Some truth to people who think we can be 100% renewable

[CaptTom]

Because of the way electricity is bought and sold, there's a lot of money in being able to stabilize the grid for very short periods.

This is where the power companies are getting familiar with storage technologies. Right now there's no sure bet on longer-term, utility-scale storage in most places, so there's not much investment there.

Probably where we'll see that first is in residences. Think Tesla's "Power Wall." It'll be most economical in off-grid applications, but it's already moving closer to mainstream.

 

[eroscott]

Because of the way electricity is bought and sold, there's a lot of money in being able to stabilize the grid for very short periods.

This is where the power companies are getting familiar with storage technologies. Right now there's no sure bet on longer-term, utility-scale storage in most places, so there's not much investment there.

Probably where we'll see that first is in residences. Think Tesla's "Power Wall." It'll be most economical in off-grid applications, but it's already moving closer to mainstream.

There are 3 main areas from my research and presentations I've seen. Some companies I follow are doing the 2nd one. 2nd graphic are examples of it.
1) Residential
2) Commercial
3) Utilities

____________________
Commercial examples

 

[NW-Bound]

... These early ones are really proof of concept on a 'small' scale. These can be scaled as needed. That is what you are missing. This started off in a conversation on Twitter and given 100 days. (Of course a lot of prep was done so 100 days is just a highlevel idea that these are not multi-year projects)...

No, I don't think I am missing anything.

Tesla had already had a design, and the 100 days was just for them to transport and install multiple units to Australia.

As for scaling it up, in another thread I showed some numbers, but have not been able to find them again. But these are not hard to look up, so I just did it again.

Take for example Los Angeles County. In 2017, it used 67,569 GWh. That's the capacity of 523,790 Tesla 129MWh battery plants. If we just want to store 1-day's worth, we still need 1,435 plants to store 185 GWh. And that's just for one county in the US.

Tesla's Gigafactory is currently producing 50 GWh/year, and projected to be 150 GWh/year when completed. So, it will take one year of battery production to produce battery to store 1 day of use for LA county.

When we talk about an entire country, how many gigafactories will we need? And then, batteries do wear out, and we need to talk about attrition rate. We do not build them up just once, and call it done.

Scaling up something like this is a huge effort that perhaps nothing like it has been done. How many people will we need to drop what they work on to just go build batteries?

 

[NW-Bound]

I have been working on my DIY home solar project, as often mentioned here.

I currently have 5.5kW of solar panels installed, to be used to charge a 22kWh bank of lithium battery.

I have not hooked up the various parts, but have been doing a lot of calculations. It is not possible for me to scale this up so that I can be completely off-grid.

My peak energy consumption is 100kWh/day in the hottest summer day. I would need 4x more solar panels, and maybe 4x more lithium batteries. It would cost way too much to be practical.

PS. It would not be hard for me to live off-grid, but it has to be in a tiny house. To turn my 2,800-sq.ft. home into off-grid is too expensive, and besides the lot is not large enough for me to build a solar farm although this is what I want to do.

 

[eroscott]

No, I don't think I am missing anything.

Tesla had already had a design, and the 100 days was just for them to transport and install multiple units to Australia.

As for scaling it up, in another thread I showed some numbers, but have not been able to find them again. But these are not hard to look up, so I just did it again.

Take for example Los Angeles County. In 2017, it used 67,569 GWh. That's the capacity of 523,790 Tesla 129MWh battery plants. If we just want to store 1-day's worth, we still need 1,435 plants to store 185 GWh. And that's just for one county in the US.

Tesla's Gigafactory is currently producing 50 GWh/year, and projected to be 150 GWh/year when completed. So, it will take one year of battery production to produce battery to store 1 day of use for LA county.

When we talk about an entire country, how many gigafactories will we need? And then, batteries do wear out, and we need to talk about attrition rate. We do not build them up just once, and call it done.

Scaling up something like this is a huge effort that perhaps nothing like it has been done. How many people will we need to drop what they work on to just go build batteries?

Nice job. I like the way you think.

Of course, we are talking about only needing a partial days supply as solar, wind, hydro, etc can be used to supplement all this at different parts of the day where excess can be stored but things like solar can simply be used during the day.

