It's true, but when does it make sense to include plants that do not deliver reliable power?
Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still using fossil fuels. Every watt generated by wind power means that you can reduce fossil fuel, and thus lower your CO2 emissions. But once you got rid of fossil fuels and you have a reliable source of power without CO2 emissions, you can get rid of the unreliable ones.
Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before that. If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy. Until then, nuclear is the only proven solution. Betting on batteries now amounts to gambling with the planet.
Batteries are not supposed to solve the large scale storage problem. They're best at solving the small scale storage problem. Recently they solved the problem of small scale storage on wheels.
> If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy.
Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.
Is it? Are you taking into account battery degradation from 1 cycle every day? The vast majority of battery chemistries won't last more than 3-4 years under those circumstances, and those that would are either much more expensive or experimental.
As of now storing 10kWh at 1kW costs around 1000$ from the cells alone. If you're changing them every 3 years then you have to spend 10 000$/kW over 30 years whereas nuclear is the same price per kW for a 30 year period.
Hauling a lot of water up a mountain at times of low demand, and releasing it through a turbine at times of high demand, is a type of battery; it seems to me a reasonable approach to smoothing supply and demand for wind/solar.
I agree that it's going to be a long time before grid-scale chemical batteries can help much with demand-smoothing.
The latest US plan aims for a 95% carbon free grid by 2035. They could have aimed for 100%, but it's cheaper to start electrifying more things at that point, as 95% carbon free electricity powering a heat pump is better than burning gas for heat. They therefore get the eqivalent of 105% carbon reduction for the same cost, more than they'd get by focusing on the final 5% of carbon on the grid.
As far as I know, few people suggest (Lithium-)batteries for long term storage. Electrolysis, optionally followed by turning the Hydrogen into Methane, seems like a much more scalable solution. That works at scale today, it's just too expensive to make sense at this point. Then there are other types of batteries that might become much cheaper in the future, perhaps redox-flow batteries or something like that.
According to people I talked with, who did analysis for "Green hydrogen" as storage method, assuming Poland - we would need something along the line of 150% peak production, locally, before it started moving the needle at all - and I'm not sure of this wasn't in combination with nuclear (though limited by the idiotic free market on electricity).
All of that assumes that the demand doesn't go up... Which is not compatible with things like climate goals
We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.
China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....
> There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.
Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing.
Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet? Nuclear is proven and if we claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat I don’t know why we would pin all our hopes on solar and wind and some to-be-discovered storage solution. To be clear, I’m not against solar and wind—on the contrary, I want a diverse clean energy portfolio. But wasting time emitting while we pray for a storage solution for wind/solar seems utterly foolish.
Sorry, but Nuclear is just proven to fail. Even if we would reverse course on Nuclear today it would be 20 or 30 years until the plants would be build. By that time solar and wind will another magnitude cheaper.
The way forward is wind and solar. Everything else shouldn't be focused on.
> Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet?
Yes. There are basically so many different chemistries (and non-chemical storage methods) that the important question is “which type should we prefer” rather than “can we even do it”.
While intercontinental HVDC interconnects are technically feasible, no major world power would ever depend on those for essential power supplies. It's just too risky if foreign countries can cut off your electricity during a war or other crisis. Energy independence is strategically critical in a way that transcends economics.
I guess a manufacturing limit is bad enough. The global battery production is expected to reach 2063 GWh/year by 2028 [0]. That wouldn't be enough to store China's electricity consumption for a single hour. The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Are there enough raw materials for this? How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries?
What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often. In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a scenario (<4% in Germany), nor will bio mass (<10%).
> The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude.
Yes, but that doesn’t itself seem like an implausible economic shift given how large the existing fossil fuel sector is.
Challenging, sure — perhaps it is politically impossible, I wouldn’t know as I’m not at all politically astute — but physically it seems fine.
> Are there enough raw materials for this?
That part at least is fine. Earth is big, and while lithium is in the category “rare Earths”, it isn’t all that rare compared to what we need, and even if it was lithium isn’t even the only option for storage.
One of the things suggested in your [2] was long-distance HVDC to different weather zones, and Scandinavian (hydro? I’m unclear) storage. In principle we could also do antipodal HVDC (different time zone for day/night, different hemisphere for summer/winter), though on a previous thread I was encouraged to do the maths and realised the EU collectively would use a 1m^2 cross section conductor for current HVDC designs (if you wanted 100% substitution rather than it being merely part of the solution), and this will take quite a long time to mine at current rates.
