Annual "Storage Week" Conference Is Coming Up
I plan to attend the annual Storage Week conference in Austin, TX, April 2 – 4; this will be my third consecutive year for this conference, and I have to say that they are terrific, in terms of both content and networking opportunities. In fact, I approve of what these guys are doing to such a degree that I’ve signed up 2GreenEnergy as a “media partner” for the event.
Storage at the grid-scale is a real conundrum, as it’s of great value to all energy stake-holders in a ton of different ways. In particular, storage:
• Mitigates the need to build fantastically expensive power plants to address peak loads that exist, at most, 100 hours per year.
• Provides a cost-effective way to deal with voltage regulation and wave-form issues.
• Enables the integration of solar and wind energy, both of which are, by their nature, intermittent.
• Sees its cost coming down every year as the (numerous) technologies that relate to it continue to improve and achieve economies of scale.
• Is a natural component of smart-grid — a direction which the world is clearly headed.
But getting utilities and the bodies that regulate them to understand all the related implications – and to take action in a world full of political lawyers and lobbyists – is no walk in the park. As a friend of mine just wrote: “I’ve been involved in Energy for a long time. Direct and indirect barriers often guarantee that the best never gets to the starting line. The good news is that opportunities exist in other parts of the globe.”
Personally, I haven’t lost confidence that the U.S. energy market is ready for a seismic shift, and that storage can play a huge part.
As always, I encourage anyone in that part of the world who wants to meet me for coffee during the day to contact me in advance. Or we can make it a beer in the evening; Austin is a city that knows how to party; I’ve had four or five clients there over the years, and yes, it really is the “live music capital of the world.”
Storage is helpful to level out both supply and demand, but there will be no investment in storage if it is too expensive. Let us hope that the price of storage can be brought down.
Consider, however, that wind farms may be unable to generate sufficient power for weeks or even months at a time. Thus, enough storage to make wind power reliable would be impractical; there would have to be sufficient storage to provide power for weeks or months will little recharging. Thus, wind power cannot replace fossil fuel power. All it could do would be to reduce the amount of fossil fuel burned since fossil fueled plants would always have to be ready to take over the load at any moment. Having to maintain two systems of power generation, i.e., renewable and fossil fuel, could greatly increase costs.
Fortunately, nuclear systems can generate power continuously because they are not dependent on the weather. But we need to do the necessary R & D work so that we can replace our pressurized water reactors with reactors which generate less waste and are safer and less expensive.
Frank, Yes but, Nuclear is as far from no waste and safe as any other possible solution if not much further. R&D is imperative in all aspects of storage as well as generation. We would be there by now if what was invested in the last decade of war was instead invested in energy R&D.
So right Ron, and we would be there now if we had gone down the road of the other reactor technology to which Frank eludes (LFTR’s). But we went down the road of Nuclear technology that yielded bomb making materials instead.
ONE of the problems with our pressurized water reactors (PWR) is that they cannot utilize even 1% of the available energy in the fuel. So, after using less than 1% of the available energy in the fuel, the rest is discarded as waste. There are at least two nuclear technologies that can extract 99% of the energy from the fuel so that the amount of waste is less than 1% of what our current PWRs generate.
One of the reactor types is the LFTR which uses thorium instead of uranium as fuel, although it does require uranium to get it started after which it requires no more uranium. It can even use our current unclear waste as fuel to get rid of most if it. It has been successfully tested in prototype form.
The other reactor type is the integral fast reactor (IFR). However, to me, the LFTR approach seems better. But there should be a “plan B” in case the LFTR turns out to have serious problems, so my position is that we should be doing R & D on both the LFTR and the IFR until we can be certain which approach to use.
If we put all our effort into renewables THEN find that they are unable to do the job, we will have wasted precious time without ending our dependence on fossil fuels. And I see no acceptable way to overcome the intermittency problem of renewables. They would require massive amounts of energy storage, like enough to last for weeks, and the technology does not exist to make that practical. If we had to reduce fossil fuel usage by only 30% to per perhaps 50%, perhaps renewables could to that. However, world power usage must increase by AT LEAST two time, and more likely four times, to lift people in poor countries out of poverty, to desalinate sea water to overcome potable and agricultural water shortages which will become even more serious with the amount of global warming which it is too late to avoid, and also to provide more air conditioning for the same reason.
Because of our poor mass media and because our high schools, colleges, and universities rarely cover any type of reactor except for the PWR, it is understandable that few people are aware of other reactor types. Thus, only a very small percentage of people have adequate knowledge to make rational decisions on energy issues.
I recommend that people do their own energy research instead of depending on environmental organizations. Here is a website to get started, but it is important to use multiple sources of information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
I am sorry to inform you that am unable to attend this time,however,will attend the seminar
next year.
Thanks Craig, please learn all you can and post the info for all of us who can’t be there. Great job as always. Mark
I am not sure how this turned into a discussion on the best nuclear power. I also think that wind has been shown to be very reliable and predicatable. If you put it in the right places and “spread the farms,” it is pretty constant. There are certainly not weeks, or even days at a time when there is no power produced. The issue is that power is often produced when not really needed (at night). By the way, I am a big fan of Nuclear as a power source, but NOT without a huge focus on really dealing with the waste. I think we can all look back a few hundred years and realize that humans are not good at long range planning. This stuff lasts for 5000 years. We need a way to eliminate the waste, not bury it and hope.
The best way to deal with nuclear waste is to use a reactor type that generates less than 1% as much waste as our current PWR technology. The LFTR is able to utilize about 99% of the energy in the nuclear fuel compared with the PWR which utilizes less than 1% of the energy in the fuel.
Moreover, the nuclear waste from the LFTR decays so quickly that it needs to be sequestered for only a few hundred years rather than thousands of years. The LFTR can also use existing waste as fuel. Although we cannot be certain that the LFTR is the way to go, to me it looks very promising. R & D on it should not have been terminated. R & D on it should be resumed.
There are numerous possible types of nuclear reactor. Surely with adequate R & D, we could implement a type of reactor that would solve the very serious problems associated with our PWRs.
Check out the link that I provided above.
The reason that this turned into a discussion about nuclear reactor types is that a better nuclear technology would solve the problems associated with our PWRs and eliminate the need for huge amounts of energy storage with its associated costs.
it’s great reading all the above a few years ago everybody was saying close the nuk sites down the coal sites etc etc know people are saying but we need them, if we all put solar pv on our roof tops including commercial buildings as well as government sites we will atleast have something to light our way home at night.the main problem i see to this is sales reps are trying to sell this system as extra income when it goes to site to justify the cost but they should only sell it as Free heat or electric and not an extra income also if you need a licence for selling this product the sales reps who sell it as an extra way to earn an income should lose there licence.