Why are you just limiting your thought to 1 gigafactory?
Why are you only thinking about 1 company? - Tesla. Notice Tesla is not even listed below!!
There are several storage companies and many around longer than Tesla.
This stuff is snowballing.

Do you know what percentage of lithium batteries are reusable? It is impressive.

q=biggest+lithium+producers https://www.google.com/search?q=biggest+lithium+producers

q=biggest+battery+storage+companies https://www.google.com/search?q=biggest+battery+storage+companies
Notice Tesla is not even listed below!!

 

[JoeWras]

Man, I wish I had saved some of my Weekly Reader papers back from grade school, during the energy crisis. Hard to believe, but this was a hot topic back then, and it wasn't pretty.

I don't remember the details, but what I do remember was we pre-teens were discussing how we'd never even drive, because there would be no cars due to the lack of energy. Nuclear and solar were topics of discussion.

45 years later, we're driving. But the party can't last forever, even though it was extended.

Solar (and storage) improvements need to get on a Moore's law path of improvement to make it really viable.

 

[eroscott]

Solar improvements needs to get on a Moore's law path of improvement to make it really viable.

Did you see this graphic?

 

[NW-Bound]

Well, even if there are 10x more companies building batteries besides Tesla, the factor of 10 would still pale besides the magnitude of the problem, if we need and want 10,000 companies like Tesla.

I guess I do not know enough about battery production to understand how big a part of the world's economy it will take to build all the batteries we would need.

I wonder if someone has done this calculation on a macro level, similar to what David MacKay has done about RE on the TED talk linked in a post earlier in this thread.

 

[JoeWras]

Did you see this graphic?

No. I do now. I'm thinking of the lack of progress in the 90s.


What about storage? Any similar graph?

 

[eroscott]

Well, even if there are 10x more companies building batteries besides Tesla, the factor of 10 would still pale besides the magnitude of the problem, if we need and want 10,000 companies like Tesla.

I guess I do not know enough about battery production to understand how big a part of the world's economy it will take to build all the batteries we would need.

I wonder if someone has done this calculation on a macro level, similar to what David MacKay has done about RE on the TED talk linked in a post earlier in this thread.

I think the reality of it is that you are more right and my thinking is smaller scale ... probably too much peaker plant replacement reading on my part.

Good article that talks about California to make your point: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/

MIT has an energy dept with a lot of information. Renewable Energy | MIT Energy Initiative

Check out this report as one example which is part of a series going on for 1.5+ decades:
http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/MITEI-The-Future-of-the-Electric-Grid.pdf

 

[NW-Bound]

I just looked at that 1st article in MIT Technology Review, published quite recently on July 27, 2018.

It looks bleak for Californians, who seem to insist for more and more RE, whether technology is there or not. Maybe some technology breakthroughs will happen to save them. We will see.

 

[eroscott]

I just looked at that 1st article in MIT Technology Review, published quite recently on July 27, 2018.

It looks bleak for Californians, who seem to insist for more and more RE, whether technology is there or not. Maybe some technology breakthroughs will happen to save them. We will see.

In a strange coincidence MIT also very recently (last week) released research on just this topic!

Below via: “Sun in a box” would store renewable energy for the grid | MIT News

'Sun in a box' would store renewable energy for the grid
Design for system that provides solar- or wind-generated power on demand should be cheaper than other leading options.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office
December 5, 2018

MIT engineers have come up with a conceptual design for a system to store renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, and deliver that energy back into an electric grid on demand. The system may be designed to power a small city not just when the sun is up or the wind is high, but around the clock.

The new design stores heat generated by excess electricity from solar or wind power in large tanks of white-hot molten silicon, and then converts the light from the glowing metal back into electricity when it’s needed. The researchers estimate that such a system would be vastly more affordable than lithium-ion batteries, which have been proposed as a viable, though expensive, method to store renewable energy. They also estimate that the system would cost about half as much as pumped hydroelectric storage — the cheapest form of grid-scale energy storage to date.

“Even if we wanted to run the grid on renewables right now we couldn’t, because you’d need fossil-fueled turbines to make up for the fact that the renewable supply cannot be dispatched on demand,” says Asegun Henry, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “We’re developing a new technology that, if successful, would solve this most important and critical problem in energy and climate change, namely, the storage problem.”

