteries are expensive and don't provide much storage believe it or not... not on the Gigawatt scale needed to last more than a few minutes.
We will likely continue to use "Peaker plants" for the near term, at least until the energy storage issue is solved with something much much cheaper.
Gas peaker plants are storage. Well, half of it anyways. Utilities here in Germany are quietly (because that kind of business works best when not everybody is doing it) ramping up electricity to hydrogen converters everywhere. But not for the 1990ies vision of a full "hydrogen economy" complete with fuel cell cars that don't work and whatnot. They just use them to convert cheap (sometime even negative cost, hence the desire to not inspire too much competition) electricity at peak supply times to hydrogen that they push into the existing gas grid that has a huge storage capacity by itself (think months of national demand). That network is currently carrying mostly natural gas, but it used to carry much higher fractions of hydrogen back in the age of coal gasification. If you can work with natural gas, chances are that you can work with a conservative blend of natural gas and hydrogen with very little extra investment, very much unlike pure hydrogen concepts.
(Also, utilities are building a lot of heat storage capacity, so that their cogeneration plants can be freely dispatched according to electricity demand, with the district heating function completely decoupled, even on the seasonal scale)
That is really fascinating. Is the hydrogen conversion something that's happening so quietly that there's nothing on the internet about it? I can't find any sources at them moment.
I haven't invested in the infrastructure because electricity is not my business.
If it were my business, I would still be at the mercy of giant incumbent competitors, and any dollar I spent on common infrastructure would benefit them more than me. They could then use that advantage to slowly force me out of the business.
The largest firms have the most to gain from improvements in the industry's infrastructure. So the onus is largely upon them to make such improvements. In many cases, there is only one firm with significant pricing power--the natural monopolist--and everyone else in their territory has to dance to their tune. They're the only ones capable of improving infrastructure, aside from a government.
The pricing power is the only way for a firm to afford projects that are neither profitable nor a competitive advantage. The only point for everyone else in the market to having firms with pricing power is so they can undertake those projects that benefit everyone in the long run.
If you're not going to improve the industry, there is no advantage for everyone else to allow you to remain as the natural monopolist. The logical thing for them to do is to seize your capital by force and transfer it to someone who might do more with it (but might do less).
A natural monopoly does not mean the same firm will always have pricing power, but that the modal situation is that only one firm has it at a time. When natural monopolists are protected as de jure protected monopolies, yes it does prevent redundant investment, but it also puts no competitive pressure on the monopolist to remain the monopolist.
I would guess that electric utilities would make wiser decisions about infrastructure if they were less protected from competition. That introduces the risk that a particular market might not be adequately served in an economic dominance war that wipes out both incumbent and challenger, but I think those crises would be very temporary, and would likely invoke a government intervention less costly than protecting the monopoly in the first place.
> If it were my business, I would still be at the mercy of giant incumbent competitors, and any dollar I spent on common infrastructure would benefit them more than me. They could then use that advantage to slowly force me out of the business.
> The largest firms have the most to gain from improvements in the industry's infrastructure. [Large monopolistic firms are] the only ones capable of improving infrastructure, aside from a government.
Under deregulated energy markets in the US, common infrastructure (specifically the transmission grid) is placed under the control of a non-profit Regional Transmission Operator or Independent System Operator. In practice the transmission lines are built and maintained by private for-profit companies, but their profits are fixed by regulation and they have to ask the RTO/ISO for permission to do basically anything.
The point of this restructuring was to break up monopolistic control over the transmission grid so that new, small generation or distribution companies could join the transmission network at a fair hookup cost. Additionally, it helps deal with the issue of who pays/profits from improvements to common infrastructure.
If you think that energy storage "makes money", build a small 10MW battery plant to supply a neighborhood or two. Buy electricity when its cheap, sell it when its expensive.
There's no "common infrastructure building" going on here. You own the batteries, and maybe you have to pay the big utility for some power-poles and comply with some basic regulations.
The fact of the matter is: these sorts of infrastructure issues are being solved by the free market all the time. Frequency regulation, long-term energy storage (which really is just ~hours) and such are commonly subcontracted out to smaller companies who own small plants from the big utility companies.
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> I haven't invested in the infrastructure because electricity is not my business.
Then do the next best thing. Buy stock in companies that are doing grid-scale energy storage across this country.
Sell it to whom? Your neighbors? In a lot of municipalities, there's no such thing as "selling it when it's expensive" because the only customer is the utility, and the utility is only paying wholesale rate from solar / alternative energy customers.
It may be an option in some places, but at present, I think you'd lose money under your current plan in a lot of places, and are unlikely to have neighbor-customers in many of the remainders.
Why didn't I make the investment? Because I am a private citizen and not a public utility... Utilities are able to rate base their investment and get a guaranteed rate of return on the investments they make. This rate base system is part of the reason why they often make costly and unnecessary investments in >$1B nuclear plants or expensive substations rather than in cheap energy efficiency measures or distributed solar. We have the technology to help mitigate renewable variability and could deploy it if we wanted to. Utilities just chose to drag their feet and not invest heavily in deploying those solutions because the wanted to keep building the same stuff they always build and get the ROI.
> We have the technology to help mitigate renewable variability and could deploy it if we wanted to.
Then build a company if you think its so easy. From my view: its clear that there are risks entailed and that the technology is far too expensive for widescale deployment.
But its a free country. If you really think that building a Lithium Ion energy-storage plant is free money, then build a Lithium Ion energy-storage center. There's no reason to blame other people for not seeing the world the same way as you.
EDIT: If building such companies isn't in your interest, then buy stocks in those companies that are working on energy storage. Like buy stock in ABB or something. Or maybe TSLA if you really think their Lithium Ion technology really is taking over the electric grid.
