How much renewable energy is the EU really getting? (photo Europe by Satellite)
The EU is confident it will reach its target of 20% renewable energy by 2020. But according to Martien Visser, professor at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen (The Netherlands), this 20% is in reality more like 14%. This is because a large part of our energy consumption is simply ignored in the calculations for renewable energy. âEven with 100% renewables, we would still need a lot of fossil fuelsâ, Visser notes.
The EU has a target of 20% renewable energy in 2020. In 2014, 16% was reached and thus, it has been concluded that the EU is well on its way to achieve the target. After all, thousands of wind turbines are being built in our countryside and millions of solar panels are being installed on our rooftops.
I assume that many readers of Energy Post are aware of the 16% level that we are supposed to have reached. But I wonder whether they have ever tried to find out how this percentage was calculated? I did â and it turned out to be far from straightforward.
The official definition of the percentage of renewable energy is: âThe share of energy from renewable sources shall be calculated as the gross final consumption of energy from renewable sources divided by the gross final consumption of energy from all energy sources, expressed as a percentageâ (Directive 2009/28/EG, 23 april 2009).
This sounds easy. Our total energy usage, the gross final consumption of energy can be calculated by taking the production of energy in EU28, adding the energy imports and subtracting the energy exports. Thanks to Eurostat, these data are public and it can be concluded that the EU-28 currently uses about 1600 Mtoe/yr (million tons of oil equivalent) to maintain its prosperity. Incidentally, this number neglects the energy which is required to create the products (e.g. in China) that are imported by the EU-28.
Although many people assume that renewable energy is based on wind turbines and solar panels, the reality is quite different. In the EU, more than 60% of all renewable energy comes from various forms of biomass
However, as it turns out, this 1600 Mtoe is not the denominator in the directive since several areas of energy usage are excluded. Firstly, the conversion losses in the energy sector, like in power production, are not taken into account. One could argue that this is justified since a fully renewable world would not need fossil power production any more, although the increasing amounts of wind and solar power will also have conversion losses.
Secondly, the usage of fuel oil for international shipping is not taken into account. Thirdly, energy consumption for feedstocks are excluded. The result: the âgross final consumption of energyâ used to calculate the percentage of renewable energy equals only 1100 Mtoe.
A denominator of 1100 Mtoe results in an almost 50% higher percentage of renewable energy than a denominator of 1600 Mtoe. This implies that a society with 100% renewable energy, according to this definition, would still require a substantial amount of fossil fuels.
A nice idea isnât it, to think that you are contributing to the EU-28 targets on renewable energy when you will be having a barbecue and drinking beer with your friends this summer
Special treatment
Letâs switch to the nominator of the equation. Here we also find some strange results.
There are many forms of renewable energy and these are reported by the national statistical offices in the member states, and subsequently summarized by Eurostat. Although many people assume that renewable energy is based on wind turbines and solar panels, the reality is quite different. In the EU, more than 60% of all renewable energy comes from various forms of biomass. Another 17% comes from hydropower in the mountainous regions.
the bright picture of renewable energy in the EU…
A very important application of biomass in the EU is wood in households for wood stoves and open fire places. The efficiency of these applications may be 50% or even lower. Nevertheless, all wood is taken into account as renewable energy. In European countries with a lot of wood combustion in households, this significantly improves the national renewable percentage. Currently, the percentage of renewable energy in the EU is 16%, but taking into account an efficiency of 50% would lower the EU-28 renewable percentage to 14.2%.
… or is there something askew? (photos Europe by Satellite)
For other uses of biomass, efficiency is taken into account. The exception is biomass used as a feedstock; this is not taken into account at all. The lesson is that if we want to have a high percentage of renewable energy, we should burn biomass preferentially at home, and we should certainly not use it as feedstock. In other words: forget cascading biomass, burn it!
Heat pumps get special treatment as well. I always thought that heat pumps are a way to reduce energy consumption. This may be true, but there is another aspect. While writing this article at home, the sun is shining through my window. The heating is off, although it is rather cold outside. But this solar energy does not count as renewable energy.
My neighbour, however, has no window towards the sun and has to use a heat pump to bring the solar heat into his house. This solar heat is seen as renewable energy. According to the directive: âThermal energy generated by passive energy systems, under which lower energy consumption is achieved passively through building design or from heat generated by energy from non-renewable sources, shall not be taken into account for the purposes of paragraph 1(b)â. Good lobbying by the heat pump industry, I presume.
While the definition by the EU directive resulted in an official share of 5.5% renewable energy, in reality less than 3% of Dutch energy consumption is covered
The statistics for renewable energy go into significant detail and nothing seems to be forgotten. One of the small categories is charcoal, which adds 128 ktoe to the EU-28 target. For environmental reasons, one may have some doubts about its sustainability. But the contribution to renewable energy nevertheless equals 250 3MW wind turbines of 100 meters each, positioned in a windy region in Northern Germany. A nice idea isnât it, to think that you are contributing to the EU-28 targets on renewable energy when you will be having a barbecue and drinking beer with your friends this summer.
The long goodbye
In an earlier article I wrote in Dutch, I made similar calculations for my home country, the Netherlands. The Netherlands is densely populated, it does not have many forests and is flat. Thus, the Dutch are having major troubles to reach significant amounts of renewable energy. According to the official statistics, it achieved only 5.5% in 2014. And in 2015 and 2016, it wonât be much better.
Dutch energy consumption, according to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), is 4000 PJ (petajoule) . But, according to the directive just 2100 PJ needed to be taken into account to calculate its official percentage of renewable energy. The Netherlands produced 115 PJ of renewable energy: Â mainly biomass, waste and wind. Thus, while the definition by the EU directive resulted in an official percentage of 5.5%, in reality less than 3% of Dutch energy consumption is covered.
In the coming years, the percentage of renewable energy will need to increase significantly, both in the Netherlands and in the EU. For 2030, the EU has a target of 27% renewable energy, an increase by 70% compared to the current percentage. If we want to achieve this by wind and solar only, it would imply an increase by more than 400% compared to today. In reality, maybe with the exception of hydropower, all sources will have to contribute.
But in whatever way we will achieve the target, the real lesson of this exercise is that if we want to say goodbye to fossil energy, we have a long way to go. Because even in a 100% renewable society, as defined by the directive, we will still need lots of it.
Editorâs Note
Martien Visser (b.m.visser@pl.hanze.nl) is professor Energy Transition and Grid Integration at Hanze University of Applied Sciences (Hanzehogeschool) Groningen. Â
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Useful article. The sun shining in the window argument is interesting, but this should probably be subsumed under building efficiency rather than fuel.
I agree, and this is indeed the case. I was however a bit surprised to find out that this (efficiency) argument is not used for heat pumps.
I remember an exercise where we Identified optimal measures to significantly increase the percentage of renewable energy in the city of Groningen. During that exercise, we actually found that the effect of isolating houses, heated by heat pumps, resulted in a substantial reduction in the percentage of renewables of the city of Groningen.
Maybe more important. What about PV behind the meter? If it is considered to be an energy efficiency improvement or “energy demand reduction” it can not be considered to be “renewable energy production” at the same time.
Europe had made commitment to a 20-20-20 target : 20% reduction of greenhouse gases compared to 1990, 20% renewable and 20% increase of energy efficiency. The renewable directive is here to promote… renewables, not to promote energy efficiency, not to promote reduction of greenhouse gas. You can’t take one piece of legislative document and then extrapolate without checking to see if it does not contradict with other goals sets by other directives like energy efficiency directive or the Kyoto protocol. What you describe are very well known problems which are not coming from the renewable binding target but rather on the fact that the energy efficiency target is non-binding.
It is not only energy efficiency. There are also important energy consumng sectors omitted: feedstock and (international) shipping. I have tried to demonstrate that, due to this definition, we will still need a lot of fossil fuels, even in a “100% renewable society”. I guess that for many readers, that is a surprise.
Furthermore, due to this definition, using biomass to replace fossil fuels in feedstock (“cascading”), or using renewable energy to replace heavy fuel oil (see “Seablind”) in shipping, is not part of the equition and thus unattractive for member states, striving for a high percentage of renewable energy.
Conclusion: climate policy is focussed to much on energy in general and power in particular?
Lots of progress is being made on Carbon capture for conversion to liquid feedstocks; they’ve identified 13 of high commercial interest. Once the issue is generally recognized in academic circles, we should be able to model the economy in sufficient detail to identify where we should apply each technology to convert waste to inputs for the next product in the circle.
The issue of shipping raises additional factors to consider.
To make a truly sustainable economy, we will design according to the carrying capacity of the ecosystems in the eco-region where we are located. We will find ways to enhance its natural productivity, and ways to separately produce food and other goods which minimize the disruption of the natural systems. Through creative use of materials, and 3D printing and other means of production by and for ourselves and our neighbors, we will have a wider variety of locally-produced goods, and more personal satisfaction in life. If we focus on this process, we will end up purchasing what we don’t have from the nearest source with a surplus, and the average distance goods are transported will dramatically decrease. This will tend to make use of smaller ships economical, and the current huge steel mono-hull ships will tend to be replaced by mid-huge, very light-weight, often multi-hull ships with battery storage in the ballast areas, fed by solar panels on or in every surface facing the sun, and by the power of the wind driving the ship past hull speed, with the excess energy turning propellers that turn generators that feed the batteries.
Such ships can also support at-sea manufacturing of offshore wind turbines, using advanced structural geometries to save materials and costs.
Another sobering fact is that bioenergy is not renewable with respect to ocean acidification. The CO2 emissions from the combustion of biomass, biofuels, and biogas are absorbed by surface seawater in the same manner as the carbon dioxide effluents from fossil fuel usage. When gauged by the CO2-induced pH decline of the world’s oceans, therefore, Germany’s primary energy sources currently qualify as only 4.4% decarbonized after nuclear power has been deducted, even though a third of the country’s electricity is already being generated by renewable energy technologies.
I’m not sure I agree. While I am not a fan of biomass or crop-based biofuels (biogas from AD is ok in my opinion), if the feedstock is harvested sustainably (a big if in some countries) then the net carbon is zero and there should be no impact of ocean acidification. As we phase out fossil fuels the carbon concentrations should start to decrease.
When CO2 from biomass combustion is absorbed by the oceans and converted to carbonic acid, it leaves the terrestrial carbon cycle upon which your assumptions on zero net carbon are based. Ocean acidification persists for thousands of years. The source of the atmospheric carbon dioxide is not differentiated by the process of seawater absorption. Instead, CO2 from all types of combustion proportionately contribute to altering ocean chemistry.
I’m sorry, that still doesn’t make sense. CO2 is CO2, doesn’t matter where it comes from. What governs absorption of CO2 into seawater is CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If my biomass emissions are in balance with reabsorption of CO2 into vegetation by new growth, then atmospheric CO2 concentrations have not increased and ocean acidification is stable.
Of course, the goal is to revert acidification by eliminating fossil fuel combustion which is what is increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Your fundamental premise that CO2 emissions from biogenic energy are in balance with reabsorption of CO2 into vegetation by new growth does not hold true in a warming world with altered vegetation patterns and yearly forest cover decline over an expanse the size of Greece. You have implied that the rise of CO2 concentrations in the Earthâs atmosphere is due entirely to fossil fuel usage. By contrast, a good deal of evidence exists that some of that increase is being caused by carbon dioxide that has been emitted by biomass combustion. This quantity of CO2 is lost for a prolonged duration to organic carbon cycles. During that interval, nearly a third of the CO2 in the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans rather than by terrestrial plant life. A part of the pH decline in surface seawater can therefore be traced to biomass combustion, correspondingly lowering the decarbonization rating of countries that employ biogenic fuels.
You may be right. Is there quantitative data that supports this? Any references?
In any case, given the current trajectory I think the only way we will meet targets is through creating carbon sinks via reforestation and aforestation. I don’t see how biomass is consistent with this and may need to be phased out.
A good deal of evidence was summarized in 2003 by the FAO in the report “Forest and climate change” (ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/011/ac836e/ac836e00.pdf). Particular researchers had confirmed that trees were shedding CO2 during prolonged heat waves, a phenomenon confirmed in the report: “Several bio-climatic models indicate that the ecosystems’ absorption capacity is approaching its upper limit and should diminish in the future, possibly even reversing direction within 50 to 150 years, with forests becoming a net source of CO2. Indeed, global warming could cause an increase in heterotrophic respiration and the decomposition of organic matter, and a simultaneous decrease of the sink effectiveness, thereby transforming the forestry ecosystems into a net source of CO2”. The ability of forest vegetation to sequester carbon dioxide will therefore continue to decline as global temperatures rise. If forestry ecosystems ultimately become net sources of CO2, the acidification of the oceans could accelerate dramatically.
Biomass with no net CO2 effect works if only biomass is used which would alternatively be rotting and release the CO2 in the athmosphere any way.
It seems to be forgotten in this discussion taht biomass degrades even if it is not burned somewhere.
Nturall ythe amount of biomass in the area in use most remain constant or should rise, so the use of biomass must be limited to this. The german word for this is “Nachhaltig” It was introduced in the discussion about the use of biomass and how much can be used sustainable around the year 1550 as far as I remember.
The concept was developed after the need of reforestration was seen after too much forest was lost in germany during medieval times. And yes, this is a old discussion in germany.
Burning biomass is the practise of primitive societies. Also, environmentalist warn that only a decade or so is left to save the planet however a tree is burned in seconds and growed 80 years. (??) The Netherlands had no trees left in 1500 with less than 1 million inhabitants. Also the Netherlands uses the power equivalent to 500000000 horses which would require 220 time the land mass for food. Conclusion: Forget biofuel.