 

[Tetto]

Show me some storage tech that has some reasonable path towards supporting 100% renewable across all the grids in the US in the next 30 years. I'm very interested in this stuff, I follow it closely, and discuss it on other forums with experts in the field. Show me.
-ERD50

I’ve read about using flywheels as storage devices. They could be made cheaply, have a massive weight for efficiency and storage capacity. It’s something worth exploring and once up to rotational velocity, it wouldn’t take much to keep it there until the sun goes down.

 

[NW-Bound]

In a strange coincidence MIT also very recently (last week) released research on just this topic!

Below via: “Sun in a box” would store renewable energy for the grid | MIT News

Thanks for sharing.

Quite a novel and interesting concept. But molten silicon at 4000F? I dunno.

They had to shield the Space Shuttle against the 3000F heat of reentry, and after a few decades of flight, that still represented a major hazard and resulted in the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

 

[ERD50]

Missed the recent posts while I worked on this...

....

For the US, biomass would require almost 100% of land area, wind would require 30-40% of land area, and PV solar about 15-20%. Imagine that, really. ....

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_renewables

Well that’s bizarre, I don’t know what to think now. I also found an academic paper that concluded the US would have to devote 0.6% of all land to PV solar to supply current demand. A lot of land, but not 25%.

OTOH, David MacKay was knighted in 2016, could he be that wrong?

Guess I may have to dig further...

Where did you see/hear that 15-20% for the US? I didn't see it in the video, I only saw UK? Did I miss it?

I came up with ~ 150,000 sq miles ( ~ 400 miles x 400 miles ) of PV to replace all energy in US. Based on:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/?page=us_energy_home

97.70 Quadrillion BTUs; energy consumption US 2017
0.293071 watt-hour per BTU
28.63 Quadrillion watt-hours
28,633 Terra Watt-hours

and...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert

A 2013 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory concluded that the average large photovoltaic plant in the United States occupied 3.1 acres of permanently disturbed area and 3.4 acres of total site area per gigawatt-hour per year.

And assuming 20% capacity factor and $1/watt installed, it would cost ~ 19 years of USA GDP, plus batteries, land, maintenance, etc.

$377 Trillion $ @ $1 Watt installed ; Giga is 'billion' (10^9)

$19 US GDP trillion USD (2017)
19 Years of GDP

And ~ 4.3% of USA land (if it was all in the sunny, clear desert).

3.4 Acres per Gigawatt-hours per year
97,352,325 Acres to meet US energy

640 Acres per square mile
152,113 sq miles

100 x 100 = 10,000 sq miles - MUSK's estimate - Musk says 100 miles x 100 miles of PV would power all US energy, with 1 mile x 1 mile for battery storage.

Check my math, could have slipped a decimal or two somewhere. Lotsa zeroes and conversions!

Did Elon post his numbers somewhere?

-ERD50

 

[catii]

Utility "unavailability" is NOT a function of its not being available! It's caused by logistics problems, & almost always due to someone's stupidity. That's speaking as a former Project Manager for the U.S. Department of Energy.

 

[JoeWras]

I’ve read about using flywheels as storage devices. They could be made cheaply, have a massive weight for efficiency and storage capacity. It’s something worth exploring and once up to rotational velocity, it wouldn’t take much to keep it there until the sun goes down.

Been reading about this technology for 40 years now. Very little progress. It is a great example of something that works well in the lab, but has difficulty in the field.

In the end, it is mechanical. Bearings and supports fail. Exotic bearings (think, maglev) are, well, still too exotic. Failures of the rotating mass hold great danger. It is not portable in a car, etc.

Maybe they can make it work someday. We'll see.

 

[JoeWras]

An old friend and I recently shared a long car ride. He's a materials engineer, I'm a software engineer. We both had a long discussion on our respective past careers (both retired, we were on a volunteer gig).

The one thing that kept coming up was how applying research and lab products to the real world is so damn difficult. That is an engineer's job, after all. We shared frustrations of schedule and budget pressures. Despite our completely different disciplines, we shared this one foundational issue of engineering.