> How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries?
No idea, but the current alternatives are “set lots of it on fire” (fossil fuels) and “bury a tiny quantity of extraordinarily dangerous stuff in scary artwork for geological timescales” (nuclear), and all it has to do is beat those.
IIRC the end-of-life batteries can be processed back into their raw material more easily than can the rocks we start with for fresh batteries.
We're also pretty far away from the kinds of renewable penetration where you actually need a lot of storage, so we have plenty of time left to build more batteries and electrolyzers.
It's not just a means of energy storage; it's a method for producing a vital chemical feedstock. If your main alternative is processing natural gas, building more electrolysers is a no-brainer. You'll have to do it no matter what the efficiency, since we just don't have a better way.
80 per cent is what you call extremely inefficient ... what percentage would be "efficient" then in your opinion?
> Accounting for the accepted use of the higher heat value (because inefficiency via heat can be redirected back into the system to create the steam required by the catalyst), average working efficiencies for PEM electrolysis are around 80% ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...]
>There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days.
My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem. Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it wasn't nuclear'.
Not really. NPPs as backup to wind would be horribly expensive. Wind droughts don't happen often; even the current price during them would not make a NPP pay off.
What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.
Are there any commercial operators of electric grid storage using hydrogen? I can only find prototype or demonstration projects.
Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed at scale. Comparing a hypothetical cost of hydrogen, to actual historical cost is comparing apples to oranges.
Why should any exist yet, when natural gas has been so cheap? Tighten the screws enough to eliminate fossil fuel dispatchable sources and you'll start to see it (or something else that can solve the same problem better).
Many places are already seeing energy surpluses. California and Hawaii are consistently reaching excess daytime energy production. If we really can store electricity in hydrogen $1/KWh, then we should be seeing hydrogen storage being built to profit off these intervals of negative energy prices. But we aren't. Is it because people fail to see this market opportunity? Or, maybe, it's because writing a white paper claiming an extremely cheap cost is not remotely the same thing as actually building an energy storage facility at said cost.
I agree, we should tighten screws to eliminate fossil fuels. But hydroelectricity is the only scalable form of grid storage we currently have, and that's limited to the right geography. Expecting some unproven technology to be a silver bullet for storage is extremely wishful thinking. We need to be honest about technologies like hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc: These are experimental technologies that might operate cheaply at scale, but we have no real-world experience to back up these claims. I could just say "storage is irrelevant because fusion will deliver energy at $1/MWh" and while nobody can technically disprove it, since they can't see into the future, it's also dishonest to claim this as fact for the same reason.
Natural gas is really hard to displace here, and won't happen until it becomes and stays expensive. It may now be above that price level in Europe, but it has to stay there to enable the capital investment in large scale green hydrogen production.
Yet the condition you claim will give rise to widespread adoption of energy storage already exist in Hawaii: fossil fuels have to be imported making it expensive, and daytime energy prices regularly go negative due to widespread solar adopt. These conditions have existed for years. Yet people aren't storing and reselling this energy. Why not? If hydrogen storage really costs only $1/KWh then a company can reclaim their investment cost in less than a week of operation, with an average price of $0.30/KWh in the state. It's basically free money.
The reality is that hydrogen storage costs nowhere near $1/KWh. People making predictions about what a technology will cost and actually building it are two totally different things.
Hydrogen is relatively inconventient/difficult to handle except when transported via pipeline.
There appear to be no dense long range pipeline networks (for hydrogen) connecting multiple countries (yet).
Pipeline networks for natural gas aren't designed to safely transport pure (or high concentrations of) hydrogen, so over a certain concentration hydrogen would have to be converted into synthetic natural gas. The latter conversion appears to not yet be deployed at very large scales.
Seems to me that the reason why there is no large scale hydrogen generation yet (though there are medium-large/industrial scale projects now), is simply that until now large scale wasn't economically feasible. With hydrogen strategies and more pressure from a price on CO2 on their way we'll definitely see more of it soon.
For grid storage, hydrogen would not need to be transported at all (although the option to do so is there if it's favorable). It could be made above the storage caverns, pumped into them, then extracted and consumed there.
Absolutely. Hydrogen can be stored underground for maybe $1/kWh of storage capacity. There would also be power related costs, but those don't matter nearly as much for rare event backup.
Germany alone has the potential to store an estimated 9.6 PWh of hydrogen, enough to supply their average electric power demand for years, not weeks.