Hummmm….
A few miles from where I’m sitting right now we’re burning biomass to make electricity.
Turns out that less carbon is released into the atmosphere if we burn wood waste from lumber operations than if we truck it to a landfill to be buried.
And the carbon from the electricity plants is carbon that was already in the above surface carbon cycle while the carbon from diesel trucks would need to be extracted from deep under the surface and added to our above ground carbon cycle.
Jeffrey Michel
Gen. 2 biofuels are more than GHG neutral because not only does it use excess inedible biomass or organic municipal waste it also decomposes the biodegradable materials without oozing methane.
The net limitation of GHG can be improved by selecting crops that produce more biomaterials and naturally store more carbon in the soil.
There has just been a huge breakthrough at KU where they have succeeded with bringing the decomposition speed of biomaterials up by a factor 100.
Your speculation that CO2 from biofuels acts just the same as any other source of CO2 is fundamentally misunderstood because It replaces net addition to the troposphere. Your assumption that the acidic rise in the oceans will last for thousands of years is also wrong. Quite to the contrary oceans sediment significant amounts of carbon every year.
The added CO2 in the atmosphere from biomass combustion is mainly related to deforestation and the spreading of agriculture and the invention of the ploug that oxygenize stored carbon in the soil. This process is reversible and should be reversed and could be reversed better with biofuels as an important enabler.
Only problem with biofuels really is cost where a significant breakthrough is required. Novozymes targeted biofuels to be competitive with fossil fuels at a crude oil price at $100/barrel. With the new methods and still cheaper enzymes and processing the cost points seems heading the right way.
As for your concerns about a warming world not being able to capture as much CO2 as today I think you should do a reality check. 2/3 of the surface is sea and the bioactivity in sea is factors higher than on land.
What are the conversion losses for wind and solar? As I understand it the contribution from wind and solar is based on energy delivered to the grid at the meter – final energy after losses (grid losses don’t count presumably). This is in contrast to the primary energy metrics applied to fossil fuels which do not include conversion losses.
But, I agree with the overall point that the correct metric should include a line-by-line accounting of conversion losses on both sides of the carbon ledger. I find the accounting for energy full of pitfalls and subject to all kinds of manipulation.
Ultimately, what counts is the global aggregate. From that perspective what’s important is that for each country, whichever way that metric is calculated, it is done so consistently and that the metric (renewable penetration) is rising rapidly.
Current losses of wind and solar are low and can probably be neglected. However, these losses will become substantial if wind and solar will grow significantly and lengthy periods of overproduction will occur.
Can you be more specific? What are these mysterious losses? As I said solar and wind are measured at the grid connect. Any losses are behind the meter. And if they are insignificant now on a proportional basis, why would they become significant with greater penetration?
The losses caused by (future) storage basically have to be considered as losses caused by solar and wind.
No, losses of storage are losses of storage.
Storage or conversion of power into other forms of energy was hardly necessary in the past but will be needed when production is higher than demand. That is a problem caused by solar, wind and tidal energy.
Yes, after reconsidering, that’s fair.
The real issue is installed cost. Wind, solar, and CCNG have low (and dropping) installed costs. Coal and nuclear have very high installed costs by comparison.
It’s much less costly to let a wind, solar or natural gas facility sit idle (be curtailed) than to not run a coal or nuclear plant.
The cost of electricity = total annual costs / total electricity produced. Lower output and there are fewer MWh over which to spread fixed costs.
In the US we let nuclear plants run as much as they are capable of running (about 90% of the time) because they take so long to turn off and back on.
More dispatchable coal plants and CCNG plants run between 50% and 60% of the time. Gas peakers run only 5% of the time.
“Tossing away” a percentage of solar or wind potential production is less financially bothersome than leaving an expensive thermal plants idle.
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As time goes along we should expect more dispatchable loads online. EVs should be a major source of places to “dump” extra power. The average EV needs to charge only 3 hours a day on a 240 VAC outlet.
We’re now installing AC systems which cool/freeze liquids when demand is low compared to supply. That stored ‘cool’ can then be used to lower AC draw on hot days, which are often high load times.
No free lunch
Fifth and last, storage is often believed to be fuelled by something called âexcessâ power, hence at no extra cost. This is quite an important fallacy, as there is no such thing as a free lunch, as the proverb says, and in anaolgy, there is no âexcess energyâ. When business cases for solar and wind power plants are set up, every hour of power production is required to make it a profitable investment. The fact that in the best production hours of âmyâ power plant, all other wind / solar power plants in the same region than âmyâ power plant, are operating at maximum capacity as well, leads some in those hours to a decline in power exchange prices, sometimes down to to zero or further below. However, this does not mean that the production cost of that power is anywhere near its market value. In âmyâ calculation, it is the total annual cost that I divide by the total energy produced to get the average production cost. In a world with feed-in-tariffs, I just need to make sure that my average production cost is below the feed-in-tariff. In the absence of feed-in-tariffs, I still need to make sure that in average, the price I am getting is above production cost. There is definitely no energy that I can give away for free.”
And that applies to my comment how?
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Of course there is no free lunch energy. Negative electricity prices are created by a combination of subsidies and the difficulty of cycling a large thermal plant off and on.
Thermal plants, especially nuclear plants, don’t want to lose hours or even days of sales by shutting down late at night when winds are blowing strong. It’s to their advantage to sell at no profit or a loss in order to participate in the market at other times.
If wind (or solar) has a production tax credit subsidy then they can sell below their operating costs and make some money. Given that the operating cost for wind and solar is roughly 1 cent/kWh and US PTCs are a bit over 2 cents/kwh wind and solar can produce and sell for 0 cents and make money from the tax credit. 2.3c PTC – 1c opex = 1.3c profit.
To get under that 0 cents renewable price operating nuclear, and sometimes, coal plants have to pay the grid to take their power.
In the US those PTCs last only for the first ten years of operation. After the PTC has expired wind and solar farm operators will not put their electricity online for less than their operating costs plus a profit.
Math Geurts
The market decides the cost of energy not theories or cost of production.
Grids has always been built with massive overprovision of capacity. The new thing is that RE based grids have near zero marginal costs, which means the savings associated with curtailing are so minuscule that curtailing only happens when the price of energy go near or below negative. For a 100% RE based grid this will be a very normal situation. To resole the issue it makes sense to discount energy to consumers that accept electricity deliveries that can be cut of at the discretion of the grid.
Many industries with high energy usage can accept such terms and a number of budging industries could benefit hugely from the discounted rates. Foremost among these industries are Synfuel plants that produce liquid, solid and gaseous fuel.
The discounts are just a completely normal cost associated with supplying energy. It is no different from cost associated with marketing, grid infrastructure, fuels, billing, administration, insurance or anything else.
The only thing you should be preoccupied with is whether RE will be cheap enough to be competitive including the necessary discounts.
If s real market would have decided there would been no PV in Germany.
@ MAth Geurts – today new PV is cheaper than new nuclear, new gas power , new hard coal or new lignite plants. So new PV would be the choce along with wind for the german utilities. Thats why the spilt in E.ON andE. OFF (uniper) happened.
What happened before was a political decided push to get wind and PV (and potentially other modes of energy generation) running. Now it is a way to keep transition in a corridor with a minimum and a maximum change speed, because to adopt everything else to the changinging energy system takes time, like any other infrastructur change too. It would not work to keep the old power plants running for another 20 years and then install 100GW Wind and 100GW PV in one year, even if on green desk calculation this might look cheaper. German gouvernent is aware of this.
Losses will increase when the combined power production by wind and solar becomes higher than market demand. The overproduction of power will have to be transported to other regions in Europe, be stored, be converted to other forms of energy, e.g. hydrogen, or may even be destroyed.
Still the losses are then not conversion losses (like in the power plant the power of electricity by pumps, coal mills etc.) but transportation losses and storage losses, as they exist for fossile fuels too at other parts of the calculation.
Depending on size and dimensioning of the grid, storages might not be neeeded at all (at least not as any kind of “battery” – it might be enough to halt or increase hydropower station with large storages. Wind and solar become less variable the larger area a grid includes.
Excess production will be used for many kinds of raw maerial production – aluminum, cement, etc. can be produced when there is excess electricity, and stopped when there is none. The system will be designed that there is excess electricity 99,9999% of the time. (rough estimation)
If you include the other baseload (geothermal, osmotic power and OTEC) and dispatchable load renewables (biomass, municipal waste) in the mix I am certain you would not require battery storage.
Further large parts of Europe use district heating where the energy can be stored cheaply as heat and the heat can be produced by heatpumps. And also despite years of focussed efforts we can still achieve a lot of energy savings by using the most efficient technologies in homes and businesses, which in many cases cap the peak power demand making the excess electricity production required less.
With the proper algorithms and expansion of the HVDC grid connections I would imagine that the cost of electricity will go down and the demand/supply mismatch will be absolutely manageable.
In Germany aluminum smelters (who need huge amounts of electricity) only operate fully when the wholesale electricity price is extremely low, which is during overproduction.
Those periods are well predictable (with the weather). The employees work at adaptable schedules.
Renewable power oversupplies may actually be reinvigorating the fossil fuel industry in Germany wherever dedicated customers can be provided with long-term price stability. The Moorburg power plant in Hamburg was dedicated in 2015 with assurances that the Aurubis copper smelter, the Trimet aluminum factory and the ArcelorMittal steel works could operate most effectively with base load coal power. Trimet stresses on its website that its electrolysis equipment runs around the clock 365 days a year. It has joined the Hamburg Efficiency Network without making any recognizable commitment to wind power. The opposition Christian Democrats have now submitted a bill to the Hamburg Senate to use waste heat from the Moorburg power plant to the supply the cityâs district heating network. Despite being an expensive afterthought, the alternative of building a new heating plant in the suburb of Wedel would run contrary to Germanyâs combined heat and power strategy. The proponents of CO2-free power claim that fossil fuels can be widely eliminated by 2040, but it will take another decade to determine whether Germany can even phase out nuclear power without reverting to more gas power generation, to an extension of lignite usage, or to imports from the French grid.
Trimet already sells it’s smelters as regulating enegry, so they are closing down when demand is high and/or supply is low.
Lignite usage is going down while phasing out more and more nuclear power.
Moorburg was designed for district heating from the beginning, but the hot water pipeline to conect it to district heating was too expensive.
It is switched off whenever power prices fall below 2,5-3ct/kWh, because then it looses money on every kWh produced. It will never ever earn the costs of the plant, this is already obvious.
It all comes down to money. Private industries needs an incentive to use energy when there is surplus supply and to minimize energy usage when electricity is in scarce supply.
In short base load is only cheapest if the industries are not economically compensated for accepting variable energy supply.
There are many environmental issues with aluminum smelters whereof the energy usage and associated CO2 emissions is only one. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4131939/
I am not familiar with the techniques used in Germany but hope and expect that outmost care for worker safety and the environment are ingrained values.
Batteries at $100/kWh (by 2020) or $150/kWh (LG Chem selling cells to GM today for $145/kWh) should change the German economics substantially. The last numbers I saw for battery costs in Germany were far higher. With the lower pricing assumed, what do you foresee happening with renewable energy economics in the copper, aluminium and steel industries?
The low emission version of aluminium smelters are standard in germany for as long as I can remember. Germany is not a country with low labour or environmental standards.
What also counts is the levelized cost of electricity delivered. The US average selling price is a little over 10.4 cents US per kWh, and in California it is over 15 cents due to CPUC-allowed gold-plating in infrastructure, by the investor-owned utilities, who are fighting to keep their monopoly model. Large-scale solar and wind are reaching parity with the marginal operating cost of fossil fuel plants, which is much less than the total cost of building and operating new plants.
We are talking about all-in cost here, including land use rights, manufacturing equipment, installing it, the cost of financing everything involved, operations & maintenance, and, often, end-of-life. We can also look at studies of the embodied energy of the system over its life cycle, compared with the energy it delivers.
When we do a whole systems approach, then we need to look at the energy efficiency of the end use, as well. A strong example is the 15% to 40% energy efficiency of an internal combustion engine. In this case we need to look at the whole cost chain, from exploration to drilling to production to shipping to refining to delivery to use to environmental and health externalities along the way, and compare that to the continually-improving financial, energy, and toxicity measures of producing solar panels, their balance-of-system, and wind energy, the range of losses that go with shipping electrons from remote utility-scale projects to the user, vs producing it on the roof above the parking lot, or on a canopy over the parking lot and charging stations (which may also reduce the heat island effect and the need for air conditioning drawing on the grid), and the exceptional efficiency of battery storage and electric motors. Biofuels from waste matter will fall somewhere between.
That is the analysis that can guide us through the maze.
Energy transition = storage transition. Since these new energy storages are nowhere to be seen, there is no transition.
Solar and wind are parasites to power plants which need to deliver backup.
For a real transition H2 or CH4 should be produced from current. Conversion losses are tremendous: current –> CH4 –> current efficiency will be 25%.
To maintain prosperity the Netherland would need 100000 large wind turbines + the hydroxen and methane factories. There simpy is no space as the total land area must be converted to chemical factory or windfarm. Solar and wind at national scale is not possible, a dead end road.
I think your calculation assumes that all energy produced by the wind and solar plant is stored before it is used. This is not likely, even in the extreme example of 100% wind and solar.
The definition of solar and wind as ‘parasites to power plants’ appears inaccurate. Even if we assume the extreme case of sufficient conventional generation capacity to cover for extended periods of zero wind and solar, for most of the year most of the conventional generating capacity will not need to run. There will be substantial savings of fossil fuels, so the ‘parasite’ label is difficult to justify. Of course, paying for the conventional generating capacity which is cold for most of the time is a different, and difficult, question.