That's the thing. This stuff (new storage ideas) can and will happen. But can it be safe, economical, reliable, and manufacturable? Lab demos do not the real world make.

 

[NW-Bound]

Regarding flywheel energy storage, Wikipedia has this article summarizing the various experimental applications. Most were for special applications, such as hybrid cars to recover and reuse energy which would have been lost during braking. Needless to say, most of these have been fulfilled more easily with lithium batteries.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage.

Most of the experiments were for smaller-scale and special applications, which require storing and discharging energy at a high power, but in periodic pulses. The examples include rail guns, catapults on aircraft carriers, testing equipments for labs testing circuit breakers, etc...

But for storing energy for long-term usage such as storing solar energy for use overnight, one can imagine that scaling up to a flywheel capable of storing GWh's is going to be a daunting task, not including consideration for catastrophic failures of the bearings.

I am surprised to learn of the following project for grid energy storage. The 80 MWh capacity is large enough to be exciting. This is more interesting than a lithium battery of the same capacity.

Amber Kinetics, Inc. has an agreement with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for a 20 MW / 80 MWh flywheel energy storage facility located in Fresno, CA with a four-hour discharge duration.

 

[NW-Bound]

About solar PV panels taking up 25% of the US land area, again I never did see David MacKay stating that. Perhaps it was for getting solar energy in the form of biomass, meaning growing vegetation then harvest it for energy.

Photovoltaic panels at 20% efficiency are hard to beat, and they are getting cheaper. The only problem is to store all that cheap and clean energy for overnight use. Technically, it is solved with lithium batteries. However, there's a huge difference between a technical solution and an economically affordable one.

Once we have that overnight storage, then we can shoot for storage for rainy days. Batteries are still very expensive as the earlier MIT article points out.

 

[ERD50]

... Of course, we are talking about only needing a partial days supply as solar, wind, hydro, etc can be used to supplement all this at different parts of the day where excess can be stored but things like solar can simply be used during the day. ...

It's not that simple. Yes, you can say we will get some solar just about everyday, and probably some wind just about every day. So you could say we only need partial day's storage.

But, if those are each running, say @ 20% over the course of 3 days, that's 2.4 days of storage to get through. And consider that seasonally in many areas, solar is far lower in winter.

I've seen solar go to near zero for a week at a time, because of snow build up on the solar panels in an already weak period of short days and low angle. You can't easily shovel off acres and acres of solar panels. You can put them on frames that go more vertical in winter, but that adds cost.

A local (N IL) installation (400 kW) shows that Dec/Jan are less than 1/5th of the output we get in June/July. Wind is a little higher in winter, ~ 1.6x on average, so that helps, on average. But if you get a week of low winds, while solar is at 20% or worse, you've got a challenge. So seasonal effects are very significant, so very expensive for storage. Probably cheaper to keep enough gas peakers on line.

-ERD50

 

[Lakewood90712]

Lowest cost large scale battery storage

The sweet-spot for battery storage farms is Sodium Metal Sulfur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium–sulfur_battery

Not sure I would want liquid metal sodium operating at > 300 c nearby , but is lowest cost and energy transfer losses.

Several manufacturers now. in the past the main commercial manufacturers were in the soviet union.

 

[mpeirce]

I haven't seen any discussions of storage vs peaking plants that mention that storage solutions have a significant recovery time vs peaking plants.

When a peaking plant is turned off, you can turn it back on right away at full capacity. On the other hand, when storage is used up it must be recharged. This not only takes time, but also consumes some of the existing generating capacity for quite some time.

 

[explanade]

Some company is trying to develop towers to lift concrete to store energy.

That way it’s not like pumped hydro which requires certain topography.

Ironic th8ng is it’s a Swiss company working on this:

https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/

 

[Lakewood90712]

Just comes down to " Have your cake and eat it too " or as the uni-bomber Ted K. would say " Eat your cake and have it too ". The developed world just uses to much $@*-&&!%%#$ energy and natural resources because they are still relatively cheap.

The hangover from this 2 century party will last as long as human existence and beyond. ( assuming some life will continue if the earth can no longer support human life ).

Rant over for today