You can invest in renewable quite easily by purchasing your power from a company that supplies it. It doesn't even require capital or much risk. Often they also provide cheaper power than the big players. The one I use is cheaper, and they also donate money to planting trees, and protecting old growth forests.
Secondly you can invest your pension in ethical, and eco companies. Again, they often outperform others (mine has anyway).
Thirdly, you can live in a place which does not waste power. Or you can at least do quite a bit to reduce energy usage yourself.
Get a bike. You'll live longer, look better, and you'll not kill people with your pollution. Ya! for not being a murderer. Share a cargo bike so you can carry heavy things.
All things which normal people not wanting to take on utility scale investments and risks. Look at your outgoing expenses and see how you can select the providers. When millions of people do it, it has a very powerful effect.
Convince your city to also purchase renewable power. As an example, in Melbourne they used the purchasing power of their electric trams. They tendered out for a new renewable power plant to provide the power. With many urban people often voting 'Green', this is not a really hard thing to do or get support for.
> You can invest in renewable quite easily by purchasing your power from a company that supplies it. It doesn't even require capital or much risk. Often they also provide cheaper power than the big players. The one I use is cheaper, and they also donate money to planting trees, and protecting old growth forests.
Not an option in all states. But yes, this is an option for me that I've been considering. This strategy relies on the local municipal (or state) government on "deregulating" the utility companies. And also on the government to force the utility companies to buy energy from a variety of sources.
There's a lot of "political infrastructure", laws, deals, and agreements, that are needed to make such options a possibility. And it will do good to remember that the "option to buy renewable" isn't an option in many states.
If I had a dollar for every time I saw a legitimate complaint about a complex system met with, "Well just reinvent it yourself from the ground up if you're so fucking smart," I'd be a rich man. It is not a constructive suggestion.
The problem is that there are plenty of energy-storage companies available for you to invest into on the Stock Market.
AES Energy Storage for example, is building tons of energy storage across America. And you can support them by providing investment dollars.
So yeah, building companies (or at least, helping companies that match your worldview) is quite easy in this Democracy. Instead of complaining about it, you should be elevating AES Energy Storage and other similar companies.
>Instead of complaining about it, you should be elevating AES Energy Storage and other similar companies.
No. I refuse to accept a standard of discourse where one cannot even point out a problem without having already solved it. There are many, many hard problems with complex systems in the world, and no person, much less a complete outsider, can hope even to begin to address more than a very, very small number of them even if they dedicate their life to the task. Saying "fix it or shut up" is asinine.
Well, if stopping people from demanding you solve a problem before pointing it out is so simple, why don't you go do it then?
...
I'm sorry.
In all seriousness though, it's a no-expertise-needed response that's meant to shout down people who are particularly clueless and disconnected. Perhaps we need a substitute response, like calling for an expert on the relevant field to decide whether the person is clueless or not?
You can't actually start a power company and compete with say Dominion etc, as they are legal monopolies. You can't even buy one without regulatory approval.
I don't think Li-ion plants are free... My point is that there are situations when problems can be solved with efficiency/renewables/new technology or with building more traditional power plants and infrastructure. Utilities have tended to go the traditional power plant/infrastructure route because they know it and because they get a set rate of return on things they build and rate base. With the traditional utility model, they do not make much money if they make it easier for people to install solar on their house or if they incentivize people to switch to LEDs.
From my experience, its "grassroot" old guys who just don't like the new "color" of LEDs. True, LEDs were invented decades ago, but the "proper color" ("Warm White") wasn't really available until recently.
Now that LEDs are the proper color for internal homes, people are beginning to use them. They're still far more expensive than incandescent bulbs, so a lot of people (who don't run the calcs on their electricity bill) still prefer the older bulbs.
It isn't just on the market or utilities. All of their prices are heavily regulated. Companies that produce baseline power are expected to make a set profit (no more or less) and the people lending them money and buying their stocks also expect a set return on investment. Any price increases have to be justified politically and the companies are expected to pay off previous investments and then return the majority of their profits to the shareholders. It is a case of an extremely conservative market being upended by rapid change.
And the kinds of investments the grid needs to move to a majority renewable system are very different from what was needed in the past. Many of the best wind projects, for example, are located out in the middle of nowhere and require large transmission lines to bring them to the places that use the electricity. The distributed nature of solar and wind require more interconnections to bring in power from locations that have an excess of sun or wind to those that need the electricity. It is more difficult to keep these diverse sources of power synced so that the grid transports a steady amount of power at the right frequency, and that also needs more and different investments than in the past.
It's not a simple matter of profit/loss, but of balancing a number of political considerations and a huge bootstrapping problem. I don't think any one company can handle this by itself.
Another way to deal with variable supply is to incentivize the demand to be variable along with it. This is done with variable pricing of the electricity. People will then find it worthwhile to adjust use of the elastic part of their demand to when electricity is cheaper - such as charging their car.
That is the major thing in their heads currently for solar.
Also since they are monopolies, gov'ts use them as hidden tax vehicles / subsidy givers as part of their monopoly status, which can make it hard to run an actual business. They make money via infrastructure access and selling electricity from power plant assets on the open market, not your specific kw/h power usage.
Most utilities should be thought of as extensions of the government in practice.
If you all are interested in the 'deregulated' energy markets in the US, you may want to check out PJM. Via PJM (and similar regional transmission organizations), you can trade energy and even hook in your own generators and storage.
Interestingly, renewables still comprise a tiny fraction of generation. I'm not sure if this is because of regulatory requirements, lack of reliable storage, or because of cost (nuclear and fossils are pretty cheap and reliable producers).