@P.Gardner
Yes, most of the energy needs to be stored or converted to motor fuel. Also because the wind blows sufficiently 1 of 3 days only. Power stations need to be standby all the time, they are the only ones that are able to stabilize the grid. It is my observation that the technology for an energy transition does not exist yet. Continuing to install solar and wind will result in a green facade and hidden diesel backup generators. Extremely expensive. We are ruining a solid and reliable energy system. Renewables are a big threat to humanity.
Nope. In the european Grid, the situation of “No Wind” does not happen. The capacity factor which always prowides pwoer sies the bigger the grid gets you look at. In a grid including Europe+ Mena this facor with modern N117 Turbines on high towers reaches 30% of nampeplate capacity of reliable power as dfined for fossile fuel plants. This even without solar power which has negative correlation to wind power.
And cold power plants do not “run in standby”. They do not run art all, they are cold, and only a lonly wathman is taking care of them. Only if wether forcast tells in some days there will be low wind + low sun simultaniuously, some people will start to fire up the plant. You can see this kind of operation in many power plants in germany today.
The people running the plant are trained for the plant, but spend 90% of time for other work on Grid servides or maintenance work in other plants, etc. No need to permanently staff a plant which just runs two or four weeks in a year or even less.
grids are very costly and ruin the landscape. Electricity should be generated close to the consumer. Also in case of grids, any area must install twice the capacity to serve neighbours. But bordering weather areas still suffer from no wind power 40% of the time.
There simply is no space for this incredible amount of equipment.
How much space to do we have for extreme climate change?
Hi Bob is not like it is one or the other bad alternative.
Grids are more expensive underground and a little less efficient but seen over lifetime the extra costs are very marginal.
If David Dirkse feel wind turbines ruins his way of life our natural beauty then he is for sure entitled to sign up to the ever growing NIMBY movement.
40% capacity factor means a windturbine will be producing power at least 90% of the time and in Europe the twice the power is delivered in wintertime where the air is heavier and the windspeeds are higher. So wind is ideally suited for the seasonal variation and also ideally matched to solar and hydro.
“Grids are more expensive underground and a little less efficient but seen over lifetime the extra costs are very marginal.”
In places that are more densely populated. Not so much where consumers are more widely dispersed and terrain is challenging.–
In most places wind and solar complement each other. And they are both abundant in terms of resource areas as well as cheap.
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Some people object to the look of wind turbines and solar panels. I understand that feeling, but I have to look at the larger problem of a potential climate in which humans will struggle to survive and most of the plants and animals around us will be driven to extinction.
To the extent possible we can put wind farms out to sea where they are only slightly visible from shore or not at all. And we can mount solar panels on the back sides of houses and behind visual barriers. But we’re probably going to have to tolerate seeing turbines and panels to some extent.
Bob I think the momentum we have is sufficient to ensure a RE powered world within 15-20 years. All fossil fuel supply chains are in peril and turmoil. The absolute numbers of wind turbines in the vicinity to people have to go up. As for solar power plants they too can be discrete. Osmotic power plants are barely visible at all and the same goes for geothermal and biomass also blends in acceptably.
Even Germany will have a problem, just for coal-free power (not energy) in 2035. https://zukunft-stromsystem.de/download/KohlestudieStromaufkommen.jpg
I foresee a complete reappreciation of fossil fuels within the next 20 years as it becomes clear that the technology for a fossil exit does not exist. Jules Verne type innovations are needed. (to power aircraft, steel industry, ceramics…)
David, you may think that ” the technology for a fossil exit does not exist” but you are completely wrong.
We could power the globe with only solar power using the technology we have now.
We could power the globe with only wind power using the technology we have now.
But what we’ll do is to use both along with other renewables such as hydro, tidal, geothermal, and biofuels. These are all generating electricity right now.
And we’ll match supply to demand with storage and dispatchable generation.
We are using pump-up hydro, flywheel, compressed air, and electricity to fuel right now.
We could do the job with technology in hand. But we should expect more advances in technology as we transition off fossil fuels over the next few decades.
@Math Geurths
Be aware that the plans of the german utilities look not so much different than the WWF scenario, and they do not see any problem with the safety of power supply till 2050. I do believe more in the abilities of german utilities to operate a grid than in your abilities to do so.
Wind and solar will bring back feudal times: some rich and many poor people, their servants. Abundant cheap energy from coal liberated the masses. Energy shortage from renewables puts our freedom at risk.
Doubts? Please explain how the Netherlands can generate 3TWh daily reliable power. (hint: nobody could so far)
Gee David, I guess you didn’t get the news.
If you add in the external costs of coal (health and environmental damage) it turns out that coal is our most expensive way to generate electricity. We just hid those costs in government and health insurance spending along with lost labor days and early deaths.
And those costs have fallen heavily on the poorest who end up living by coal plants.
“Coal-fired power stations cost the European Union up to âŹ42.8 billion a year in health costs associated with coal-fired power stations. âThe Unpaid Health Bill: How coal power plants make us sickâ â found that EU-wide impacts amount to more than 18,200 premature deaths, about 8,500 new cases of chronic bronchitis, and over four million lost working days each year.
The total costs are up to âŹ54.7 billion annually when emissions from coal power plants in Croatia, Serbia and Turkey are included.”
http://www.evwind.es/2013/05/03/coals-hidden-health-costs-40-billion-euros-a-year/32333
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“Please explain how the Netherlands can generate 3TWh daily reliable power.”
52.9% solar (PV and thermal)
5.7% onshore wind
43.3% offshore wind
http://thesolutionsproject.org/
Of course some amount of storage will also be required. And power trades with other European countries will help minimize storage needs.
Agreed, coal is dirty. Solution is to replace capacity with clean CCGTs. No dirty emissions and carbon halved. Also at a lower cost than renewables plus storage and extensive transmission works .
Nigel, half is too much.
We must get as close to zero carbon as we can.
Bob, UK has got rid of coal by switching to gas so lowering carbon emissions. Less well developed coal burning countries are unlikely to switch directly to renewables because of the cost of having to deal with the intermittancy issue. Nuclear may not be an option for them either.
So CCGTs would make sense by halving carbon emissions and eliminating other pollutants.
“UK has got rid of coal by switching to gas so lowering carbon emissions.”
That’s a good half step when it comes to climate change and an excellent solution to the health damage caused by coal.
I think you realize that a half step is not enough. Now the task will be to continue adding renewable generation so that gas usage can be lowered over time to zero.
Grids can’t operate on only wind and solar. Developing nations will need some way to fill in the gaps. CCNG plants are the least expensive and fastest way to get the dispatchable generation that will insure 24/365 power. (I’m assuming they don’t have hydro that could be used.)
I think we’ve overbuilt CCNG in the US. We may be able to sell off some of our unneeded plants over the next few years.
David,
Dutch offshore wind alone is already enough:
We have 57,000kmÂČ continental, which implies >500GW wind turbines which produce >6TWh/day.
And offshore wind is becoming real cheap (3cnt/KWh) as recent German tender shows…
on the average your example generates 4TWh daily. The amount of resources (steel etc) is beyond imagination.
Very unlikely this will ever be realized.
David, we will have to build something. By 2050 almost all our existing plants will have aged out.
That’s money that will have to be spent one way or another. It makes sense to me to spend our money on the least expensive solutions.
A shortage of steel, copper, or other input material is not an issue. Not even rare earth minerals for turbine magnets.
@B.Wallace
And electricity is the easy part….How to power airplanes ? Do the arithmetic: storing all electricity for Germany for 2 weeks in batteries requires 300 years of world production . Again, there is no energy transition underway. We are fooling ourselves at an unprecedented scale. Energy transition = storage transition but these “new” energy supplies are nowhere to be seen.
And why should any one want to store two weeks of german power production in batteries? There’s absolutely no need for this than in pipe dreams of nuclear fanboys.
Its more easy just to exchange power with the neighbou, like everybody is trading oil, gas coal and uranium today.
Energy systems are not that simplicistic.
About aeroplanes – like chemical industriy the path for aircrafts so far is to use PtL to supply them with energy. Costs for air travel compared to land base travel will rise then as far as energy costs are concerned. but not higher than oil prices of 100-150$/barrrel today. Which did not stop air travel.
How to power airplanes?
First hope really, really hard that the Hyperloop works as predicted.
If so, we should be able to move a high percentage of plane travel to the ‘loop. Faster, cheaper, more comfortable, and powered by renewable electricity.
If so, then we stand a reasonable chance of powering the remaining flights with biofuel or synfuel.
A longer shot is developing batteries with the capacity to store enough power for long distance flights. Lithium-air batteries are promising with power to weight ratios similar to gasoline.
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Helmut has dealt with your German storage question. It’s unreasonable. But to the extent we have to store large amounts of power the solution may be pump-up hydro or synfuels, not batteries.
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The energy transition is very much underway. Just look around. Do some reading. Get some real facts.
40% capacity factor means that 2 independent weather systems (1000km apart ) will not produce in 36% of the time. 3 independent systems: 21% of time no energy.
Also, the storage problem is not solved. Wind and solar energy is a suicidal path.
Wrong. 40% capacity factor does not mean 40% of time 100% output, 60% of time no output, but means e.g. 98% of time 1-100% of output and 2% of time no output.
But in priciple the calculation shows the direction.
5 independent Systems in your calculation then 8% no output, 10 independent systems then 0,6% of time no output. As you see storage problem shrinks drastically with rising grid size. At a certain point it shrinks below the size of existing hydropower storages in the grid. Or below existing hydropower storages+biomass (waste) generation capacity.
David, you still seem to think that a capacity factor of 40% means that electricity is produced only 40% of the time. As I explained before this is not the case. Your calculation therefore makes no sense at all.
You might want to read the paper by Archer and Jacobson that found “35% of capacity. 85% of the time (the CF of a coal plant)” for connected wind farms over a modest area.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
That should give you a better handle on what capacity factor means.
wind power depends on wind speed to the power of 3.
Half wind speed means 12.5% capacity. So a windmill is almost an on/off device.
Remember that windmills require enormous space. To supply electricity directly to a grid at half wind speed requires the 8 fold capacity ! Even double if a neighbouring weather region (1000km away) must be serviced as well. No society is able to support this amount equipment. So may expectation is that renewables head us for a new feudal era. I regard cilimate alarmism as a revolt of the elites. The (new) noble class strikes back đ
I’m sorry David. You’re just loaded up with misinformation.
Wind turbines are in no way “on/off” devices. Cut in speeds, the wind speed that is high enough to get them operating, is about 8 MPH.
As wind speeds increase the amount of power increases in an almost linear fashion until the turbine reaches rated speed.
If the wind only reaches half the rated speed of the turbine the output will be half of peak potential.
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Wind turbines have small land requirement which is shrinking (per MW) as turbine size increases. You may be confusing the size of wind farms with the actual <2% are in the farm that is used by turbines, access roads, ancillary buildings, and transmission.
" I regard cilimate alarmism as a revolt of the elites. "
This tells us a lot about you.
You deny the facts that we have empirically gathered. You permit yourself to make up "fake facts" about climate.
That also leave your thinking free to make up "fake facts" about energy technology.
there is no increase in extreme weather events, as the IPCC reported. The alarmism is the outcome of computer simulations, so this threat is totally virtual.
I’m sorry. The data says that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and stronger.
Take a look at this page. The data used to generate the graph is from actual real world measurements, not a computer model.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heavy-precipitation
Pull yourself out of denierland. It’s a dark, dank place to reside.
Bob even a calm ocean level rise would be pretty extreme in Holland as well as here in Denmark.
I can see the Fjord and think we are about 5 meters above sea level. In heavy weather we can get up to 2.5 meter sea level rise so I might risk as my neighbors down the road to get water in the cellar. The parliament is discussing how to handle the situation for house owners that can no longer be insured and how to handle coastal erosion. My girlfriends stairway to the beach by her summerhouse (60 meters) was one of the few that survived on the North coast of Zealand after two out of three storm in the last two years that each broke records.
We’re starting to see the impact of rising seas and stronger storm surges in the US.
The city of South Miami Beach has had to replace its sewer and water systems because salt water was infusing into the utilities.
Street flooding is becoming much more common.
We’ve already lost some waterfront houses along the NE coast.
Because weather is so variable it takes several years to statistically establish extreme weather events and climate change relationship but we seem to have reached the ‘enough data’ zone and some researchers are reporting a positive relationship.
Unfortunately: “A Big Lull” http://euanmearns.com/a-big-lull/
That’s a big lull over the NW corner of Europe.
When wind data for most of Europe and solar data for Europe and Europe’s existing dispatchable hydro and storage are included we can talk.
I can draw a graph showing only solar output and prove that we can’t power grids with renewables. It’s not hard to set up an argument demonstrating renewable failure. Just leave out critical components.
I can graphically prove that grids cannot be powered with nuclear. Plot the output for a single reactor with no storage or backup. There’s no way to match output and demand. About 10% of the time the grid would be totally dead.
Not until we add in all renewable sources along with storage and tweak their amounts for local conditions can we discover how much dispatchable generation might be needed for a 100% renewable grid.
Let’s stop these silly attempts to prove that renewables don’t work.
Let’s put our energy into figuring out the best renewable energy system. Then we can compare that to a system that includes nuclear to see if would save us money.
A near 100% renewables system is just a dream:
1/ There is no need for it, unless one is anti-nuclear and believes gas must be phased out.
2/ Politically it is a non-starter for most countries as it would involve loss of control of vital electricity supplies.
