Joseph Somsel’s article of 8/14/08, “Wind, Solar, Nuclear, and Electricity Storage” was an excellent, standard view of the problems of storage. His analysis was brilliant, out of the playbook thinking. That it was out of the playbook is what I take exception to. In effect, this type of thinking is based on the notion that variability is a generator issue, and up to the generator to finance the solution. If wind or solar energy is too variable, then it is up to these generators to solve the problem.
I disagree. I believe that variability is a grid issue. In short, it is the grid operators’ responsibility to capture what energy they can, when they can, and to use it. There are a number of constraints. Simply put, use of wind and other variable sources is for a number of reasons thought of as a local/regional resource. The problem with this thinking is that such resources should be thought of as a continental resource/issue. Europe is making progress by realizing this, while the U.S. continues with looking to regional grid operators complaining about regional variations. The flip side of this is that long distance transmission of electricity entails a loss of energy. I cannot remember who coined the phrase, but “Think Globally, Act Locally” comes to mind, and I believe comes into play here.
In 2003, provisional figures for the U.S. say we consumed 3891.72 TWH. If grid operators put a $.01 surcharge on every kilowatt hour generated, they could realize an annual budget in excess of $38,917,200,000.00. If that money was used to install sodium/ sulfur batteries, we could install 15,566.88 megawatts worth of batteries a year.
In arriving at that figure, I made a number of assumptions. The first assumption is a price of $2,500,000 per megawatt installed. The second assumption I made was that there were 110 days of peak demand a year which would be delivered at $375/MWH, but purchased at $60.00 per megawatt/hour, adjusted for a battery efficiency of 8 MW purchased for 7.2 megawatts delivered. I assumed a real life usage of 13 years. As the batteries are listed as having a 1,500 full charge discharge life cycle rate, I used 110 days of damaging use for a figure. This gave a service life of 13.67 years, which is why I stopped at year 14. I further assumed that the “profit” from selling electricity at peak demand would be used to buy additional batteries. I purposely ignored a lot of other factors on the basis that they would potentially cancel each other out over time, including non damaging use of the batteries during the rest of the year to resolve variability problems. I am proposing this as an alternate first order analysis. The idea is simply this: that money is collected during year one starting January 1, and that on January 1 of the following year, all the batteries are installed. The program for adding batteries stops after year 14 as at that point, the batteries from year two would need replacement. There is no financing – this is a pay as you go program. I used a spread sheet to find that this would finance the purchase of 217.9 GW worth of storage that would yield 24.5 GW/hour for 8 hours. Please see attached.
While batteries per se may not be the ideal energy storage solution, I believe this shows that there is an economic pathway to some form of storage as part of the solution. Assuming a benchmark cost of $2,500/kw for storage, we could achieve nearly 218 GW of storage in 14 years, if we wanted to. As I see it, that is the crux of the problem. We could take the same amount of money and build 24.5 GW of coal fired, non renewable energy generation plants that will add to our carbon and methane footprint, or we can choose to spend the money to make PV and wind farms work within the constraints of reality. It is a choice.
http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/successes/ss/5-060t...
Give them a billion dollars, and the problem will be solved.
There is no getting around the fact that high production costs and intermittency of wind and solar will be paid for by the end-user in higher electric bills.
No, the problem is NOT a producer problem or a grid operator problem but a customer problem because he will get stuck footing the bill one way or the other. Ultimately, the advocates of windmills and solar panels or solar thermal want to pass their increased, non-competitive costs on John Q. Public. The only way to do so is through the political process - that's called rent seeking and is a public vice in a democracy.
The batteries are installed on top of pan designed to control any spill or leakage. No extra building or cooling is required in most circumstances. From what I have read there are no special handling or recycling issues. As for security etc, one such 5MW battery is being installed in West Virginia as a cheaper solution then a small substation. The batteries actually need to be kept hot, not cooled, so buildings might be needed if the winter temperatures are too low.
William Norquay:
That looked interesting but I am curious why NASA chose to drop it, as energy storage for satellites is an issue.
Joseph Somel:
My windmill? Sorry, but I do not own any. Nor do I work for a supplier or manufacturer. As a customer myself, I am interested in seeing things done in ways that do not negatively impact me.
I am not sure how to proceed. As my spread sheet attachment demonstrates precisely how grid operators would finance the effort, how would they lose money? I had thought consumer payment for the program was rather clear.
Rent may actually be the best discussion to have regarding solving the energy problem, as it is the crux of the whole discussion and determining the best strategies to pursue. That would be a much larger discussion and I would suggest that some thought needs to be given on how to organize and structure one or more blogs to deal with it as EVERY energy source has rents. If rent is a vice and therefore a "sin", then we are all sinners. No one is innocent. Even coal is subsidized. At least in the case of storage, the rents are cheaper, easier to follow, and if made a grid issue, will solve a lot of other problems.