Generally, in the US, distribution companies (i.e. electric utilities) purchase energy from the transmission companies. Many don't generate electricity themselves. Actually, most distribution companies are co-ops. There are still regulation via FERC, and they stay active because of high-impact capacity transmission failures in the past.
But, it's all cool stuff. And, for those interested in machine learning, you can download a lot (or all) of the data and make a lot of money (I used to work in a pseudo-quant like capacity in that space).
That sounds very cool. I noticed a while ago that there are a lot of python libraries specifically for electrical grid simulation. Now I know why :) It's quite fortunate your electricity markets aren't vertically integrated monopolies (and the more monopolistic part i.e. transmission, is run by co-ops). Over here in Oz, on the other hand, our dickhead politicians are trying their hardest to sell off anything that isn't nailed down.
Distribution companies don't purchase energy from transmission companies. You were probably thinking of Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), which are not the same thing as transmission companies. That said, it's not accurate to say that distribution companies purchase energy from RTOs either.
RTOs (and ISOs, which are similar) are non-profit organizations that ensure transmission grid reliability and fairness by operating markets in which generators and distribution companies bid or buy energy [1]. The market mechanisms have been designed to also incorporates network balancing and congestion control. RTOs/ISOs are the benevolent, omniscient regional gods in charge of coordinating dispatch for the purposes of ensuring transmission grid reliability. They facilitate sales, they don't sell directly.
Transmission companies, on the other hand, are for-profit organizations that build and maintain transmission lines. Their profits are constrained by regulation to be a certain percent return on equity [2], and they need to get permission from the RTO/ISO that monitors their region before making any operational changes to their transmission lines.
One more difference is in their scale. There are only ten RTOs/ISOs in North America, and they tend to cover very large regions of the continent. There are many transmission companies, and they tend to cover smaller regions.
For example, where I live in Southeast Michigan, the RTO/ISO is the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), and the transmission company is ITC [3], a spin-off from DTE Energy after deregulation forced DTE to pick two from their generation, transmission, and distribution capabilities (they kept generation and distribution, because post-deregulation that's where the money is). However, MISO's entire coverage area includes 52 transmission companies [4].
Basically, under deregulated energy markets transmission is treated as a public utility and the transmission grid is treated as common infrastructure. The grid is operated by non-profits and private companies who are required to be financially independent from generation and distribution interests. That's why the notion that distribution companies buy energy from transmission companies gives the wrong impression of how the system works, though I can see where the confusion could come from.
Wind energy production is remarkably volatile throughout the year, especially if wind farms are co-located in the same pathways as is the case in Denmark.
This is not a US focused article, but I want to provide some clarifications specific to the US:
While the incremental operating cost of wind and solar plants (and the related staffing levels for a given plant size) are much lower than conventional thermal plants because of no fuel cost, they are far from zero or "free". This is a misconception that ignores the need for staffing and maintenance services. Over the 20 year design life of a typical wind plant, for example, operating costs are expected to roughly equal the initial investment in total.
Additionally, the subsidies most used in the US for wind and solar development are the Production and Investment Tax Credits (PTC and ITC). Tax credits for new projects will be phased out completely in the next approximately 5-7 years (the phase out plan is of fixed duration, but the tax accounting rules allow projects to claim credits ahead of project completion as long as certain conditions are met, such as start of construction of outlay of sufficient capital to show commitment to project completion). The US renewable industry does not have a general expectation of tax subsidy renewal, and developers, utilities, and suppliers are all looking to be able to build economic projects without tax incentives. The reality is that costs have come down and performance has increased to the point where these renewable resources are largely able to compete with conventional generation on price already.
Also, the need for transmission line development is apparent, but it's mostly about bringing transmission to the resources rather than needing to rebuild existing lines. That means large scale transmission projects to connect low population areas with high wind and solar resource to population centers. Existing lines and substations do often need upgrades to accommodate new generation, but those are determined based on study and the costs are often (though not always) borne by the project or group of projects requiring the upgrades.
As others have highlighted, large scale energy storage technology is going to be key to reducing the need for peaking power plants to cover load gaps related to these intermittent resources.
Editorially: We are fools if we think we can keep burning things we dig out of the ground forever. The solar energy needed to power our lives is already here, and it's on us to learn to harvest and use it effectively. And by all means continue to work on clean nuclear power but at the moment it is not cost competitive.
IMHO, we should have increase nuclear power 20 years ago to avoid the current carbon pollution. Now, it is too late for nuclear. The future is solar power and it is quickly coming. The amount of available solar energy is enormous. In a further future, we may also have solar plants in orbit that would reduce weather problems.
Yes, which is why we need to (as a civilization) put more effort into grid-scale energy storage.
My leading candidate for that is some kind of flow battery. There have recently been some announcements about a better and more stable electrolyte that is also non-toxic and non-corrosive. But as always, it might be five years (or never) before that gets commercialized.
We'll need a lot more storage and overcapacity than people think.
For example yesterday germany had a renewable fraction of around 50% throughout the whole day. Yay? Nope. During january there was a whole week where it was in the 0-10% range during the night and 5-20% during daytime.
That means we don't just have to smooth out daily variability but on the span of multiple weeks.
Of course that doesn't mean we need to store all of that in batteries or that we need to keep a whole shadow infrastructure of fossil/nuclear plants around. With enough overcapacity from renewables we could also produce hydrogen and store that for example and run it through fuel cells or gas plants when needed.
But that still means that a bunch of smartmeters won't fix the issue, we'll need real infrastructure to handle that variability.