Only a fraction of the renewable output would have to be routed through hydrogen, though. It turns out this is still cheaper than new nuclear for providing "synthetic baseload" supply, especially if one looks at projections of how much renewables should cost in the time it would take for any new nuclear plant initiated today to come online.
Said "fraction", for moderately modest needs and assuming just 24h window where it provides "baseload" can be as "low" as 1/3rd of total renewable capacity - assuming that renewables do 100% of peak whiel saving the excess..
Or so analysis from people I know in the industry, interested in decarbonising (not fossil lobby related), show.
> If the energy is basically free which under certain circumstances (lots of wind) could happen, does it matter how inefficient it is?
There are two sides to this cost: energy production, and storage.
The part which is argued to be essentially free is the production, which is not synchronized with energy consumption patterns.
Renewable's main challenge is how to store energy cheaply in order to be able to be used reliably to supply the baseline. Until that happens, everyone is required to employ non-renewable energy sources that can and do meet the baseline.
It matters nothing is production is free if storing it to supply the baseline is more expensive and thus wasteful than conventional non-renewable sources.
Depends how expensive the electrolyser is. Just because I did make something when I was 9 years old that could fill up a small jamjar with hydrogen, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s economically viable.
(I have no idea either way if this is an important limit or not. Just that it can have other sources of downside besides merely using otherwise wasted energy).
But if a country mitigates, e.g. by having many operators of different technologies, then consumers can hardly help noticing the price of nuclear. So the operators of nuclear plants end up having to explain ⓐ why they're expensive ⓑ that they are more reliable than the Japanese operators at Fukushima and c) why they still require public subsidy of their liability insurance.
When you say "why they're expensive" do you mean the plant itself, or the produced electricity?
In any case Fukushima is easily explained: They ignored the risk of tsunami despite two studies (and governmental bodies) warning of it. The real reason the Fukushima is so damaging, is that the Japanese are seen as generally "competent", so their mistakes/hubris are seen as reproducible anywhere i.e. "if the Japanese couldn't get it right".
Either, since the income should justify the investment: One wants nuclear plant operators to have plenty of income, so as not to be tempted to save on maintenance.
I agree entirely with the hubris argument. And it's a harsh one, because if an organisation claims to be more competent than the Japanese and and safety-minded too, why can't it persuade an insurer to sell it liability insurance on normal commercial terms, at a justifiable price? It's a difficult argument to make.
> if an organisation claims to be more competent than the Japanese and and safety-minded too, why can't it persuade an insurer to sell it liability insurance on normal commercial terms, at a justifiable price?
It's because nobody else buys that amount of insurance. A hundred billion dollar insurance policy has significant risks and costs to the insurer completely independent of the actual risk of a claim.
For one thing, the insurer is required to hold enough capital to pay out possible claims no matter how unlikely they are. So you're basically paying interest on that sum of money in the difference between the ordinary market rate of return and the lower return on the "safe" securities insurers are allowed to hold. That cost is completely independent of the risk of a claim; it's strictly based on the amount of insurance you want.
Then what happens if there is e.g. a major earthquake which causes a minor incident at a nuclear plant, so that 99% of the damage is caused by the earthquake but the insurer is a deep pocket and the judge is sympathetic to the earthquake victims? That's a risk an insurer has to account for, but it's not a risk you can address by improving the safety of the nuclear plant because the risk is rooted in politics.
When the risk of an incident is low enough, it's costs like that which dominate the premium for the policy. You can make the risk of a legitimate claim arbitrarily small and those costs would still be the same.
And it's an isolated demand for rigor. Nobody else is required to carry that amount of insurance. When a coal mine turns an entire town into a superfund site and kills thousands of people, they just file for bankruptcy. What would the alternatives cost if they had to carry the same insurance, or pay for their externalities?
Reinsurance has nothing to do with it. Lawyers could convince a judge to make the nuclear plant insurance pay out to earthquake victims because no one else can. The increase in the premium from the amortized risk of that happening is the same whether you spread it across other insurance companies or not.
Try going to a major insurance company to get a policy that pays out in the amount of two hundred billion dollars in the event that you're abducted by aliens. If you can get the policy at all, the premium will be unaffordable, and it's not because the insurance company thinks there is a significant probability that you'll actually be abducted by aliens.
Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still using fossil fuels. Every watt generated by wind power means that you can reduce fossil fuel, and thus lower your CO2 emissions. But once you got rid of fossil fuels and you have a reliable source of power without CO2 emissions, you can get rid of the unreliable ones.