As to rent-seeking, let's not degenerate into "moral equivalence" arguments. There are winning government industrial policies and there are legitimate losers and illegitmate boondoogles. Nuclear power development is an example of the first. The government control and support of commercial nuclear development resulted in manifest national benefits. For example, the first fleet of nukes reduced the use of oil for electrical generation from 25% of of to 2%, reducing our consumption of imported oil (coal helped.) Today, nuclear power makes 20% of our electricity (wind makes less than 1% and less than wood!) plus pumps tax revenues back into the Treasury in the form of nuclear waste trust fund payments in excess of cash outflows. Operating nukes makes some of our lowest cost electricity. Nuclear has clearly paid back the investments the taxpayers have made in it.
Will windmills and solar PV and other "alternatives" do as well? My analysis shows that the likelihood of these being competitive winners is very low. As far as I can see, what capacity we have is largely the result of great public relations and political salesmanship. Since they can't make it in a free market, advocates continually get governments to cook the books to MAKE them work and even worst, to hobble the competitors like coal and nuclear. While many starry-eyed advocates of alternatives are sincere in their support, once the doors on government-mandated largress are open, the sharks rush in.
The wind generation in West Texas, as I have read and be told, are shut down at night because there is no load. Base generation cannot be stopped and started on a daily basis to it is impractical to shut these units down yet we should "harvest" this renewable energy form.
Shifting air condioning loads to off peak generation will help a great deal as HVAC is the largest contributor to peak demand. Give the wind mills a load at night, store the energy in the form of ice until it can be used during peak times. These commercial systems are about $1.00 /watt. That is a great investment in existing infrasture and cheaper than PV, which is about $8.50/ watt and clean coal at at about $2.50/watt. And energy storage for cooling can be on line quickly.
In my life, I have witnessed two catastrophic events: The Bayonne Bridge Fire of 1965 and Chernobyl. In 1965, I was in the first row of vehicles stopped on the Bayonne Bridge as it was shut down. I was looking down on the tops of burning oil derricks directly below the bridge. During the Chernobyl accident, I got to watch P-3 Orions being decontaminated at Moffett NAS for several months, some 10,000 miles from the actual accident. Before anyone gets started, I know for a fact that it was decontamination, but I do NOT know that any radioactivity was ever actually found on the P-3 Orions. For all I know, it could have been the base commander's way of dealing with hysteria among his personnel. In some way, that makes it the perfect allegory for discussion of the rent/footprint of nuclear energy. Unlike the Bayonne Bridge Fire, any nuclear catastrophe has the possibility of reaching thousands of miles in potentially fatal ways. That it has not happened does not mean it will not happen. The French nuclear accidents of this summer demonstrate that the "gremlins" of WWII fame are alive and well. The additional problems of North Korea and Iran along with nuclear weapon proliferation in general are additional rents/footprint costs.
Chernobyl as an ecological issue has in fact not been dealt with. The fuel is still in a molten or semi-molten state depending on one's definitions, and is still in a position to reach and contaminate the water table. One meteor/satellite strike or earthquake could release enough radioactive dust to literally kill upwards of a billion people. The likelihood of either is negligible. It is not zero. If nothing happens with either Chernobyl or any other reactor, then the cost is zero. But if one accident does happen, the cost may not be measureable in money. One can use all the risk analysis in the world to arrive at some number, but in the end it comes down to either something does not happen (rent is $0.0) or something does happen (rent approaches infinity). And that before one figures in the ticking time bombs such as Chernobyl or the USS Scorpio.
In preparing for my response, I looked into the costs of storing waste materials. The initial surcharge of $0.001 looks rather promising. At $1 million a year, that surcharge would be sufficient for up to 100,000 years. It falls short in that it does not provide for military and intelligence agency expenses for 100,000 years. At current costs, the surcharge should be as high as $0.046/kwh, based on my assumptions, which could be either too low or too high; however, that was not what troubled me the most about looking at the issue. It is the sheer magnitude of the time frame. If one assumes only 10,000 years, that is longer than writing or city dwelling has existed on Earth. The pharaohs who built the pyramids and the Sphinx expected those monuments to be kept up. While they are still standing, they are not in anything approaching the pristine condition of their inception. While making decisions with 100 year ramifications makes some sense, as we have corporations that have either lasted that long or whose lineage can be traced in modern corporations, no one can point to any organization that has lasted 10,000 years. If one assumes that storage will be necessary for 100,000 years, I would argue the case is even worse.
The problem with determining rents/footprint costs for nuclear energy is that ultimately, we are gambling. We are gambling that perfection can be achieved and maintained for thousands of years in the case of storage, and at least 150 years in the case of current reactors built and/or under consideration. Ultimately, I am not entirely convinced that is the way to go.