It's not as bad as you think. The amount of storage capacity required is easily computed from known long-term weather patterns, and we can (and necessarily will) work toward it slowly. "More than people think"? Who cares what people think. It's still cheaper than fossil in the long run, and energy investment is long-term investment.
I'm not convinced that it needs to be explicitly computed in a feedforward sense. If you just let the price float, then price will naturally form an error signal that the energy storage market (and customer demand) can respond to.
Cold snaps certainly do happen even in climates that normally only justify a heat pump. I grew up in rural SE Tennessee, so I totally get that.
Even in an environment of electric heating and an impoverished customer base, the price doesn't have to be totally inelastic to avoid a social justice nightmare. You can choose not to run the electric clothes dryer in the middle of the night, for example. Having regular large price swings will be accurately perceived by the energy storage market as an arbitrage opportunity. Even if you only allow the price to swing by some limit (say, by enforcing a maximum price ceiling on the utility through the state regulatory commission), the electric utility will be incentivised to pay even more than the natural swing to third parties who can provide that arbitrage.
There's definitely a vein of "smart grid" technology that is based around the utility shedding the customer's load for them, in a sort of fractional rolling brownout. I don't think we need to go there, and that most folks would be rightly pissed off at the imposition of such by their mammoth utility.
OTOH, I could see a Nest-style device which can read the day-ahead price and adjust for the customer based on their own preferences being perfectly acceptable.
Note that load shedding can include changing the temperature by a couple of degrees. So, not only can it be an opt-in or opt-out situation instead of being "imposed", it can be something that most folks would sleep right through.
There's no need to "impose" this. It provides economic value, so it can either be seen as a discount for opting in, or an extra charge for opting out. People already do this in a manual fashion with time-of-use rates.
Fossil fuels and nuclear carry their own weight, unlike, say, wind. Here in Finland, there would be no new, not any installations of wind without massive subsidies (we're talking about a guaranteed price more than 2 times the market prices) – just to disrupt the working grid as it is. (Solar isn't really even worth talking about here...)
Coal is dirty, and dirt cheap, but wind is simply too inefficient.
For fuel-based plants, you have the cost of the plant, the mine, the transport between the mine and the plant, as well as the clean-up. That's quite a lot of operating cost on top of the capital cost.
For a network of solar-panels and domestic batteries, it is almost all capital cost. There is no fuel transport, no mine, etc. And whereas one massive plant with one massive mine is a decade-long planning and construction process, the domestic panels and storage are each very short installations that can happen largely in parallel.
The domestic solar+storage grid should win, because it is a heck of a lot faster to marshall consumers into buying a consumer good, than to plan and build out nation-wide infrastructure projects.
Its not the infrastructure, its the price. If you let the price float more, then customers will naturally avoid buying electric energy when it is expensive, and will shift some of their demand to the less expensive times automatically. Energy storage naturally becomes an economically decentralized business that follows any other arbitrage pattern.
A floating price means smarter grids. Smart grids that don't exist yet in large swaths of the country.
We gotta upgrade all of those electrical meters in everybody's homes to take into account time AND price changes. We've gotta build the algorithms to distribute those price changes.
A lot of cities have that kind of infrastructure already of course. But lets not deny the monumental task ahead of us. The idea of "smart meters" that communicate with a central server (ie: requires perpetual and reliable internet access) was unfathomable just 10 years ago.
I don't think the meter needs to be that smart. First off, I'm using the existing day-ahead markets that many of the independent system operators are already using to predict demand. These markets clear once per hour, for the price of energy 24hr in advance in one hour windows. They also account for somewhat fine-grained regional variation (ie, power line usage). There are additional markets that clear only 15 min in advance (the "spot" price for power) and these can have much more volatility.
So, if I were king of the electric market, I would only expose retail customers to the day-ahead price. This way, existing web-scale publishing tech can tell people what their price will be up to 24hr in advance. Retail customers' price gets fixed at that time, and they pay a small energy premium for reducing their volatility exposure. Now, the meters only need to record a list of {kWh, hour-of-day} pairs, one for each hour between the last reading and today. So if the local electric utility reads off the consumption once a month, then you only store ~700 entries or so. That's much cheaper than needing a reliable Internet connection to the meter.
Anything smarter than that is considered a "smart" meter. A dude comes out one a month to see how many KWhr the meter has ticked up, then they send you a bill in the mail for you to pay.
All this talk about "spot" price and "day of pricing" simply doesn't work with current electricity meters that are deployed around the country.
And honestly, if we're going to be upgrading to "smart" meters... we should all have "smart bi-directional" meters to account for the ability to "sell back to the utility". (IE: Net Metering).
I haven't seen those meters in years (in the US, at least)
For as long as I can remember living in a suburban house (since ~2008), there was a smart meter. At some point it was replaced with another smart meter.
Neither have I seen a person come out and manually get readings, because that seems incredibly inefficient, time consuming, and costly for the utility, so it was probably one of the first things to get automated.
The smart meters are medium-range wireless for the most part. The utility still has someone drive around in a truck, but they just need to drive by. The driver doesn't need to get out or even stop.
What would the picture look like if you included a wider area? Germany is relatively small, and geographical diversity can substitute for storage to an extent.
I recall seeing a blog post about that issue, assembling publicly available data, and they found that even over larger geographical regions there were still fairly significant lulls lasting longer than a day.
I look at maps like this http://www.electricitymap.org/ which show the solar and wind potential across Europe along with imports and exports between countries.
It makes me wonder how much more of a baseload renewables could provide with a more integrated energy market and continent wide capacity planning. At least in the US, electrical grids are highly fragmented and poorly connected between states and regions.
