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by audunw
753 days ago
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Yeah, this is why I’m not too worried about the energy storage side of going 100% renewable energy in a scenario where we also decarbonise completely. Storing energy as heat is dead simple, cheap, can let you store huge amounts of energy, and you can store for fairly long timespans. It doesn’t matter that you can’t feed power back to the grid (well, maybe you can.. you can convert the light given off the heated block with photovoltaics.. but that won’t be a huge factor). If we decarbonise industrial heat it will create enough demand for renewables that the minimum output of renewables (over a larger area, I think it’s fair to assume some grid improvements over the next years) will be more than enough to cover base load needs. We will probably have quite a lot of batteries for frequency regulation and smoothing out the duck curve. Some of that will also help with dunkelflaute. But mainly there will just be so much renewables that the output never goes below what is needed on a given day. There’s so many aspects of decarbonisation that makes balancing the grid easier. Electric cars is another example, where a lot of people will have flexibility of delaying or being proactive with charging based on electricity price forecasts. I expect most rental car companies will provide some grid balancing services, and in the near future you’ll have to pay extra to check out a car with 100% SoC. |
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FWIW there are a few other comments in this page discussing TPV (albeit briefly) and there are at least a few companies seriously pursuing it with federal support. It is a pretty interesting alternative to other forms ESS, particularly for long duration (ie more relevant for critical resiliency applications than supply/demand arbitrage). Like you said probably will not end up super relevant in the grand scheme of the grid’s total ESS capacity, but it will most likely have a niche I think.
> I expect most rental car companies will provide some grid balancing services, and in the near future you’ll have to pay extra to check out a car with 100% SoC.
Rental car companies are an interesting example I hadn’t thought of before - thanks for highlighting that. Another more common challenge/opportunitu will be campuses - eg universities, large corporations, etc which have their own microgrid (often a CHP/district system in the northeast at least) - which may have a large number of commuters arriving in the morning and potentially wanting to charge their EVs all day. In 15 years, this might represent a pretty significant increase in demand, and represents giving a pretty substantial amount of free electricity to commuters (if things stayed as they are today). At the same time, charging up all of those vehicles during midday and then sending them home to immediately discharge when they plug in at 5-7pm could substantially abate the duck curve, and being an even larger further savings for the commuter. Seems obvious that some sort of new agreements/contracts etc will come in to play for these sorts of campuses.