3/ The supply security risks would be too great with renewables dependent on the weather – extreme weather events can’t be predicted. If one accepts conventional back-up is needed why bother aiming for 100% renewables. It makes no sense.
4/ Existing pumped storage capacity (not pump up) is tiny relative to national demand. A huge build programme would be required in northern Europe at great cost. The environmental issues are huge too due to many feasible locations being in protected environments.
5/ Wheeling vast amounts of electricity over long distances would be very costly and the overhead lines needed would not be acceptable environmentally. Costs and feasibility becomes a problem going underground. The sensible option is to generate locally and avoid excessive power exchanges.
Best to listen to engineers, not dreamers, who understand the technical issues and practicalities. Also accept that one size does not fit all. Countries who choose a mix of generation sources are not prepared to be dictated to by environmentalists who are prejudiced against nuclear.
Near 100% renewables would not be the best option worldwide. Certainly the UK will not be aiming for that, rather a balance of renewables, nuclear and CCGTs. Extremists who advocate 100% renewables are a danger to the world, not a help.
Clearly we will have to move to either an all RE, all nuclear or a mixture of RE and nuclear. Carbon must go.
The question then becomes price. Which will give us the least expensive electricity – all RE, all nuclear or a mixture of RE and nuclear?
“Near 100% renewables would not be the best option worldwide. ”
You’d need to furnish numbers proving that. Otherwise it’s just an opinion.
Bob, ideally choosing the lowest cost option out of those three to decarbonise would be the best way forward. However the subject is hugely controversial such that supporters of all renewables, or all RE, would never agree which is best on economics alone. Studies and reports are not definitive either relying on forecasts and complex models which can be picked apart by experts if one doesn’t like the conclusion, or dismissed as biased.
Opinions posted here too demonstrate hugely polarised views.
Governments will decide the direction and that should be incremental to suit the region to contain costs and on feasibility grounds. UK policy is directed at providing secure, affordable and clean electricity. Brits live on a small densely populated island. Near 100% renewables, or mostly nuclear based on big nukes, are not feasible options for the UK so a mix of nuclear and renewables is happening. I think that is the best option for the UK, and also much of Europe.
Whereas California and other US states blessed with year round sun and vast open tracts of land for renewables have lower cost RE options than densely populated northern Europe. Australia too.
Hence 100% renewables would not be the best option worldwide.
Nigel West
It appears you have no knowledge of the topic that you so infuriated debate.
100% RE is most certainly technically doable and economically viable. I was in the Danish parliament today for a hearing where among others the three largest utilities in Europe outlined their vision of 100% RE.
UK will have a more easy path to 100% RE than most other countries due to your fantastic offshore wind resources.
NEL the worlds leader in hydrogen filling stations posted a 300% growth these four first month over the entire result last year and have a preorder pipeline of 800 filling stations (Not counting the talks with Nikola trucks). Currently hydrogen is at $5/kg but is expected to drop to $2/kg over the next few years.
45% of the electrolysis produced hydrogen is currently supplied to the refineries and that demand will soar because refineries has amble supplies of excess CO2 and low value hydrocarbons that can be boosted to higher value with hydrogen.
21% of the transport fuel in Sweden is either Synfuels, biofuels or combinations hereof. Sure Sweden is a frontrunner but this will be how it is done everywhere.
If Denmark goes offshore for biomass then Denmark could power the entire nation with biofuels and interestingly the bioenergy sector is still a wee bit bigger than our wind industry. UK could do the same.
UK needs nukes just as much as fish needs bikes.
Even completely without interconnections you could model a 100% RE supply system with no security issues and cost savings relative to you current costs.
IMO England is pursuing nuclear because a few powerful politicians and business people don’t want to see wind turbines from the windows of their weekend country homes.
The UK has more than enough renewable resources to power themselves 100% with RE.
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“Hence 100% renewables would not be the best option worldwide.”
You arrive at that conclusion via a goodly amount of hand waving.
You have provided no data to support your opinion.
Jens, the UK will not have a more easy path to 100% renewables because UK is just not doing it. Instead UK energy strategy is based on a mix of clean generation sources. Check out UK Government policy on energy if you wish. Furthermore EU policy is not driving for near 100% renewables either. It’s far less at 27% by 2030.
Many EU members would not agree to a policy of near 100% if the EU tried.
Soon the UK will be free of EU directives which will make it even less likely.
The UK would need a massive over build of renewables and huge costly storage capacity to get by on 100% renewables. Totally uneconomic and not feasible for a densely populated island.
The decision taken to replace the UK’s ageing reactors was based on a full public consultation exercise some 10 years ago and a Government Energy Review. A strategic siting assessment also took place leading to potential sites being put forward. It was a very thorough exercise and had nothing to do with wind turbine blight. Although that has since become a problem in Scotland.
The UK’s offshore wind resources are good. However there are periods during the winter when the North Sea is becalmed lasting days concurrent with periods of high system demand. There was such a period this January when wind generation was low for 7 days straight. Solar PV output in the northern hemisphere is not much help during the winter either.
http://euanmearns.com/uk-grid-january-2017-and-the-perfect-storm/
During the winter the UK consumes around 1TWh/day. For arguments sake lets say over this 7 day period 3TWh of stored electricity is needed. The UK has one big pumped storage plant capable of storing just 0.01 TWh. Hence 300 similar size plants costing around ÂŁ5bn each would be needed based on these rough figures. That’s not practical in terms of feasibility, or economic.
Former Government Chief Scientific Advisor the late Professor David Mackay also looked at this. He said in his book,
https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_193.shtml
1.2TWh of storage would be needed to cover a lull in renewables output. (NB that would likely not have covered the recent January lull). He concluded the UK could expand pumped storage to around 100 to 400GWh max. but it would not be enough to cover lulls in renewable generation.
So this is why I am confident that a near 100% renewables scenario is not a practical or economic solution for the UK. Note this analysis only considers the UK’s current electricity needs too, not total energy consumption also comprising heating.
Let’s watch and see how it plays out, Nigel. Will Brits tolerate paying more for electricity than necessary?
Pump-up is not the only solution to extended periods of low wind. Combined cycle plants run on synfuels or imports from Northern European hydro are a couple of other options.
MacKay’s book is long out of date. And he wrote to support a position, not what a good scientist should do.
As for Means, he’s also someone with an agenda.
That said, you might actually look at the data he presents.
The wind was low, not becalmed.
Nigel, you should start listening to engineers.
Long distance power transport is not a real issue any more. HVDC e.g. also allows rising cable diameters and alog with this current and along with this power transfered on existing corridors without signifisignificantly changing the look of the power lines. The additional power line corridors in germany close gaps in the grid which exist due to cold war / reunion of germany. No further corridors are planned for the future, only increased capacity on existing corridors.
Long distance power transmission is a big environmental and cost issue in Germany already. Overhead lines have been rejected for the Suedlink. Going underground the cost forecast is >ÂŁ16bn.
Add that to the cost of the latest German offshore wind projects and off shore wind looks very expensive. The same issues would arise across northern Europe.
No it would not because Seehofers Datscha is located along one of the alternative routes of the overhead line version of Suedlink, and nowhere else in northern Europe.
How much it will cost is unknown yet, because the decision was made by brute froce from bavaria without any cost or technological consideration, it’s purely political, based on personal preferences of a single important politician.
Where existing overheadlines are extended there are usually no problems with the project. Since we have overhead lines in operation here wich are partly almost 100years old (400kV AC) the costs pery year, and especiallt the cost per additionally transported GW is not that high. Major poit is that gaps in the german grid which are left over from cold war must be closed now to get a unified grid, and not two island grids ( east and west) only loosely coupeled with three interconnecting lines, as it was built against advice of grid specialist after reunion to safe a few Euros. This solution worked so far, but now the investments for stronger grids must be made.
(Be aware that the south east HVDC line adds another connection btween te east and the west island, while SĂŒdlink is being built as north south interconnector where such a interconnector is missing – 150km from the WW III Frontier new high voltage lines were not wanter by military, so there is a big gap in North -South lines in the middle of germany.
Be also aware that the western HVDC-connector mainly uses existing masts along the Rhine. As it will happen with futurte HVDC connections.
A “Doppeltonne” Mast with 400kV can tranport already a substantial amount of power with AC, and even more with DC. Such masts are already in use along the strong rhine corridor for decades, without anybody taking much notice of them.
Ultra high voltage direct current (UHVDC) lines now run at 800 kV.
Twice as much energy on the same gauge cable.
800kV technology is limited to overhead air insulated conductors. Fine for countries with vast open uninhabited spaces like China and the USA.
Also DC switches at that voltage and required ratings do not exist so meshed grids can’t be built, only point to point systems which are not that flexible.
Underground cable sections often are needed in Europe. Also subsea to interconnect the UK with the Continent and Scandinavia with northern Europe. DC cables are limited to about 2GW a circuit. That means many circuits would be needed to wheel 10s GW between the UK and Europe.
@ Bob Wallace – newest power lines also operate with 1100kV DC.
But there is also a political factor. If a 400kV Line is well established in a area it might be cheaper to install higher gauge cables than spending a lot of time to persuade people that higher masts for a higher voltage would not disturb tham more than the existing power line which never disturbed them. There is no real technical problem to install 8x2000mmÂČ instead of 4x185mmÂČ wires, while keeping voltages and mast dimensions the same. In other regions 1100kV and higher might be the better solution.
” DC cables are limited to about 2GW a circuit. That means many circuits would be needed to wheel 10s GW between the UK and Europe.”
Yes, five.
And the math needs to be done to see what is the most affordable solution.
@ nigel West: be aware of the 700kV DC Power cables already available on the market. As usually in this area it will take some time till they show up in Projects.
As I understand the engineers of ABB their HVDC switches can be adopted to various voltages, also to higher voltages. It’s a modular system. But as well it will take some time till they show up in actual projects due to the long planning times and conservative approaches in the grid envionment. But having several Systems in paralel helps reducing the effects of a fault in one system. If the interconnectors come in portions of 2-3,5 GW as they are available without additional development today, they already make big changes in the electricity market.
By the way, SĂŒdlink is planned with up to 6 Systems so far, the number is in tendency rising.
I said 10s of GW, not 10GW. So its not just 5 – and redundancy is required e.g. to cover when anchors drag up subsea cables.
In a 100% renewables scenario do you have any idea of the interconnection needs to wheel sufficient power between the UK and Europe given the UK’s peak demand is around 50GW and the UK’s wind resources would be expected to help support Europe? Clearly orders of magnitude greater than 10GW!
@ Nigel West,
With the interconnectors already under construction UK will have 15 GW echange capacity soon, and it will be rising most likely every year further up.
This project alone:
http://www.tennet.eu/news/detail/three-tsos-sign-agreement-on-north-sea-wind-power-hub/ could add 20 or 30 GW exchange capacity if UK decides to lay some cables between its ofshore wind park and this island too.
With this project, and some others in planning or in discussion being built, renewable power production in UK could be anything between 0 and 130GW with a tiny bit of curtailment and without interfereing with the demand, as far as the interconnectors are concerned.
But maybe UK will be too proud to lay some km of cable from their own doggerbank wind farms and other nearby windfarms too that island(s) built by other european countries, and prefere to build “cheap” nuclear instead.
Nigel, the column has become very thin. I’m taking my reply to a fresh spot.
David Dirkse
Synfuels are produced with 60% conversion efficiency and new research reported this year has shown 79% conversion efficiency. Ruthenium that is the key catalyst has just been shown to be possible to produce in a much more stable configuration with many times bigger surface area.
Also Synfuels production opens for a lot of side products that also limit GHG emissions and even pave the way for storing more carbon in long term natural depositories. Among the side products are minerals, metals, cement, fresh water, fertilizers etc.
Your fantasy about power stations required to stand by is simply not true. The offshore wind turbines are approaching 60% capacity factor and the whole idea is to over provision. Other renewable energy forms like OTEC, Osmotic power, geothermal and biofuels either deliver baseload or dispatchable energy.
Danfoss owner and 20% owner of SMA has just launched a project after years of research where they use the salinity of geothermal water to produce electricity by osmotic power. They aim for less than $0.015/kWh.
Biofuels are unethical as they destroy the habitat of animals.
It is thanks to fossil fuels that a crowded country as the Netherlands still enjoys fine nature. ( Most trees already cut in 1500, at 1 million inhabitants , now 17 million)
The only technology able to replace fossil will be nuclear by nature. A lot of research has to be done.
Meanwhile, the “renewables” are a severe threat to nature and humanity. Energy poverty will bring us back to feudal times: only the rich will live a convenient life at the cost of many poor: servents, tenants or worse.
Only offshore wind on our part of the North Sea (57,000kmÂČ) can easily produce >20times more electricity than we consume now (=120TWh/a)!
Just do the math.
Considering the price trends of offshore wind, that will be very cheap electricity. Allowing us to operate enough PtG to cover long periods of no wind.
Then we also have solar, onshore wind, etc.
Suggest that you check your speculations at dutch FactCheck (NRC, our pro-nuclear most reliable paper is involved).
Realize that renewable implies a combination of technology (wind+solar+geothermal+storage+ ….).
While Off-shore wind alone can generate already far more electricity than we need.
Further that P2G is viable and it’s technology is improving fast. And we already store gas in earth cavities at massive scale (so natural gas processing plant capacity can be lower).
etc. etc.
Netherlands need ~10GW on av. So we need to install only 5000 wind turbines of 8MW to produce all electricity needed. Which implies that we only need to install them along the busy & noisy highways so nobody can hear them.
We also can install part in the sea’s around us.