When Germany was in the 10% range, was there a region that could provide high amount of wind generation to pick up the slack? Or on sunny, windy summer days when electric prices go negative, is there somewhere to put that energy?
https://energytransition.org/2014/05/german-power-prices-neg...
I noticed in Germany, there are solar panels on houses and barn roofs everywhere, even in not so sunny regions - maybe that investment would be better put into grid scale wind, while Spain and Portugal build out grid scale solar.
If investment in renewables took place on a continental scale, with high capacity connections between solar installations in Spain, wind turbines in the North Sea, nuclear plants in France, renewable and lower carbon utilization could go up and some of the gas and coal plants could be spun down.
> If investment in renewables took place on a continental scale, with high capacity connections between solar installations in Spain, wind turbines in the North Sea, nuclear plants in France, renewable and lower carbon utilization could go up and some of the gas and coal plants could be spun down.
Yes, but countries don't typically like being dependent on each other for their energy needs. We are even in an era where people are openly questioning the future of the EU due to the rise of Euro sceptic parties in France and the Netherlands.
The power grid operates at a snail's pace compared to the rest of the high tech industry. Getting the permission to build something, passing all the environmental impact assessments, financing, etc, can take years before the first shovel of dirt is moved to build the project.
> I noticed in Germany, there are solar panels on houses and barn roofs everywhere, even in not so sunny regions - maybe that investment would be better put into grid scale wind, while Spain and Portugal build out grid scale solar.
This I do agree with. Financially, I can't see how it makes sense for someone in Germany to install solar, when places like Spain or Greece get far more sun in the year. It simply a question of location, and northern localities such as Germany receive much less annual irradiation than more equatorial localities do.
However I think most people in Germany would install solar not for the electricity, but because they are conscious of the environment and believe that by installing solar, they are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
Ökostrom (ecological electricity) is very big in Germany.
Ökostrom is indeed big here, but the solar thing seems logical enough for me if you look at the policy picture: The German government needs to reduce the country's overall CO2 emissions by X percent over the next Y years to keep political promises. I mean promises in both the sense of treaty obligations, and also social expectations from its own citizens as you alluded to.
And it has to do that at the very same time that it is constructing new coal-fired power plants to keep the base load power it will lose by shutting down its remaining nuclear plants. So there is some urgency to this. Rooftop PV is really the only option that can be quickly deployed en masse through incentives, right across the country, skipping all that red tape you mentioned.
If solar in Germany can be very effective for half the year, then it is still going to make a sizable impact on those annual CO2 figures. So obligations are being met on paper while also having a pretty visible presence on the ground in cities and towns.
> With enough overcapacity from renewables we could also produce hydrogen and store that for example and run it through fuel cells or gas plants when needed.
Aren't lithium-ion batteries more efficient than hydrogen fuel cells?
More efficient, but also more expensive and harder to scale.
To expand battery capacity you need to dig up lithium and half a dozen other rare elements, deal with the toxic byproducts (or dump them in a lake), manufacture batteries, control circuits and run ongoing maintenance.
To expand hydrogen capacity, you need more pressure vessels. These can be made of steel or aluminum, two of the cheapest materials in existence, and with practically zero pollution. Ongoing maintenance amounts to checking for rust and occasionally replacing valves, so it scales far better.
Hydrogen has serious downsides, but there's definitely a case to be made.
Lithium's not just a little bit more efficient, it's like 2x more efficient.
I think converting H2 to methane and storing that is far more realistic than storing H2. Methane slots into all of our current natural gas infrastructure. Liquid natural gas cars are more practical than H2 cars.
However, we're going to be harvesting TWh-worth of lithium for our car batteries anyway, so we're going to have a huuuuuge secondary market of used car batteries that still have a consistent 50%-80% charge capacity that could be used for grid storage.
I think it's too early to see exactly how the technology will work out, but a huge lithium-ion economy seems inevitable. I truly hope that electricity -> H2 -> methane (or a carbon chain) happens though. Because that is carbon sequestration, and I think that in 2050 we're going to want to start paying people to do that and not let the result get emitted again.
> To expand hydrogen capacity, you need more pressure vessels.
Even simpler, you can store it in salt domes which are currently used for natural gas reserves. The pipes and related infrastructure may need to be replaced due to hydrogen embrittlement, but the storage itself is already there.
At the risk of sounding like an idiot, would there be any value in capturing some of the energy as compressed air/purified oxygen to be injected in to the hydrogen burning process... thingy? Perhaps in a manner similar to how a SABRE engine works? [0]
Redox Flow Batteries can be expanded by also just adding more "pressure vessels" to store the charged electrolyte.
Which is why I'm more interested in Redox Flow than Lithium Ion, for grid-scale applications anyway. Lithium Ion's efficiency is necessary for cars or other mobile applications. But if you're building it on the ground, you just build a bunch of cheap heavy tanks all over the place.
Nah, what I already wrote already covers about everything I feel sure about, and half of it is just common sense. Shouldn't be too hard to find better sources, though.
They are, but we probably want lots of hydrogen anyway. I don't know if we can easily substitute methane with hydrogen in gas power stations or gas ovens, but it is certainly possible.
Yes, but the methane here is generated from CO2 and H2, then combusted back to CO2. With no leaks, that cycle is carbon neutral, and leaks can be minimized.
If this infrastructure is built out, it may also provide the path to pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere or ocean and permanently sequestering it. That is something that I think we'll probably be very interested in doing in coming decades. Having affordable technology for that (perhaps $20-80/ton?) would enable CO2 emissions for those cases that really require it, and possibly also some clawing back of the worst parts of anthropogenic climate change.
