Is Baseload Power Really Necessary?

[Eclipse Now]

Most Life Cycle / EROEI papers show renewables having a good EROEI, with solar PV at 7, and wind at 30. But what if we count the energy cost of building all the batteries and hydro dams it would take to store energy for the 2/3rds of the day the wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine? 

 

Graham Palmer has calculated that the EROEI of renewables + storage, that is, the EROEI of the whole system together, ends up being very low indeed. Where oil used to repay the energy to drill a well with 100 times the energy, building storage drains wind and solar energy profits down enormously.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/02/09/book-review-energy-in-australia/

Then there's the study by Weissbach, which looks at the most energy efficient storage method possible, mass scaled pumped hydro that can last 100 years, and finds that just 10 days storage (required in Germany) totally kills the ERoEI of wind and solar PV. They're not high enough energy sources to run our civilisation.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

Edited July 10, 2015 by Eclipse Now

[billvon]

 

 

But what if we count the energy cost of building all the batteries and hydro dams it would take to store energy for the 2/3rds of the day the wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine?

A few answers to that:

1) In the short term, that need will be met by peakers coupled with high power, low energy BESS (battery energy storage systems.)

2) In the mid term, loads themselves will become more intelligent.  A good example of this is the EV market, which generally charge between midnight and 6am to take advantage of lower power costs.  Once solar contributes a larger percentage of our power, and we have surpluses during the day, that behavior will change.

3) Real time power pricing will allow consumers to save money on their electricity bills by using power when it's cheap.  This will give people incentives to use all that extra solar and wind power when it is available, and incentives to not use that power when it's dark and still.

4) Long term technologies like vehicle to grid (V2G) and thermal storage will better allow demand to match supply. 

[CraigD]

Graham Palmer has calculated that the EROEI of renewables + storage, that is, the EROEI of the whole system together, ends up being very low indeed. Where oil used to repay the energy to drill a well with 100 times the energy, building storage drains wind and solar energy profits down enormously.

http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/02/09/book-review-energy-in-australia/

While EROEI (Energy obtained / Energy used to obtain it) was at one time ~100, according to sources like this

The EROI of oil and natural gas has shrunk from higher than 100 (for domestic US oil at the wellhead) in the 1930’s (Cleveland et al., 1984; Cleveland, 1992; Cleveland, 2005), to around 30 for global oil in the 1990’s (Gagnon et al., 2009), and 3 down to approximately 20 by now (Gagnon et al., 2009; Murphy and Hall, 2011). Even lower values, closer to 10, have been estimated for specific fields that are getting closer to exhaustion (Cleveland, 2005; Hall et al., 2008; Guilford et al., 2011; King and Hall, 2011).

- “The Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) of Photovoltaics: Methodology and Comparisons with Fossil Fuel Life Cycles” Marco Raugei, Pere Fullana-i-Palmer and Vasilis Fthenakis

it’s now much lower. The post by John Morgan reviewing Graham Palmer’s book states that the minimum viable EROEI is about 7, which Raugei et. al’s estimates show oil fast approaching.

 

EROEI is just one simple measure, so I’m cautious about over-relying on it. As long as a power generator has an EROEI greater than 1, it’s potentially viable, given cost and other factors.

 

A few answers to that:

...

Welcome to hypography, billvon! :) You seem a person familiar with the subject of electric power. :thumbs_up Please feel free to start a topic in the introductions forum to tell us something about yourself.

 

Your answers all seem sensible to me, but I’m curious what you and other readers think of the large-scale solar power generation and energy storage plans such as Ken Zweibel’s “Solar Grand Plan” described in this 2007 Scientific American article). Excerpting it’s “key concepts” sidebar:

• A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
• A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
• Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
• A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
• But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive

[billvon]

Your answers all seem sensible to me, but I’m curious what you and other readers think of the large-scale solar power generation and energy storage plans such as Ken Zweibel’s “Solar Grand Plan” described in this 2007 Scientific American article). Excerpting it’s “key concepts” sidebar:

• A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
• A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
• Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
• A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
• But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive

 

I read that and thought they did a good job of outlining a possible path forward.  However the costs and speed of the buildout of that amount of solar is, I think, unlikely.  What I think we WILL see in the short and mid term:

 

-An acceleration of solar installations brought about primarily by rising power prices and dropping solar prices.  Prices for PV are already well below $1/watt, with installed prices for large systems approaching $3/watt.  Large facilities are beginning to sell contracts for power that are less than the cheapest coal power available.  Within five years I'd expect to see about 15-20% of our electrical power come from solar.