Then we have enough roof space to produce all electricity we need.
So if we combine we can easily produce enough to supply all future electric vehicles too.
Consider also that:
– wind turbines will increase in max. power (EU study showed that 20MW is feasible with present technology) as well in capacity factor (better design, higher towers which imply more steady wind).
– The efficiency of PV-panels increases as that techology improves steadily, which widely expected to continue during next decades. Increase ~0.3%/a, which implies an efficiency of ~30% (now 21%) in 2050.
the Netherlands uses 3TWh energy daily.
Please look here for some simple calculations:
http://www.davdata.nl/math/greenlies.html
Electricity is the simple part. Motor fuels are the core of a transition.
EVs, David. Watch out. They’re coming at you.
Within five years (perhaps three) the cost of manufacturing a long range (320+ km) EV should be the same or less than of an ICEV.
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The page you put together is full of misinformation. Here’s one bit that glares out at readers….
“For the money of a windfarm a nuclear power plant can be built ”
The installed cost of wind in the US is now around $1.50/watt. Nuclear is running $7 to $8/watt.
Adjust for differences in CF. US onshore wind is now producing above 40%, nuclear 90%. Assuming we would have to install 2.25x as many wind watts as nuclear to produce the same kWh over time the price of wind rises to $3.40. Less than half that of nuclear.
(You don’t understand what “production factor”, capacity factor we call it over here, means.)
Not a valid comparison. You’ve left out the storage costs and transmission reinforcement needed for the wind scenario to match 90% nuclear CF.
Nuclear, if more than a minor part of the grid supply, needs storage.
Wind may have larger transmission cost than nuclear but nuclear still has transmission needs.
Nuclear needs no storage. If small reactors are installed near the consumer, almost no grids are needed. The trend is : cordless equipment! The less wires the better. Nuclear reactors run cheap once built, so they can always run at maximum capacity. In case of excess power, synthetic motor fuels are produced. (which is storage)
Nuclear needs no storage as long as the amount installed is no greater than the annual minimum demand. And as long as there is less expensive dispatchable generation that can be curtailed.
(I hope you realize that the same is true for wind and solar.)
Above that the extra power generated during low demand periods has to be stored or the reactor(s) throttled back.
Both methods cost money.
It’s possible that we can invent some very low capital and fixed operating expense uses for surplus electricity. But if you spend significant money on a desalination or synthetic fuel plant you’re going to need to run it most of the time in order to recover your investment.
The transmission needs for new nuclear are of no consequence compared to what is needed for a near 100% renewables scenario.
Nuclear doesn’t need storage either. Large nuclear fleets are fine as part of a balanced generation portfolio. Nuclear outages lasting a week every few years can be planned to coincide with periods of low system demand.
If nuclear doesn’t need storage then why have countries built storage for nuclear?
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Transmission costs may well be higher for renewables than nuclear. But don’t forget, nuclear is several times more expensive than wind and solar.
The US EIA states that transmission costs for new nuclear would run about 1c/kWh and transmission for new wind and solar would run about 3c/kWh.
That’s a two cent advantage for nuclear which is fighting against a 10 cent generation cost difference.
“Nuclear outages lasting a week every few years can be planned to coincide with periods of low system demand.”
Nuclear reactors go offline unscheduled much more often than most people realize. Things break.
Sometimes they break and stay offline for extended periods of time. A year or years.
And we’re seeing reactors shut down when the are most needed due to increasing heat waves.
There are a number of myths which have sprung up around nuclear energy. Spend a little time and dig into the facts.
The UK has run a fleet of nuclear stations for years with hardly any storage. I am not sure where this nuclear needs storage idea has come from. It’s a red herring. If one is anti-nuclear there are better arguments to pursue.
UK National Grid needs to hold fast response reserve to cover for the largest infeed loss to the system so that frequency remains with limits. That currently is about 1GW, but will rise to 1.6GW to cover for the loss of a reactor at the new Hinkley Point plant and to provide scope for large wind farm single circuit connections.
Holding that level of reserve on partly loaded steam plant is costly. Pumped storage is better for fast response reserve. Endurance is short though so Grid needs to instruct other plant to take over before the upper reservoir runs dry.
Renewables costs in the US are really not comparable with Europe. US doesn’t need to go off shore and incur higher cost like Europe for example for large scale projects.
The availability of older nuclear plants will fall if they are not refurbished, or replaced with new plants. New PWRs once settled achieve >90% availability for many years.
You might wish to ask yourself why the US and Japan had large pump-up hydro storage programs at the same time they were building reactors back a few decades ago.
“Renewables costs in the US are really not comparable with Europe. ”
Hardware and labor costs are very similar. Europe has a much lower offshore wind price due to being a much more mature industry. We’re just hooking up our first turbines in the US.
Germany’s cost of rooftop solar is much better than the US’s.
I think you’ll find that as industries mature the cost of solar in Europe’s sunny parts will be similar to the US’s sunny parts. Same with on- and off-shore wind.
Europe needs to not look at itself as a bunch of tiny little grids. Tie the whole damn thing together.
It’s not like each of you produce all your own oil, uranium, coal, natural gas, and coffee beans.
Bob, Europ has already just about 6 interconnected grids:
1) The continental european grid stretching also over north Africa and Turky (and maybe Iran too, I have no data for that connection, the later running synchronus but are no formal members of the organisaton )
2) The GUS grid, strectching over the former sovjet union and Finland, so stretching all the way till Wladiwostok and approaching Alaska. Its interconnected with the european grid at many places.
3) Nord Pool, stretching over Scandinavia, more and more interconnected with the european grid.
4) UK National grid, also getting more and more interconnecotrs to the nighbours
5) Irish national Grid
6) Iceland national grid
The Organisation to manage the european Grid is ENTSOE, and on their homepage you will find the TYNDP for the european grid development for the next 10 years, as well as the plans for the grid development till 2050, which includes the neccesary grid extensions also for a 100% RE power supply for whole europe.
There is no such thing as a isolated national grid on the european continent outside some islands any more for many many decades.
That’s why those funny storage calculations of some nuclear fan boys for single states do not make any sense at all.
Re. US and Japan pumped hydro projects and nuclear.
A commercial issue for countries with high nuclear capacity ambitions decades ago would have been how to manage the daily demand curve. If nuclear capacity exceeded minimum demand some nuclear stations would only run during demand peaks.
Nuclear economics dictate running plants baseload. Two shifting or part loading them makes no sense, although light water reactors can do that. Conventional thermal is better for peaking use. However, the marginal cost of production is much higher than nuclear.
Enter pumped hydro storage. When system demand is less than available nuclear capacity, pumped hydro storage can soak up excess nuclear output. At times of peak demand pumped storage is then used instead of burning fossil fuels.
The objective was to smooth the daily load curve so nuclear could run flat out. Another way was shifting load to the night time e.g. storage heaters.
Japan’s lack of fossil fuels and plans for a high level of nuclear capacity at one time is likely why they developed pumped storage plants. France though hasn’t developed many pumped hydro plants perhaps instead relying on fossil peakers, their hydro and interconnections.
Today if a country decided to go all out for nuclear a level of storage would make sense commercially to smooth out the load curve and avoid burning fossil fuels say. However clearly the capacity needed would be much less than that needed to deal with renewables intermittancy. Of course today there are more options than pumped storage such as higher capacity interconnection and DSR.
Sorry the calculations/numbers on your page are outdated. Check the recent German offshore wind tender (3cnt/KWh).
Dutch offshore wind alone can easily generate 6TWh/day.
David this is well understood and there are several dozens of Synfuels projects ongoing here in Scandinavia. Do not worry they are close to cost parity with fossil derived fuels and will soon go below. You live in a heavily populated country but with a fair share of the shallow parts of the North sea so you will soon be a net exporter of energy and independent of fossil fuels.
“The issue with P2G technologies is their extremely low efficiency rate.”
“The use of the mass chemicals thus produced as fuel or as starting material in chemical production is therefore favored by many market observers, but does not solve the problem of the intermittent electricity production.”
German author: https://peterscoll.de/%20storage-business-cases-many-pitfalls-rare-viability/
That is simply pure and utter nonsense.
Who ever gave you that impression.
P2G is highly efficient with the best commercial electrolyzers near 80% and fast approaching 90%.
By comparison that is way better than what a modern wind turbine can do relative to the Betz limit or modern PV can do relatively to the ShockleyâQueisser limit.
I read your link – what an ignorant.
It is very easy to solve the intermittency of RE by use P2G just not cheap enough as of yet.
However the cost point for RE is coming nearer dramatically fast. Solar down 21% last year wind power 14%.
“Energiepark Mainz: Technical and economic analysis of the worldwide largest Power-to-Gas plant with PEM electrolysis” (2016)
“From this analysis it can be concluded that by choosing the most suitable power procurement and operation strategy, a PtG plant like the âEnergiepark Mainzâ can yield operational revenues. However, the regulatory framework, especially regarding payable surcharges, is a crucial issue towards economic viability. Also, the revenues might not be sufficient to cover all other fixed and variable operational costs and the capital costs. Further important economic enablers are the reduction of capital and fixed costs, the improvement of efficiency, and last but not least, the realization of cost premiums compared to conventional produced hydrogen.”
However: nobody ever considered power production from (cheaper) convential produced hydrogen. Thus: no storage economy.
Hydroxen is best generated by nuclear power plants.
Nuclear is to expensive for that. Most PtG plants are in North Germany as they can use cheap wind power, etc.
Ah you mean like in Fukushima befor the explosions? đ đ
Which is not a problem since such storage is for sure not needed during the next 20 years. It is a research project, to see what is possible, what needs to be developed, and what economy of scale might be possible in a future rollout. Ther will be many more similar research projects in many directions, as it always has been.
David et al, re your statement, David Dirkse says
April 29, 2016 at 15:32
Energy transition = storage transition. Since these new energy storages are nowhere to be seen, there is no transition.
Solar and wind are parasites to power plants which need to deliver backup.
Did you not see mine? Mark Roest says April 21, 2017 at 03:06
Batteries at $100/kWh (by 2020) or $150/kWh (LG Chem selling cells to GM today for $145/kWh) should change the German economics substantially. The last numbers I saw for battery costs in Germany were far higher.
[Adding here, just now:] Tesla plans to be below $100/kWh by 2020, and LG Chem swears they will keep up. Two other companies I know of will probably be in there with them.
I have been told that the limit for storing electricity in batteries is 600Wh/kg.
Data for the Netherlands: final energy demand in 2014: 1980 PJ.
6 MW wind on land will deliver around 40 PJ.
Maximum PV for Germany in 62 scenario’s = 150 GW in 2050. Land surface of the Netherlands = 10% of Germany. Buildings = 20% of Germany. Very optimistic scenario would be 25 GW PV in 2050 for the Netherlands = 80 PJ.
Who discovers anything like an “energy transition”?
As ‘usual’, we in NL wait until things become more clear. In the mean time we do something to be roughly in line with other EU countries.
Also because experts calculated that sea level rise would benefit our economy.
Considering popularity of renewable electricity (especially wind) I believe that we, the population, are now making the choices. Even a classic utility such as Eneco now promotes wind power, so chance that all other utilities will have to follow when they want to prevent great losses.
It also implies a fast end for Borssele, our only NPP. The owner, Delta, is already making losses…
Luckily as Borssele is one of the most dangerous NPP’s in the EU, thanks to our pro-nuclear (rather virtual) ‘NRC’. Borssele is even allowed to continue while not implementing all the recommendations of the EU stress test after Fukushima!
Borsselle NPP is not the only Dutch power plant in trouble: http://www.nltimes.nl/2016/04/14/hundreds-dutch-green-energy-windmills-operating-loss/
Yes we should replace the older <2MW wind turbines which require once in 6 months a maintenance visit, by the 8MW wind turbines which require once in two years a maintenance visit. The blades of those bigger wind turbines also turn much slower which is more agreeable for the eye & minds of people.
Also time to finally put a realistic price on the external cost of climate change and to replace the non-functioning C02 emission market with a carbon tax of about 80⏠per tonne CO2.
Agree.
EU countries won’t do that alone as it implies that emitting industries will move to other EU countries who didn’t increase the costs of emissions. And it will take many years before the blocking EU countries (those dependent on fossil) will agree…
The blocking countries are supported by USA where CO2 and other GHG emission is free.
Your analysis is verified by the circumstance that many Eastern European countries are primarily dependent on coal (in Poland) and lignite (EU member states farther south) for district heating. http://cornerstonemag.net/the-eurasian-lignite-backbone/
If the EU-countries would agree on such a “realistic” carbon tax, they also would agree on enforcement of the ETS.
Right,
The ETS idea is fine. It only needs a system of depreciation. E.g.
Emission rights become each year 3% less.
So an emission right for 100kg becomes 97kg next year, then 94.1kg, 91.3kg, 88.5Kg, 85.9Kg, etc.
Correction: The ETS emission rights have a depreciation rate of 2.2%/a.
So after ~5yrs an emission right will allow only ~10% less emissions.
Hence the owner have to buy more rights each year if he continue to emit same amount of CO2-eq.
You are doing a kindergarten mistake. The final demand is not what you are pretending. It is very well defined by Eurostat. It is the final demand of electricity, heating and cooling and fuel transport. The EU directive has never hided that the objective is based on the final demand and not the gross primary demand. I teach these notions at the first lesson of energy policy.
It’s not only the energy losses in the energy sector, which has been omitted in the directive, abpnd which will be substantial if solar and wind energy grow as predicted. But as well the energy demand for ocean shipping (“Seablind”) and the energy demand for producing feedstock. I don’t argue whether the directive is correct or not. My statement is that, due to this definition, even if we reach 100% renewables, we will still need a lot of fossil fuels.