Last I read they're working on issues with the high-temperature seals. It'd be awesome to have a big shipping container in my neighborhood that just stores all of our energy for use during peak/off hours.
Yeah a lithium-ion battery that doesn't catch fire and may be able to double energy density from PBS Nova [1] though I don't think the clip talks about energy density.
I think it will be multiple things, that would slowly converge to one or two solutions.
Already you can see that Tesla's power wall works really well. Then you have other technologies that would allow cities to store energy. I think we are slowly getting there.
I think the more interesting story regarding disruption is the story about how dominant energy players will no longer be able to influence foreign affairs due to their net exporter status. If you are looking to de-hinge yourself from overbearing geopolitical influences, standalone energy production is incredibly appealing.
So this magazine offers the idea of removing fixed pricing for electricity, but is electricity demand that elastic? Perhaps in some markets, so this might be a good option; but should not be made mandatory.
A lot of electricity demand is formed by weather which makes it inelastic in the short-run - you will still pay your bill if you are cold regardless of today's price. In the longer run (next season), you'll just make people give up using electric heating - for natural gas, wood and coal, depending on the region.
Consider another policy - a carbon tax, which is a very popular tool among economists or the similar fuel excise taxes. They will lower profits for plants that solve the intermittency issue with fossil fuels, creating an advantage for energy storage.
To keep power flowing, the system relies on conventional power plants, such as coal, gas or nuclear, to kick in when renewables falter. this is also partially incorrect - nuclear power plants usually are used to generate a fixed amount of electricity, only France I think which is a primarily nuclear in energy generation does it. In fact hydro-electric plants are commonly used for power balancing, with natural gas power plants in second place.
> The bigger task is to redesign power markets to reflect the new need for flexible supply and demand. They should adjust prices more frequently, to reflect the fluctuations of the weather. At times of extreme scarcity, a high fixed price could kick in to prevent blackouts. Markets should reward those willing to use less electricity to balance the grid, just as they reward those who generate more of it. Bills could be structured to be higher or lower depending how strongly a customer wanted guaranteed power all the time—a bit like an insurance policy.
Most electricity in the US is distributed across wholesale electricity markets with nodal pricing, which have all of these mechanisms where distributors/utilities are the customers. The author appears to suggest moving pricing out to end users, which is possible even just on the utilities side, without having to restructure power markets. Restructuring power markets to take into account individual end user behaviour rather than aggregate demand would be a gargantuan effort--right now the California Independent System Operator's (CAISO) optimization process takes into account a few thousand nodal prices, and there are tens of millions of households in California. Having utilities introduce demand response and smart metering to approximate their costs would be a much simpler implementation.
It is possible (after clearing many hurdles) to participate in the electricity markets in order to identify inefficiencies around renewables and incentivize their use by providing better price signals to planning markets, but this is very challenging and most utilities and power trading groups/companies are not interested in that angle. It is, however, one of the things we're doing at Invenia ( https://invenia.ca/).
I think the author is suggesting to give the end user the option to turn on/off power in an attempt to do peak shaving. If spot prices are predicted to go up at a certain time due to grid constraints, then you can inform the user and if they want, they can turn off their air conditioning/washer/pool heater, etc. There would also be the monetary incentive, saving money since the prices are high. https://www.bidgely.com/ offers something similar to that, but I'm not totally sure.
This also depends on the pricing models allowed within the retailing side.
It strikes me that this is very similar to the NBN (broadband network) problem. There is a widely deployed network of old technology that is no longer worth investing in (copper in the NBN case / coal plants) and newer technology (solar + storage) that is still a little pricey (storage) and not widely enough deployed.
Which means you need to manage a transition so it's not too painful.
A first random guess -
One way might be to allow a few coal plants to go bust, and enact "load shedding" (turning off areas of the grid during times of low demand). Within a year or so, enough places will have batteries that you're load shedding less often.
If the government purchases the coal plants when they go bust (at a steep discount), they can then stagger the shutdowns enough that load-shedding is controlled.
But it doesn't seem sensible to force it to be economic to run the coal plant full-time. Surely that just drags out the transition, and suppresses the demand for storage that we're hoping will be the solution?
The easiest fix to the intermittency problem is to use electricity when renewables produce [1]. That would reduce the need for batteries in the beginning.
the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine.
...
According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.
A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.
The construction of renewable energy systems still consumes fossil fuels as inputs to manufacturing concrete, glass, metals, plastics, and silicon. Construction machinery likewise still runs on fossils. But the lifetime-amortized dependence on extractive industries for a MWh of renewable energy is much lower than for fossil energy.
In the USA, coal is the single greatest railroad transport category by tonnage. From 2008-2012, when volumes were considerably higher, coal was an even greater #1 by tonnage and was also the #1 source of railroad revenue:
There's no commodity that has enough volume to make up for the decline of coal transportation. There's going to be "stranded assets" left in railroads and shipping along with fossil extraction.
And, coming with the rise of electric vehicles, trucking jobs on the chopping block too. Hazmat certified tanker truck drivers -- the ones who drive tankers carrying flammable fluids -- are highly paid, well above trucking jobs in general:
That is very cool, thanks. I don't think it could be used for energy storage though.
Its major disadvantages come about from the fact that it is an extremely-high-energy active structure. It requires constant power input to make up energy losses and remain erect.
Wikipedia used to have a much more elaborated explanation on them.
A superconductive structure with evacuated rails wouldn't need energy to stay in place (always in theory - one would certainly need something active). An electromagnetic one will use a lot of power, but still much less than the amount stored.
Sill, it's not something simple that one could deploy today.
