Renewables and Energy Storage
Frequent commenter Garth writes:
Remember ANY successful business that runs a supply line for their product must have storage or they face shortages and customer loss – energy is no different and storage is the answer. I just can’t explain why the wind industry has been in denial over this fact. Reality is on its way.
You are most certainly right about the lack of storage in the energy industry. As my friends at Eos Energy Storage (breakthrough zinc-air batteries) have been known to quip, “even sushi has better storage.” Having said that, I’m not sure the wind industry is “in denial” here. In fact, one of the clean energy investments that I support is a 25 mW project that will deploy CAES (compressed air energy storage).
There are a couple of other points that should be made here, as well:
• No one denies that storage is a good thing, but who’s going to pay for it? It benefits all stake-holders: generation, transmission, distribution, and load. How do you split up the costs based on that? I’ve been attending conferences for several years that address this issue, and I don’t think we’re too much closer to answering this now than we were when I began. The situation is exacerbated by the criminally insane ways in which the utilities are regulated.
• The penetration of wind into the grid-mix is about 4%. Until it’s two or three times that, storage means very little.
• Not everyone agrees with me, but I believe the advent of electric transportation changes the equation here, with EVs charged largely at night when wind resources are highest.
• The people at Eos (referenced above) think their solution is its own game changer, offering utilities the ability to store energy cost effectively.
In any case, I appreciate your comments, as always.
EVs may help, but using them for storage would reduce battery life. Whether the reduction in battery life would be sufficient to be a serious problem is unclear. It would depend partly on the number of EVs connected since the more EVs connected, the more shallow the cycling. Presumably EV owners would be provided monetary incentives to permit their batteries to be used in that manner.
However, currently there aren’t enough EVs in existence to make any difference. It could take decades to have enough EVs and I question whether we can wait that long. We don’t even know for certain whether there will ever be enough EVs to provide sufficient storage to make renewables practical. It could be that we will continue to use internal combustion engines and power them with an artificial fuel.
It is disturbing that backers of proposals to depend 100% on renewables automatically reject any possibility of a “Plan B” and thereby assume that there is no possibility that renewables could conceivably fail to do the job. If renewables prove to fall short of the task, then we will have to expand the use of fossil fuels or expand our current nuclear technology, with all of its problems. Surely it would make sense to put more funds into developing a better nuclear technology than to depend on breakthroughs, which may never occur, to make renewables practical.
Craig,
As far as who should pay for storage, that’s easy… the storage facility should pay for itself by the value that it adds to the grid. If it cannot do that (CAES), then the storage is clearly not worth the benefit.
This is certainly the easiest way to consider the notion of storage. Wind power should receive subsidies based on the externalities that are offset by the use of wind power… the same obviously holds for solar, geothermal, and even switching to higher efficiency CCGT or ultra-SCPC w/multi-stage exhaust scrubbing… In all these cases, you can point to externalities from NG and coal power that are not priced, giving an unfair advantage to the fossil industry.
In grid integration solutions (storage), this is not the case. All of the problems with grid intermittency ARE priced into the grid… so the benefit to society has a known cost. We’re done.
🙂
Note that WindFuels would fully solve this problem while being quite profitable just by using current grid pricing.
I think WindFuels is a great technology to balance the intermitency of renewable generation. It can be sited along most wind corridors to even the demand/response issues. Other storage using various battery systems would make a lot of sense at the sub-station level. Battery charging during low demand, switching to grid support during peak demand times in a local area. Summer afternoon air conditioning peaks for example. Storage solutions can be sized to the substation capacity. Big cities have bigger substations than rural areas, so the storage solutions would be bigger too. The local utility customers would benefit from sub-station support the most. Both scenarios would benefit the generation, transmission & distribution providers. Costs to build divided 3 ways, paid for by the consumer.
Or perhaps storage would become the responsibility of the end user of the power. So, if you want reliable power, it would be your responsibility to buy your own batteries and electronics or some other storage technology.
Craig: I think storage is mostly the responsibility of the generator because it´s part of the product he is selling. The guys in the fossil fuel business provide it, it´s all part of the cost structure.
Involving the end users would become a huge problem, imagine if the current is shut off or any other unexpected problem arises, the legal responsibilities would shoot into unmanageable proportions.
How long would a small problem shut the flow because of that.
Who would be responsible for what part of the problem, etc.
Maybe the generators could subcontract the service to another company which would take care of that part of the distribution (but in bulk); that way, the responsibility would be easier to control (fewer people involved).
Presumably if the generator assumed the storage responsibility, the end user would be charged for that service by paying higher rates for the power. If the end user assumed the responsibility, he would pay less for the electricity but of course have to pay for his own storage system.
If the generator charged for storage, perhaps the charge could be based on the reliability guaranteed. For example, if the end user accepted a risk of being without power 25% of the time, he would pay a lower rate than if he accepted a risk of being without power for only 10% of the time. That way, the generator could, when supplies became short, cut off power to users in sequence depending on the reliability for which they paid.
There are various ways that the storage could be divided up and perhaps all could be used concurrently depending on the desires of end users and what the provider is willing to guarantee. The problems with all storage methods are that reliability would inevitably be less than what we are accustomed to and that it would be impossible to predict far in advance when a failure would occur. Perhaps the most that could be hoped for would be a few hours notice before power was cut off.
In all likelihood, fossil fueled generation would be required to ensure adequate reliability at a tolerable cost. That means that the investment costs of renewables would be in addition to the investment costs of fossil fueled generation that would be required to ensure reliability thereby greatly increasing the cost of power.
Storage is likely to show up all over the grid.
Generators will use some because it will let them firm up what they have to sell and let them move “unwanted”/cheap power to higher demand times.
Utilities will use some to avoid the cost of gas peakers. They’ve find it useful to spread storage around ‘neighborhoods’ which will give them some breathing room when lines get knocked down and to take stress off of highly used lines.
End users will use some to let them buy the cheapest available and offset the most expensive.
If one or more of the promising battery technologies pans out I suspect storage will be well distributed around the grid.
This assumes that the cost of storage will be reasonable. Perhaps it will be reasonable at some future date, but it isn’t now. It would be unwise to depend on something that may never happen.
I agree that the market problems facing storage at this time are confusing and vague but I think that will work out in time. The bigger challenges we’ve faced in the effort to license and build a large storage facility and getting it on line has been both the regulation barriers set by government and the almost vitriol response from the large utilities who at this time use natural gas for renewable integration. When a 400mw to 1000mw storage facility is ready for service the regional balancing authorities will see the value of storage over natural gas both in price and regulation value. Remember the goal is to replace fossil fuel with renewables and storage is the path we have to take to clean up our world. I’m sure until there are enough renewables we will be buying unused energy from coal and gas to time shift but that in its self is reducing the green house gas or at least not wasting it while a coaler idles.With storage in the right areas even BPA won’t have to curtail wind rather it can be stored for peak demand during the day and the product will be clean frequency controlled and stable.