This renewables story is a fairy tale. Consider the cost of 1 ton of steel if the ore was digged by hand in Sweden, transported by horses to the coast, shipped by sailing ships to the Netherlands, and processed at steel mills using wood (or dried cow dung?). So, windmills are not sustainable at all. They are there because fossil fuels produced them. (1 offshore windmill is 1 million kg of steel and copper)
We mine underground using electricity. We can mine above ground using electricity.
We currently transport using electricity. Many of our railroads run on electricity. We’re starting to see large trucks running on battery power. We don’t yet have an electricity solution for ocean transportation. This may be a place we’ll have to use biofuel.
We now use electric furnaces to process metals.
Some years back we reached the point at which we annually generated more energy with wind turbines in a year than we used to produce and install those turbines. More recently we passed that threshold with solar panels.
We still use fossil fuels for mining and transportation but we can, and will, transition away. We have to.
First of all Bob I am delighted to see you comment again. I worried if you were well since you no longer seems active in debates.
Norway has just set up a national effort to develop hybrid shipping based upon batteries and hydrogen. And in Scandinavia I would imagine we have passed 50 or so battery driven ferries, whereof some are pretty gigantic (connect Denmark and Sweden and carries trains).
Shipping will in the future be net energy producing.
As for the transitioning away from fossil in mining that is an ongoing revolution as many mining territories all around the world are in high insolation where solar by far is the cheaper option.
The main character behind the offshore wind revolution, Henrik Stiesdal , has started a discussion about whether solar will overtake wind on price. In recent German offshore wind auctions DONG bid for zero FIT.
Another 50% price cut would signify that the entire fossil fuel supply chain would collapse in on itself as Synfuels would then overtake the market.
The new cost points are down to increased competition, coming larger turbines and industrial learning so potential game changing innovation is not even in the equation. The latter is astonishing because a lot of potentially game changing wind power technology is in the works.
A bit unnoticed biofuels are making a headway too. In Denmark we will install biogas capacity that will produce 10% of our NG consumption in just this year.
Jens,
Thanks for your remark regarding German offshore wind. Seems offshore wind is already now becoming cheaper than onshore!
Please can you illustrate your remark:
“Shipping will be net energy producing.”
I understand that they can operate more easy 100% renewable than cars, as heavy batteries and H2 storage are less of a problem.
But not how they can produce?
Btw.
Cycling to the North Cape last year, we had the honor to use a number of your excellent electric ferries!
I have no doubt that shipping will change a lot. Another Norwegian project is exploring the hull of a ship as an gigantic sail. Many succesful attempts have been tried with onboard windturbines. Yet another Norwegian project is exploring a fishtail style propulsion. And finally I have som privileged information on technology to reduce frictional drag.
Offshore wind cheaper than onshore was in the cards as early on as 2014 but was prevented by the current Lomborgian government in Denmark who changed the permitting system from an open door approach to a very complex process with extremely high demands on the operator.
According to expertise and again I have privileged information the cost is going down.
” regarding German offshore wind. Seems offshore wind is already now becoming cheaper than onshore!”
How about hours of production?
Here in California we have a lot more nighttime wind than daytime. Onshore.
Going offshore may mean that the percent of time with output should greatly increase, lowering the need for storage. Even if offshore might be somewhat more expensive that would be offset via storage savings.
Does the same hold for German/Danish on- and offshore wind?
The CF of the Dutch Borssele off-shore wind farm, which will use 8.2MW wind turbines, is 52%.
The German wind farms won by Dong not asking any subsidy or guarantee, are in a more windy piece of the N.Sea. Furthermore I think they scheduled 10MW or 12MW wind turbines as the farms only have to be fully operational in 2024 (Dutch wind farm in 2020).
Bigger wind turbine = higher = more steady wind = higher CF. Though I estimate their CF still will be less than 60%.
Good onshore has CF’s of ~35%. Installing >5MW turbines onshore imposes a difficult transportation problem as the parts become too large and heavy to use roads with viaducts, etc.
Capacity factor is not a good measurement of hours of production. A wind farm with a 50% CF could have some hours of very strong wind and hours of no wind at all. Or it could have moderate winds almost all the time.
The US DOE (NREL) has identified significant areas (2,000,000 km2) in the US – onshore – where we can expect to get 60% CF using 140 meter or higher hub heights.
http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/windmaps/resource_potential.asp#states
Bob it is very uncommon for windspeeds not to follow a normal Weibull distribution.
No matter the hub height you could easily design for 60% capacity factor but it might be nonsensical.
In Northern Europe everything will evolve around offshore. Europe could power the entire globe and not only the electricity demand by offshore wind only.
The Adwen 8MW turbine has 20% larger swept area than MHI Vestas 164.
The expected size increase by DONG is 13-15MW by 2024 and so far Siemens has confirmed this size range whereas the ongoing rebuilding of Esbjerg Harbour suggest 20-24MW.
In this decade wind power is projected to increase carbon fiber demand from 17% of world production last year to 65% by 2020.
The reasons are demand for more and larger blades.
As for the capacity factor there are actually huge potential for increase simply because a wind turbine is not a very efficient design.
Hi Jens. I burned out by spending several hours a day doing mod work on another site. I had no time to read wider. So I took a break and now I’m back searching the web for a larger variety of information.
When I talk about ocean transportation I’m thinking about crossing the Pacific or Atlantic. Short distance shipping may be possible with batteries or hydrogen, although hydrogen would require about 10x the storage are as diesel/bunker fuel.
I suspect a couple of decades from now we’ll have put a heavy price on burning fossil fuels, making bunker oil shipping a lot more expensive. That will probably drive manufacturing closer to markets. And this should be aided by both the levelization of labor costs around the world as well as labor reductions as we use more robots.
I also hope that the Hyperloop works. If so, we could connect the world with tubes. Shipping China to the US West Coast would take ‘ten hours’ vs. ‘ten days’. And all done with electricity from renewable sources. Only very bulky items like large machinery would still need to be shipped.
Perhaps we’ll make all the large stuff on the continent where it will be used, shipping only smaller components that would fit into a Hyperloop shipping container.
Maybe we’ll be able to get our large ship needs down to a very small number and fill their fuel tanks with canola oil.
Hi Bob
The engine will be gone in future ships and the drive train will be much lighter. So a lot of weight and space will be freed up. Further the energy requirement will be going down and future ships will produce on the go.
Hyperloop cross ocean would have to be freely suspended in the water column. Interesting scary difficult.
One word – Chunnel.
From the US West Coast up to Alaska.
Underwater to Asia.
On to Europe.
—
You’re aware that Musk has founded a new company named “Boring”?
The name tells the story.
—
I don’t want to get too far ahead of the data. We’re waiting to see if the ‘loop works. If it does then we can start considering how much we can do with the technology.
Perhaps we ‘loop to Southern Alaska and plane/ship to Asia from there. And ‘loop to Eastern Canada where we plane/ship to Europe.
Perhaps Musk has figured out a way to bore tunnels rapidly and inexpensively.
Either going underwater to Asia or hopping across oceans at the narrowest spots could cut our plane/ship fuel considerably.
If the ‘loop works.
” whether solar will overtake wind on price”
Solar may well overtake wind on price and become cheaper. That’s unimportant.
Both are on track to becoming so cheap that there will be little room between their final prices.
And they tend to produce at different times. In many places winds are stronger at night, in the winter, and during storms. Those are all low sunshine times. It’s going to be cheaper to install (wind or solar) than to install only (wind or solar) and store that production for the (still days or sunless hours).
Wind (or solar) will be cheaper than solar (or wind) plus storage costs. The difference between $0.021/kWh and $0.018/kWh will not be a deciding factor.
If synfuels can be manufactured for less than the price of processed oil (at <$20 barrel) then I can see plants built in some of the sunniest and windiest places.
" Half of the ten sunniest places on record are in the American southwest states of Arizona, Nevada and Texas. The other sunny region is in northeast Africa. It spans southern Egypt, northern Sudan and northern Chad, taking in the Nile Valley and deserts to the west."
The synfuel plants for Europe, Africa and Asia get located in northern Africa. The synfuel plants for the Americas get located in the US SW. Shipped to market by electrified rail.
That works for me.
If we can electrify almost everything then we can reasonably run the rest on biogas or synfuel. There are some applications that will likely require a portable dense energy source.
We expect to produce batteries with 580 Wh/kg under severe duty, 1160 Wh/kg nominal (moderate duty), and 2320 W/kg open circuit by 2020, at $100/kWh volume selling price, with 10,000 to 20,000 cycle life.
That means, not counting interest, etc., 1 cent to 0.5 cents per kWh simple levelized cost of storage. Your difference was 0.3 cents per kWh, which we would meet when we reach about 35,000 cycles. So far, we don’t see a theoretical limit to the cycle life; we just need to get there in practice.
Far from the equator like in almost all of Europe wind is needed not solar. So batteries won’t help much.
You have wind that blows all the time and in sync with demand?
No, but offshore wind is much better than solar for Europe. To store wind energy batteries are not very usefull.
MG – solar is pretty good in places like Italy and Spain.
Batteries are now pushing NG peakers offline when it comes to grid smoothing (short term storage).
As battery prices fall it will make more sense to store some solar for late afternoon and wind for early morning in order to purchasing fuel for thermal plants. Over time we should see storage gradually push thermal largely out of the market.
I live in a house and surroundings where solar panels would be aesthetically offensive but a great deal of roofs could integrate solar and solar panels are fast becoming the least priciest roof if you include the electricity production in your investment calculation.
Solar is likely to continue down in cost and since solar is behind the meter in many cases we will see solar penetration grow.
The proper mix of RE is changing with the fast technology and cost development. Two years ago osmotic power was considered exotic now it delivers cheap electricity. Two years ago biogas was considered way too expensive now biogas combined with Synfuels production has almost breached the gap for market based jet fuel and the addition of new biogas capacity this year only will supply 10% of the annual NG consumption. Very small tweaks of the flow of materials and the airlines can cost effectively wean themselves of fossils even in this period with “depressed” fossil fuel prices.
Fossil fuels fight against the ingenuity of RE developers is a loosing battle.
Math,
In our area, wind and solar correlate negative. So using both is beneficial.
Sun shines when high-pressure areas pass, but then little wind.
Wind blows when low-pressure areas pass, but then cloudy and rain…
CF of solar is 12%, and hardly anything during winter when demand is high. Europe should not spoil money on batteries.
Installing sun implies less storage needed.
Mark Rest
Who is we?
Anyway your calculations are completely off.
You have to factor in both CAPEX, OPEX and loss factors.
Meantime Synfuels is now so very near market cost for selected high value fuels such as jet fuel.
We are talking month before Synfuels can deliver a superior product with zero GHG emission over production at current market price.
Unfortunately the high altitude emissions means that air traffic will still be a huge GHG contributor due to soot and water vapor.
Batteries makes no sense for storing unless you place them behind the meter or you need local mission critical backup supply.
The future will be overprovision of RE and discounted electricity for Synfuel production as well as other diverse electricity intense production that can be performed when there is excess electricity production relative to premium price paying customers market demand.
The latest offshore auction sees DONG bitting zero FIT, which means that they in 30 years after the power plants starts production will sell at current market value, which is less than 3C per kWh and a bit lower for wind as an intermittent power source.
If you place the electrolyzers in a 9MW wind turbine nacelle they will add about 1% to the total weight, whereas a battery that can store one days production would weight 1300tonnes or approximately 3% of the nacelle weight.
Batteries makes no sense for grid scale storage.
I expect we’ll see batteries (cells) for under $100/kWh. But add in the cost of rest of the system. For EVs the cost to assemble the cells into packs adds 20% to 30%. Then there’s the electronics to convert from AC to DC and back to AC. And real estate and labor.
10k to 20k cycles would make the cost of storage a lot more affordable.
I’m looking forward to how cheap storage might get but at this point there’s a lot of speculation and not much real world data that supports cheap battery storage.
I have to agree with Elon. There’s more BS surrounding storage than pretty much any other technology. I hope you’re right about stuff like 35k cycles but I need to see a product before I get excited.
Interesting article, it leads to the question: How appropriate is the renewables’ share target at all? If the Netherlands – despite insulation and heat pumps – currently have one of the lowests REN shares in the EU, and countries such as Romania or Poland a much higher one, due to burning of wood in old ovens and co-firing of biomass in inefficient coal plants – it apparently is not an indicator of progress towards a low-carbon society. It simply includes too different fuels: electricity from PV and wind, as well as traditional fire wood. In its current form, it seems to be quite a misleading indicator.
re these paragraphs:
“A very important application of biomass in the EU is wood in households for wood stoves and open fire places. The efficiency of these applications may be 50% or even lower. Nevertheless, all wood is taken into account as renewable energy. In European countries with a lot of wood combustion in households, this significantly improves the national renewable percentage. “Currently, the percentage of renewable energy in the EU is 16%, but taking into account an efficiency of 50% would lower the EU-28 renewable percentage to 14.2%.
“For other uses of biomass, efficiency is taken into account. The exception is biomass used as a feedstock; this is not taken into account at all. The lesson is that if we want to have a high percentage of renewable energy, we should burn biomass preferentially at home, and we should certainly not use it as feedstock. In other words: forget cascading biomass, burn it!”
First, we are not talking about gaming the system, we are talking about saving life on this planet. Let that be reflected in analytical rigor.