LOL I'm not sure it's obvious how a space-catapult could be built at all .. I'm pretty sure some Darwin nominee would have tried it by now if so /s
Come to think of it - the "obvious" flaw to this whole scheme is the need to store enough energy gravitationally and then release it such that it projects something beyond earth's gravitational pull. Strikes me as a non-trivial engineering problem ...
There are a variety of gravity-driven storage solutions out there. Heavy railcars on steep slopes has gotten some HN attention before.
The real point is, there are numerous ways to solve the storage problem, some of which are geologically specific (allowing for some reduced cost due to local landscape features).
What you mean is that little power gets lost, not little power gets stored. The goal is to reduce thermal losses. Beyond that, it's just a matter of throwing mass at the problem.
These aren't ordinary rail cars. They're designed to be generators, so they optimize for efficiency. Adding mass increases storage, but we don't want to waste more energy than necessary in the storage process.
Yes, you are right that I should have said little power gets lost.
I thought about it some more, and I think the underlying problem is that even these very heavy rail cars don't have nearly enough mass. Compare them with the literally millions of tons of water in an even moderate-sized reservoir.
Water is 1000kg/m^3. Cast iron is 7300kg/m^3, so there's a substantial density difference. More important, though, is geography. A place with long, steep, relatively straight slopes isn't necessarily a good place to build a reservoir.
Density doesn't matter for storing power by lifting up weight, what matters is total weight lifted, and how far.
As far as I can tell, the problem with the heavy rail car method is that it costs too much for the amount of storage you get. One reason I say that is that if the economics if it were good (and I assume they are pretty easy to calculate), then articles that talk about different methods for storing all that renewable energy we are getting would include it, but they rarely if ever do.
Also, unlike other methods like lithium-ion batteries and flow batteries, the various technologies involved in heavy rail cars are already well-developed, so there is little room for improvement once the first few models are developed. I mean, it is not like anyone is likely to develop cheaper ways of making rails or railroad cars.
or a vacuum u-bend. and the weight is pulleyed up slowly and dropped when it reaches the right altitude and when it has thrown it's payload it's attached to another set of pulleys on the other side and reset.
Better title: "Green power subsidies are disruption the power economy". Subsidies are good for wind and solar, but corrosive to existing infrastructure, which are being squeezed to stay in business. Maybe some more measured plan would be good. Instead of blind enthusiasm.
Only 45% of energy subsidies in the US are going to renewable energy (that was in 2013). Quite a bit go to fossil fuel and nuclear as well.
Historically from 1950-2010 only 9% of subsidies have gone to renewable energy. Fossil fuel was heavily subsidized for decades with hundreds of billions of dollars. Now it's shifting more to green tech but it's still not the majority. The effects of past subsidies to fossil fuels can still be felt in the industry as mines and wells subsidized long ago are still operational.
So renewable energy is not entirely unique in this aspect.
But I agree the real costs of renewable energy are not always obvious given how much of the federal/state government's thumb is on the scale.
Not trying to defend fossil fuels here, but I'd interpret that 2015 global fossil fuels subsidy figure ($5.3 trillion) with some caution. Looking at the paper, they're not really talking about direct subsidies. They're counting 'implicit subsidies' like "undercharging for global warming", "air pollution", "broader vehicle externalities" etc. These unpriced externalities make up at least 78% of the total estimated fossil fuel subsidy.
This is a fair thing to do in theory, assuming the same approach is used when pricing other forms of energy generation. But deciding what is and is not an attributable externality is a bit subjective, and externalities themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.
All that aside, even if global warming somehow didn't exist, it still makes a lot of sense to phase out coal power generation, as it causes around one million deaths per year (mostly from air pollution).
I believe he's pretty honest about the limits of the estimations and the difficulties defining "subsidy".
> While there are many caveats (discussed below) to the estimation procedures and findings, the policy implications of the paper are clear: energy subsidies are very large and their removal (which entails levying Pigouvian taxes) would generate substantial environmental, fiscal, and economic welfare gains.
All of those subsidies still have an overall effect on the market prices. The external costs (accidents, gas prices) are factored in as people decide to buy cars and company financial officers always consider tax deductions or other benefits.
You don't have to hand cash to a firm to significantly reduce their operating expenses.
Although I do agree that the decision by the study author to include things like congestion and road accidents is questionable...
> Broader externalities associated with the use of road fuels in vehicles, such as traffic congestion, accidents, and (less importantly) road damage. Although motorists may internalize some of these costs (e.g., the average costs of road congestion, the risk of injuring themselves in single-vehicle collisions), they do not take into account other costs (e.g., their own contribution to slowing travel speeds for other road users, injury risks their driving imposes on pedestrians and other vehicle occupants).
Even if you add say a carbon tax, what are the alternatives? Some people can't bike to work. Or taking public transit is not an option (especially in the US and Canada). And if you drive an electric car then you have the same problems of accidents and congestion.
I agree on both your points re: the paper - the author was very upfront about the methodology and the car thing was a bit of an eyebrow raiser. Sorry if I gave the impression I was accusing the author of dishonesty: I didn't mean to suggest that.
On road congestion specifically, the current 'mainstream' thinking is that variable congestion charging is probably a good way to price that externality. Weight also needs to be considered: large trucks do quite a bit more damage to roads than smaller vehicles. Unfortunately fuel taxes are a poor proxy for these kinds of externalities. That is to say, these should ideally be levied in addition to a carbon price. Singapore has variable congestion charging, but I guess it's a little easier to do if you're a small, autocratic island state.
For me, a carbon tax or cap and trade system are by far the best policy responses to climate change and air pollution. Although (at least in Australia) they are rather unpopular. My observation is that people (and politicians) prefer lavish subsidies for this or that 'green' technology, because there's a greater sense you're "doing something", plus everyone hates tax. Unfortunately, direct subsidies are also horribly inefficient and almost certainly will cost far more than just pricing the externalities and letting the market figure the rest out.