 

-Improvements to power transmission systems including some DC backbones.  This will help deal with renewable energy reliability problems, since the odds of all the renewable energy over four states ending at once is low.

 

-Buildout of BESS (battery energy storage systems) made possible by reductions in battery cost and better integration.  You can now buy containerized BESS's that come in 4 megawatt-hour/4 megawatt "blocks" - and stack as many as you need.  Small systems allow time to spin up conventional peakers; larger systems allow load shifting to times when renewable energy is available.

 

-Grid support from EV and hybrid batteries, both from a primary standpoint (i.e. programmable charge times and vehicle-to-grid systems) and from a secondary standpoint (i.e. retired EV and hybrid packs see a second life as load-shifting storage.)

[Eclipse Now]

But at what cost?

 

 

German solar is 3 times more expensive than nuclear: and it doesn't run on a cold German winter night.

"An analysis by the Breakthrough Institute finds that the entire German solar sector produces less than half the power that Fukushima Daiichi – a single nuclear complex – generated before it was hit by the tsunami. To build a Fukushima-sized solar industry in Germany would, it estimates, cost $155bn. To build a Fukushima-sized nuclear plant would cost $53.5bn. And the power would be there on winter evenings."
http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2011/03/doing_the_math_comparing_germa.shtml

 

Storage in northern nations like Germany could bankrupt any nation that tried it. You can *either* buy Tesla Powerpack batteries to back up *one week* of winter in Germany (at a hypothetical 30% penetration of wind and solar, and these wind and solar farms must still be bought), OR you can just buy safe modern nuclear-waste eating nukes that will do the whole job for 60 years. Again, *backup* a third of a renewable grid for just one week, or nuke the whole grid for 60 years! That’s the economics of renewable storage V nuclear.
Point 2 below
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/issues/renewables/the-grid-will-not-be-disrupted

[billvon]

But at what cost?  German solar is 3 times more expensive than nuclear . . .

Here solar is considerably cheaper than nuclear (or any other form of solar.)  Last month, NV Energy signed a purchase agreement with First Solar Inc. for 3.87 cents per kWh from a 100 MW solar power plant. That's a lot cheaper than combined cycle natural gas (6 cents) or nuclear (9 cents.)

 

As you mention, there are availability problems; solar and wind are both periodic.  These are being solved by BESS buildout, fast-startup natural gas generators and adaptive loads, and hopefully in the future by real time pricing.  Thus in the future we might well see much cheaper energy prices during the day, with higher prices at night - and the consequent market adaptations to deal with that change in pricing.

[Eclipse Now]

But that's only cheap for the daytime period. Try making that baseload! I'm not against renewables, just against trying to make it 100% baseload in countries that don't have large hydro resources. Half nuclear and half renewable should do the trick. Thorcon have a plan for assembly line produced Molten Salt Reactors that will come in at about 3c / kwh, which is about half the price of coal!

Edited August 29, 2015 by Eclipse Now

[billvon]

But that's only cheap for the daytime period. Try making that baseload!

I agree - for the forseeable future we will need additional baseline generation, although that need will decline with time as loads become more flexible and intelligent.

 

 

 

Half nuclear (ThorCon comes in at about 3c / kwh)

That would be a great price.  What nuclear facility is selling power at 3 cents/kwhr?

Edited August 25, 2015 by billvon

[Eclipse Now]

Hi,

Good question billvon, and I'm sorry I phrased it that way. I made it sound like they were out on the marketplace already! ( went back and edited the post to make it clearer.)

 

This is Thorcons estimation of how cheap they could put power out, based on the fact that they have plans for a factory that will put these Molten Salt Burner reactors up on the assembly line. They'll require a fraction of the steel and concrete and fuel of a standard coal plant.

These plans are ready to go. They're just burners, as the future thorium breeders still need a bit of work. But those breeders are coming, and one day will eat all the nuclear waste these burners make.

Edited August 29, 2015 by Eclipse Now