Second, the answer to your statement, “The efficiency of these applications may be 50% or even lower,” is so, we’d better penalize or regulate the sale of such low-efficiency devices, and subsidize the installation and use of high-efficiency electric heat pumps, or piped steam from central district heating projects, etc. — in other words, change our faulty behavior.
Third, you did not place them in context properly, by giving the percentage of total biofuels comprised by these inefficient processes, and to make matters worse, you then generalized to all biomass from their less-than-50% efficiency. BAD logic!
So, regulatory sloppiness at the top is confusing analysis throughout society. I think the thing to do is to recalculate with good numbers and logical relationships, and understand the opportunities technology presents to us. A major one is to use advanced pyrolysis technology, such as that from All Power Labs, in Berkeley, California, to capture both the energy content of wood chips, walnut shells, and the like, making a liquid fuel or chemical feedstock plus biochar, which you can bury in the garden to make it healthier, and more resilient to drought and nutrient shortages. Another one is to use advanced methane digesters for sewage, food wastes, and grasses or other cellulose (including soiled bedding material from cattle or other livestock), producing clean water, methane that replaces fossil-fuel-derived natural gas, and fertilizer.
By the way, in forests that have been allowed to get too crowded, due to long-term fire suppression, as in the USA, selective harvesting to thin them and remove a portion of the dead trees can yield huge amounts of lumber, wood chips (for pyrolysis) and shredded soft cellulose material for humus or composting or methane digesters or fermentation). This also prevents intense ‘scouring’ forest fires that burn all the organic matter in the soils, and dump all the carbon in the forest immediately into the atmosphere.
Mark
Burning wood is a menace that kills thousands of people while also inflicting terrible suffering on the victims.
The sooner it can be banned altogether and we can get an ash free future the better.
There has been almost revolutionary progress in biomass technologies that despite the current “depressed” fossil fuel prices now are very near price points where they have become price competitive.
I am not much in favor of central power plants based upon biomass but the modern ones feature far better energy efficiency than average coal power plants and the excess heat is used for district heating.
Anyway I think biomass usage and also handling of municipal and industrial waste will probably be too expensive not to be subsidized in the future mainly because solar, osmotic power and wind will be significantly cheaper. It will as you also suggest be something we do to increase organic carbon in the soil.
This may have already been covered in the comments. I haven’t read them all yet.
The author states that “However, as it turns out, this 1600 Mtoe is not the denominator in the directive since several areas of energy usage are excluded. Firstly, the conversion losses in the energy sector, like in power production, are not taken into account.”
He’s referring to this definition of 100% renewable.
” âThe share of energy from renewable sources shall be calculated as the gross final consumption of energy from renewable sources divided by the gross final consumption of energy from all energy sources, expressed as a percentageâ”
In the US we separate our energy use into “primary” and “final”. Primary energy is the raw fossil fuel and nuclear fuel along with output from wind, hydro and solar facilities. Of that 100% primary we turn about 40% into final energy and discard about 60% mostly as waste heat.
The definition holds if one defines final energy as that energy which actually performs work.
Then –
“Thirdly, energy consumption for feedstocks are excluded. ”
Energy is not a ‘feedstock’. Fossil fuels are used as industrial feedstock but in that case they aren’t energy. They are chemical inputs the same as sulfur or iodine.
There’s no problem using oil, natural gas, or coal as industrial feedstock as long as we keep the carbon contained and don’t release it into the atmosphere to add to our greenhouse gas blanket. Use it. Reuse/recycle it or bury it in a landfill where it will stay sequestered.
Nigel posted – “In a 100% renewables scenario do you have any idea of the interconnection needs to wheel sufficient power between the UK and Europe”
Nigel, neither you nor I know what it would take to make England’s grid 100% renewable. That is a very complex thing to work out.
First we’d need a few years of actual demand data. Then we’d need weather (wind speed and solar input) for those same hours or minutes.
We’d need to know the amount of dispatchable hydro.
We’d need to know the potential for load-shedding or load-shifting.
Then we’d need reasonable cost estimates for new onshore wind, offshore wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, biofuel and tidal. We’d need to know the cost of storage, both short cycle and extended period storage.
We’d need to know the availability and cost of importing electricity from the mainland or Iceland.
If we had all that data (and perhaps some things I’ve overlooked) we could then plug it into a computer program that would calculate the optimal mix of generation, storage, and purchasing abroad.
Then we’d need to do the same with nuclear. That’s the only real way to determine the least expensive solution. I would hope your government is either already doing that or at least building the program.
What we do know right now is that wind and solar generation is considerably less expensive than is nuclear. And that the cost of wind and solar should continue to fall over the next few years so that by the time a new reactor could be brought online the cost differential is likely to be much wider than it now is.
Based on what we know right now, mainly the cost of wind, solar and nuclear we can at least make some reasonable guesses.
Let’s assume that at least 90% of all electricity used in the UK will be generated in the UK. No more than 10% will be purchased abroad.
That means that the cost of a nuclear supplied grid will run the cost of Hinkley and upwards. It won’t get cheaper to build nuclear unless we have an unicorn event.
The cost of a renewable (largely offshore wind) supplied grid will cost far less as we can see the cost of offshore wind dropping to 5 EU cents and probably lower.
The major inputs will be a massive part of cost determination.
100% renewable studies covering Europe indicate about 50GW peak UK exports to the continent, and 30GW of imports. So interconnection needed would be >50GW. Plans are in place for about 12GW already so about 20 more interconnectors would be needed together with a massive increase in on shore transmission capacity to evacuate 50GW for export which wouldn’t be popular re. the environment.
Currently UK market prices are higher than Europe so the economics work based on exploiting that differential. Too much interconnector capacity though and the differential will disappear requiring other income sources to finance construction.
A major issue with relying on that level of electricity imports would be UK national security, too serious to dismiss with arguments that the risk is the same as importing gas or other storable fuels. Secure electricity supplies free from outside control are just as important strategically for the UK as the UK’s decision to leave the EU so preserving sovereign nation status free of outside interference. Also reflected in the UK maintaining strong defence forces including a nuclear deterrent with a strong navy soon to have a pair of supercarrier battle groups.
Looking at Germany where they take a very conservative view on managing risk, they have c. 90GW of renewables, a total generating capacity of almost 200GW and peak demand c. 90GW. So they are not taking any risk with intermittant renewables. Nor are they keen on relying on Russian gas. Neither should the UK contemplate taking the risks that would come with a near 100% renewables strategy and inadequate conventional back-up.
I doubt the UK would model all nuclear or all renewables, and then pick a winner. Anyway input forecasts needed over 40 years say would not be reliable enough to make a clear decision. There is no need to either, developing incrementally works and provides flexibility to take account of developments.
The way the UK has chosen to optimise the costs of moving to a low carbon electricity supply is an auction which is mainly off shore wind capacity. Capacity is being phased too. Should avoid grid problems. Competition will drive down prices whereas FIT schemes don’t. They result in a free for all and too much capacity being built. The development costs of new nuclear are too great for investors to risk losing at an auction or a competition. CFD strike prices are negotiated directly with developers.
“100% renewable studies covering Europe indicate about 50GW peak UK exports to the continent, and 30GW of imports. So interconnection needed would be >50GW. ”
No.
First, local generation would be extremely unlikely to fall to zero.
Second, there would be some amount of avoidable loads during the peak.
Finally, the input over a period of time has to supply the remaining peak but all of it does not have to be shipped in during peak demand hours. Local storage can be replenished before the peak.
Think about that Means “terrible wind week”. Wind never went to zero, it just went low. Peak demand is not 24 hours per day, a large number of hours peak is lower.
“The Big Lull” without importing power.
Day 1. Loads are shifted off peak and some of the short cycle storage is discharged.
Day 2. Loads are shifted off peak and more of the short cycle storage is discharged.
Day 3. Loads are shifted off peak and the last of the short cycle storage is discharged.
Day 4. We’re screwed.
Now, “The Big Lull” with imported power.
Day 1. Loads are shifted off peak and, since the weather folks have predicted the lull, imports start. During off-peak hours local storage is recharged.
Day 2. Loads are shifted off peak and since imports refilled local storage life proceeds as normal.
Day 3. Like Day 2.
…
Day 7. Like Day 1.
Day 8. Winds are back.
The interconnection needs to be enough to replace what local generation isn’t supplying but not at peak rates as long as there is sufficient storage.
No. UK wind resources would need to be exploited fully in a 100% renewables Europe. So UK generation would >100GW at times. Less peak UK demand gives an export of at least 50GW. Away from peak UK demand the export could be even greater if Europe was in the doldrums.
UK has 0.03TWh of pumped storage currently – c.f. 1TWh consumed daily. Feasible sites would allow expansion to about 0.1 TWh. Would not be enough insurance.
University produced models purport to show the UK could exist on near 100% renewables as part of a Europe wide scheme. It’s totally hypothetical – not UK energy policy.
Well, when UK has installed moe than 100 GW offshore wind, it will get also well baove 400TWh per year from offshore wind alone. So there will be a power surplus being exported more or less continuously from UK to other countries, provducing a stream of revenue in the other direction. (different fom today)
Germany also has more than 50 GW brutto capacity of power lines crossing the borders today. And further capacity is being built in all directions.
It could take decades to reach that level based on the rate of UK offshore build over the last five years – c. 5GW.
UK consumers should not have to subsidise capacity over build relative to the UK’s needs. Over build would have to be financed privately and on a merchant basis. I doubt the UK would benefit much from the revenues and most of the equipment would have to be imported.
Nigel states – “Today if a country decided to go all out for nuclear a level of storage would make sense commercially to smooth out the load curve and avoid burning fossil fuels say. However clearly the capacity needed would be much less than that needed to deal with renewables intermittancy”
In terms of daily power-shifting it’s not clear that we would need significantly more storage for an all renewable vs. all nuclear grid. The spread between daily peak and daily trough demand can run 3:1. That would entail moving a lot of nuclear produced electricity from late night to daily demand.
Longer term storage would be needed for renewables.
Then we have to deal with the times that nuclear plants go offline unscheduled. Somewhere in the system would need to be weeks/months of extra storage or parked reactors to step in and pick up the outage. The grid would need a few days of storage for the parked reactor to come online.
Pro-nuclear people act as if it’s “Build a reactor, turn it on, Bob’s your uncle”.
It’s not that simple. Demand ebbs and flows. Stuff breaks. When a reactor breaks a very large portion of the grid supply suddenly disappears.
Bob, the subtle point I am making is yes some storage in a near all nuclear scenario would be desirable commercially, but there is no technical need for storage to complement nuclear. Also despite the grand intentions of central power system planners in the 1970s to go fully nuclear the only country to get anywhere near it of note is France and they have one large pumped storage plant. France’s load curve is fairly smooth. Not sure how, might be electricity used for heating timed for off peak periods.
We will have to agree to differ on the level of storage needed for a renewables only grid. For the UK it would need to be at the very least a few days so >2TWh. Unless there was adequate conventional dispatchable back-up, in which case no need for expensive storage too.
A feature of any interconnected system is the need to hold reserve capacity. It’s unavoidable that infeeds will be lost. TSO’s know the biggest loss risk on their grid. For the UK it was one half (1GW) of the cross channel link, not a generator. As you say stuff breaks and when the cross channel link fails it can take months to fix. Similarly reactors can fail too for long periods, or a subsea connection to a large windfarm. So to avoid large frequency deviations, the greatest infeed loss needs to be catered for first by part loaded plant known as spinning reserve. Wind farms can now provide this service too. Reserve generation plant then takes over after a few hours. Not a reactor as they don’t sit idle, but typically low merit reserve conventional thermal plant at a few hours short notice to sync. Storage is no good to cover such infeed losses as it wouldn’t be economic to endure for months.
The point here is regardless of the mix of generation on a grid reserve capacity must be held, storage would not be economic. Also, an all nuclear grid is not desirable, and I would argue neither is a 100% renewables grid. A mix of generation sources is best.
“there is no technical need for storage to complement nuclear.”
If the total output of your nuclear reactors exceeds the grid demand at any moment in time you have two options 1) store or 2) decrease output (curtail).
If your grid has a small component (less than the minimal demand) then it can rumble along in the background.
If your grid has cheaper generation (wind/solar) then the reactor may have to operate at a financial loss in order to avoid a costly shutdown.
” the only country to get anywhere near it of note is France and they have one large pumped storage plant. Franceâs load curve is fairly smooth”
France uses the rest of western Europe as it’s “battery”.
When France has surplus electricity they sell it to other countries. When they run short they purchase from other countries. Germany makes very nice money by buying electricity from France and selling them back electricity at a higher price.
“A feature of any interconnected system is the need to hold reserve capacity.”
Yes. All grids build in additional generation to cover stuff breaking. Usually it’s enough, sometimes not. SoCal Edison had a huge problem when both SONGs (San Onofre) reactors failed at the same time. They hadn’t built in enough spare capacity.
I suspect our best “deep backup” for now is to:
1) Hang on to some fossil fuel plants. Keep them in working order and keep an adequate supply of fuel on hand.
2) Convert those plants to use biofuel. CCNG plants can run on methane from sewage or landfills. Coal plants can run on wood waste or pellets from sustainable sources.
Most grids are probably at least 20 years from being almost fossil free. Some issues like deep backup can wait. Let’s go after the easy stuff and the stuff that cuts CO2 fastest now.
Install lots of very affordable wind and solar. Start building in storage to time-shift wind/solar energy around for short times (day to evening) and leave the niche problems for later. We’ve got workable solutions and can develop better ones later on.
“If the total output of your nuclear reactors exceeds the grid demand at any moment in time you have two options 1) store or 2) decrease output (curtail).”