People seem to forget that the money being spent on these inefficient subsidies are their tax dollars, meaning the government has to cut services or raise taxes elsewhere (likely further compounding the efficiency cost of 'picking winners').
I believe we're mostly in agreement here. It's good to dig into this stuff none the less.
I'm more on the libertarian side and I actually agree that federal governments should be regulating environmental policy. It's one of the few things that crosses state/provincial lines and is not well controlled by market forces.
I personally haven't researched carbon tax enough to know if it's the right answer. But being in technology and startups I know that government should not be in the business of investing in green tech.
At most they should make the lives easier of green tech companies and VCs by getting gov out of the way. For example, reducing capital gains tax, streamlining regulations, and reducing corporate tax on green tech companies.
There have been two pretty spectacular flame outs in the Obama administration when they invested directly. One was the SV solar company and the other is the clean coal project that is billions over budget and years late.
My initial concerns with the carbon tax are that it might be a negative incentive that has an overall negative effect. For example, the primary concern is big factories that pump out carbon/methane. The costs to convert to a green facility are significant. What happens in practice is that their current operation is made more expensive but on a distributed timeline. The two paths they could take:
a) do nothing and pay a little extra each month in carbon tax
b) invest a lot of money right now and reduce operation expenses with a renewable energy that is comparable to fossil fuels, but is cheaper overall because of the tax
Everyone who has taken business accounting knows that it's better to have costs distributed over time rather than one big investment today. So I doubt this will have the intended effect in business that people hope.
The costs will ultimately trickle down to the customers so I doubt the companies will feel it. Then the question is will consumers be incentivized to buy electric cars due to the carbon tax and change behaviour? Again I dont think the tax rates currently used in Canada (where I live) for carbon are significant enought to have an effect on consumers. Only for businesses watching their bottom line.
This is the interesting part: ideally the costs would trickle down to consumers. The other half to a carbon tax policy, or the government auctioning permits in a cap and trade system, is that the revenue raised would ideally be handed back to individuals through increases in welfare payments and tax cuts.
This probably sounds a bit pointless. Why take with one hand and give with the other? Because of substitution effects. By making carbon intensive goods and services relatively more expensive, consumers at the margins will substitute away to less carbon intensive products. In other words, you're relying on the substitution effect rather than the income effect for a carbon price to do its magic. This is going to sound cynical, but I feel it's much safer to rely on the behavioural effects of direct financial incentives rather than the belief that individuals will make ethical choices in service to the common good.
One important caveat: I'm only 'talking the theory' here. It would be interesting to see if all this theory has been empirically validated (I honestly haven't looked). I'd imagine there's a bunch of studies examining the effects of carbon pricing in (mostly) European countries, but I can't certain about that. I might have a hunt around on the weekend (unless anyone here has some good references)...
And nuclear, oil, coal were never subsidized? It's not like most of these huge power plants were built with gov money ,right? It's not like we spent billions to protect our interests in places that have abundance of oil, but lack of stability. It's not like we subsidize coal industry, farming and other part of the economy, right?
Capitalism is responsible for fossil fuels and climate change but only kept alive by greed.
Government is responsible for renewable energy and saving the planet but only kept alive by subsidies.
That's the reductionist narrative that you find everywhere but largely misses the bigger picture. You don't have to dig very deep to find counter points.
While I would prefer that our society didn't have to depend on fossil fuels, without them our advanced society would not be possible. Fossil fuels are bad but they were/are necessary. All we need to do know is to just recognize that they will not be needed in the future, and keep investing into renewables.
> All we need to do know is to just recognize that they will not be needed in the future, and keep investing into renewables.
They may soon not be needed in western society - which can afford the capital investments into renewable tech and the subsidies to push rates to competitive markets rates.
But all of those oil wells and mines still exist. They will just find a market in developing countries such as Asia and Africa. Africa is going to be where the greatest amount of population growth will be for the next few decades. Combine that will a flood of cheap oil and it will likely partially offset the benefits of renewable energy in the short term.
Eventually renewable tech will be so cheap that it will no longer make economic sense to use oil/coal but I don't think that will happen globally as fast as people hope.
>But all of those oil wells and mines still exist. They will just find a market in developing countries such as Asia and Africa.
I have to disagree. Consider this - when countries in central europe, after the fall of Berlin Wall, began to invest into IT and Communication infrastructure they usually invested into the new technology, simply because that made more economic sense. They did not have to go through analog->digital, instead they jumped right into the newest tech.
Developing countries in Africa and Asia will be able to skip right into renewable and save money by not having to build new power lines, new power plants, transfer stations etc.
Renewables will grow much faster than most people anticipate, and since the demand for fossil fuels will drop, their price will grow, which in turn will turn renewable into even better investment.
True, that might be the case as power plants and infrastructure are expensive. But there's also existing infrastructure and there is a lot of industry already in place supporting fossil fuels, such as equipment makers, manufacturers, and fuel suppliers.
These operations won't necessarily just go out of business or just become renewable energy firms, they will likely drop prices and sell to other developing markets.
Renewable energy is largely defined by high upfront capital costs but long term savings (solar panels, wind turbines). This is the primary barrier that I see in poorer countries. The cost of fossil fuels is more distributed over time as you buy cheap engines and pay more over time for the fuel.
Again this is the short term side effects. Eventually it will shift to green tech as there will also be social pressures, not just economic ones. It will also be a positive benefit as prices drop and helps develop industry - even if their are climate costs.