On a grid, generation = demand + losses. So nuclear output can’t exceed demand. Generation is dispatched accurately to meet forecast demand. Nukes can be part loaded if needed to follow demand. Storage is an option, not a requirement for nukes.
Whereas a massive and costly increase in storage is a requirement for a near 100% renewables grid, together with the cost of a higher capacity transmission system. California’s duck curve shows that renewables generation can be very poorly matched to demand.
“France uses the rest of western Europe as itâs âbatteryâ.”
Yes, so no need for storage to support their nuclear fleet.
“Install lots of very affordable wind and solar.”
What looks the best option for California is not for the UK. UK solar CF is half that of CAL and can be down for days in the winter during peak demand times. Tesla power walls and solar look a good option in CA to avoid the grid, not in the UK though.
Best locations for onshore wind in the UK are saturated like in Scotland. The affordability of off shore wind in UK deep waters, together with transmission works and the need for back-up is not proven yet relative to new nuclear.
“Nukes can be part loaded if needed to follow demand.”
That makes nuclear even more expensive.
I’m glad to see you realize that if France couldn’t rely on the rest of Europe to make their nuclear fleet workable they would have to add massive amounts of storage.
The UK has massive wind resources compared to California. (At least until we start installing floaters off the coast.)
The wind blows many more hours per day than does the Sun shine. That makes it easier to incorporate.
Statoil floaters are making their way to UK grids at the moment.
“Iâm glad to see you realize that if France couldnât rely on the rest of Europe to make their nuclear fleet workable they would have to add massive amounts of storage.”
No. France’s marginal cost of nuclear production is low so they export surplus to willing buyers. If they weren’t exporting they could use their hydro and fossil plants to avoid part loading nuclear plants. France wouldn’t need massive amounts of pumped storage.
This nuclear needs massive storage is put about by antis as a smokescreen to try and disguise the fact that renewables will need massive amounts of storage to provide firm capacity.
Nigel, let’s do what science does when it wants to study something. Scientists take the issue into the lab and strip it down to the basic elements.
So here’s our lab experiment.
You’ve been put in charge of replacing the costly and about to age out diesel system on an island. The electricity demand on that island varies from 1,110 megawatt electric (MWe), the output of a AP1000, to 3,330 MWe throughout the year.
Now, please describe what you would use to give the island a nuclear-supplied grid.
Nigel West
Denmark is a very small country where people swap jobs very fast. At any given time there would be several people working in any wind power related company that has been close colleges with a large number of other people in all the other wind power related companies. Your speculation that DONG has made a bid they are not intent on or consider realistic will only be called if they by 2021 conclude that they do not want to advance the bid. The interesting thing is that although the bid is small it is preceding many planed larger auctions in the same area of the Northsea. On this ground alone I suspect that DONG will accept a perhaps financial dubious project economy. DONG, EON, Vattenfall, Shell, RWE (Innogy), Statoil to name the largest companies that pursue offshore wind all have to secure buying power in order to get the best negotiation position with suppliers and to be able to build the huge infrastructure they need to handle offshore projects. In the frame of mind for these companies size matters. It is a bit like the display business where it is insanely expensive to order the building of gen.11 display factory. You have to make the call. Currently Siemens is the only wind turbine maker that has made money form offshore but MHI Vestas seems to be on track to report black figures this year only three years after incorporation. Senvion, Adwen, GE etc. will have to see if they can gain experience but it takes almost as long time to build an offshore capability as to build a nuclear power plant so no-one knows if they can become competitive and can scale their next turbines to the sizes required to become competitive.
The DONG business case is based upon unusual good wind resources and free grid connection. The next projects might not have free grid connections and may also have access to less attractive wind resources.
Everybody in the wind business knows that unlocking the potential of offshore wind requires further cost reductions.
Bladt the largest producer of fundaments has stated they are on track to reduce fundament cost by 40% by 2020.
Jens, thanks for your insight. I favour nuclear and offshore wind that is affordable for the consumer. I hope the decline in offshore wind prices can be maintained.
Jens, I think your comment was posted in the wrong place.
Bob, it’s an electrical power engineering matter to be precise.
So I can tell you, it would be a non starter. An isolated island with that demand would not choose that size generator for power system operability, system stability and supply security reasons. That size of plant is for connection to large grids.
Nice try though. Best not mention real island system cases like Hawaii, Tasmania and S. Australia (poorly interconnected grid) where bad decisions involving renewables have caused/nearly caused blackouts….
Fine, Nigel.
Work out the all nuclear solution using any size reactors you like.
BTW, the population of Java is over 141 million. They just began construction on a 2,000 MW coal plant. Not all islands are populated by one castaway sitting under the lone palm tree.
And what I want you to describe is an all nuclear system for an isolated island where connections to other grids are not feasible.
You can do that, can’t you?
—
Since Hawaii is still very heavily supplied by diesel I’d appreciate you backing up your claim that renewables have caused or nearly caused blackouts.
Bob, it’s not possible to describe an optimum power system for an isolated island because every situation is different. In reality engineering consultants would be retained to advise on feasibility, options and costs. All types of generation and mixes would be considered, not just one solution. Detailed studies would take many months and the issues would be wide ranging.
Similarly describing how an an island could be supplied reliably by 100% renewables would need engineering studies. Do you have the skills to do that credibly? It takes far more knowledge and skills than a blogger has surfing the internet.
So that’s enough of playing games. Islands are a side show. My focus is on big nations and energy strategy.
Hawaii’s Utility has been forced to cap solar connections before their system became unstable risking blackouts. I expect the issue is their fossil generation can’t at the moment cope with rapid load changes at dusk. The other two locations are though in a worse position. They weren’t before the renewables dash.
Nigel, I can’t tell whether you don’t know how an all nuclear system would work or if you don’t want to describe one because it would mean admitting inconvenient facts.
I’ll do it for you.
First, we’ve got a 1:3 range in demand with average demand running somewhere in between. Let’s call it “2” since this is back of the envelop designing.
Let’s use 1,000 MW as our minimum demand which would make our maximum demand 3,000 MW and our average 2,000 MW.
There’s probably a couple of ways to skin this cat. One is to build three 1 GW reactors and load-follow with them.
That’s going to take the “13c/kWh” and increase the cost by about one half. On average each reactor would be running only half time.
The cost of electricity would rise a bit under 20c/kWh.
Then we’d need a spare reactor we could turn on in the event that one of the other reactors failed. That would add another third to the cost. Now we’re up to 26c/kWh.
Or we could build two reactors plus a backup and install enough storage to do the needed time-shifting. Since storage is cheaper than reactors this could bring the cost down a bit.
Nuclear is our second most expensive way to generate electricity if we require coal to pay its external costs.
“So thatâs enough of playing games. Islands are a side show. My focus is on big nations and energy strategy.”
Big nation. Modest sized island. The economics are the same. The more nuclear you add to the mix the more expensive electricity becomes.
You can duck the extra cost of load-following and storage as long as the total output of reactors is lower than the demand minimum. And nuclear is given a “first taken” privileged position so that it doesn’t have to price compete.
—
Hawaii temporarily halted new end-user solar installations because some of their grid components were being stressed.
That problem has been solved and people are once again free to install solar. (And, I suspect, some friends of fossil fuels inside the system were protecting turf.)
There was never any problem with throttling back generation in Hawaii.
Hawaii uses diesel for their grid. Just like driving a car, push down or let up on the “accelerator”.
Bob, there is no need for more storage in a high nuclear scenario in the UK (a big island) as explained clearly here.
http://euanmearns.com/uk-electricity-2050-part-2-a-high-nuclear-model/
You are pushing false info. to try and slur nuclear. Whereas it would be unavoidable in a high penetration renewables scenario – vast amounts of additional storage are needed and/or impractical demand side measures. That is just a very inconvenient truth for renewables.
Your back of the envelope strawman calculations do not impress engineers either.
@ nigel west, you don’t really want to reference the fake news site of euan mearns seriously?
That’s a back of the envelope design, ignoring ramp rates, based on average loads per day, and already sees the requirement for 35 GW of other (non nuclear ) generation.
By the way Dinorwig was built to balance nuclear….
In Australia it’s all about bad grid management, which has tradition there, and not about wind and solar. Same blackouts plagued the place even when there was only coal and gas generation. previous blackouts were mainly triggered by internal faults of northern power station.
Well, Nigel, sometimes you need to sort out your aguments. If dumping of surplus nuclear power in other countries is OK because the share of nuclear in the total european grid is small, this must also apply to “dumping” wind and solar power in other countries as well on similar level of penetration.
(About you continuously complain)
And the argument does not hold water if you rise penetration of nuclear in the grid, then either storage must be added, or the grid expanden to a size where there is no low nightime demand any more – in this grid size PV supplies power around the clock, too.
With the interconnectors being under construction, Offshore wind in scottland is by far not saturated.
And it is also needs to be proven that the afforadbility of nuclaer + grid expansions+ storages is better relative to offshore wind+solar+biomass+grid extensions+storage.
So far there is a big price gap beween prices for new nuclar projects in UK and offshore and solar wind projects in Germany and Damark allowing to add a lot of grid extensions etc. without getting more expensive than nuclear.
That’s why some utilities now come to the idea of building merchant offshore wind power plants, while no utility comes to the idea of building merchant nuclear power plants.
EDF exporting low cost nuclear power that is not supported by FITs does not constitute ‘dumping’.
“And it is also needs to be proven that the afforadbility of nuclaer + grid expansions+ storages is better relative to offshore wind+solar+biomass+grid extensions+storage.”
No thats doesn’t need to be proven. Plenty of new nuclear capacity could be connected to Europe’s grid with hardly any grid reinforcement, and storage would not be needed. CCGTs can be used to cover peak demand and in France existing hydro. Near 100% renewables is a dream. EU policy is only 27%.
The developers who recently won off-shore contracts with zero FIT support have basically taken an option. They are not committed to build. They could walk away if their bids proved to be too low if predicted cost savings are not achievable.
The UK’s off shore auction process now underway will determine prices here. Whatever happens though UK energy policy promotes both new nuclear and off shore wind. I don’t see that changing soon.
Nigel West
There is no subtle point in your declaration.
It is very simple to substitute any given amount of nuclear power with RE that has the same baseload profile as nuclear.
UK and the British isles as such have lots of sea water and salt deposits so you have amble opportunities for osmotic power and you also have lots of untapped geothermal resources.
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/energy/geothermal/
And https://www.thespruce.com/uses-and-types-of-salt-in-britain-4122397
To make the most of both you find geothermal sites with high salinity brine and access to the sea and or possibly freshwater. If you further can find the resource in the vicinity to a city with district heating or industries with process heat demand you really have a winning proposition.
Any interconnected system may benefit from reserve capacity but is in no way a prerequisite. In P2G design you employ electrolyzers that can double in as fuel cells when you run them in reverse whether you base you system on liquid carriers such as Innogy propose with their Methanol project or hydrogen or Methane etc. etc. etc.
The British offshore wind potential is huge and you will be supplying most of Europe in the coming decades.
Further you have a second to none biofuel potential in the seas around the British isles and Minesto and others that tap into your steady sea currents may eventually come of age and pull it of.
P2G is the only way you can scale to demand rapidly.
NEL mainly Hydrogen focussed has tripled business volume in these four month relative to their entire fiscal year 2016 and Hydrogen busses on unsubsidized basis would be cheaper than Diesel busses if they could purchase electricity at production cost. Currently the hydrogen they produce is $5/kg but is expected to go to $2/kg in a short timeframe. Any gasoline station can be fitted with Hydrogen within days and their current capacity to build 300 annually can be increased relatively cheaply.
The one point we do agree upon is that there is no meaningful battery storage opportunity on grid scale.
How can RE have the same baseload profile as nuclear?
The rest of your post is wishful thinking based on tech. that is not proven on the scale needed. Sounds impractical too.
“How can RE have the same baseload profile as nuclear?”
Build the right mix of inputs and storage.
RE in isolation is not baseload capacity and Jens claim that RE can simply substitute for nuclear is a fallacy. It can’t without all the costly add ons.
Nuclear can’t run a grid without addons either.
Nigel West
Geothermal, Osmotic Power and OTEC are three examples of RE baseload production technologies.
You labor under the assumption that P2G will stay expensive, which is a major misunderstanding.
The cost point for cheaper than fossil based P2G products is within reach. 5% of the global Hydrogen production is now based on electrolyzers. Interestingly 45% of the consumed Hydrogen is used by the refineries and the introduction of P2G will be a gradual one where more and more of the diesel and gasoline you consume will be based upon biofuels and P2G. In Sweden the percentage is now 21%.
In Denmark we are very close to being able to produce the jet fuel we consume based upon a combination of biogas and hydrogen. Very small advances in technology and a little lower RE cost will make non fossil jet fuel cheaper than the current very low cost level for fossil based jet fuel.
So what you call costly add ons are just sound economic options.
Electrolyzers can run backwards as fuel cells, which means that for easily storable Synfuels such as methanols you can establish a system with very low cost reserve capacity that alternate between consuming electricity and producing electricity.
The British isles have vastly better wind and biofuel resources than Denmark and can now after almost no British investments at all just scoop the profits. Similar you have better geothermal and osmotic power resources and can now rejoice in the fact that these technologies have been developed by very small countries like Iceland, New Zealand, Costa Rica and Denmark. If you are able to get past your emperial pride then just do it.
Don’t forget run of the river hydro as another “baseload” source.
What would be the outcome if diesel could be purchased free of tax?
Diesel burning vehicles would be bought in higher numbers and replaced with battery powered vehicles slower.
People would die in higher numbers due to the additional diesel pollution.
The climate would heat faster.