![UD_logo[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/ud_logo1.gif){kind=logo}
From the University of Delaware a press release that made me laugh out loud when I read it for the sheer disconnect with reality. The bold in first sentence about the 99.9% is mine. See why I think their press release is ridiculous following the PR (besides the fact that is is just another model made from unicorns and rainbows).
Wind, solar power paired with storage could be cost-effective way to power grid
Article by Teresa Messmore Dec. 10, 2012–Renewable energy could fully power a large electric grid 99.9 percent of the time by 2030 at costs comparable to today’s electricity expenses, according to new research by the University of Delaware and Delaware Technical Community College.
A well-designed combination of wind power, solar power and storage in batteries and fuel cells would nearly always exceed electricity demands while keeping costs low, the scientists found.
“These results break the conventional wisdom that renewable energy is too unreliable and expensive,” said co-author Willett Kempton, professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy in UD’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. “The key is to get the right combination of electricity sources and storage — which we did by an exhaustive search — and to calculate costs correctly.”
The authors developed a computer model to consider 28 billion combinations of renewable energy sources and storage mechanisms, each tested over four years of historical hourly weather data and electricity demands. The model incorporated data from within a large regional grid called PJM Interconnection, which includes 13 states from New Jersey to Illinois and represents one-fifth of the United States’ total electric grid.
Unlike other studies, the model focused on minimizing costs instead of the traditional approach of matching generation to electricity use. The researchers found that generating more electricity than needed during average hours — in order to meet needs on high-demand but low-wind power hours — would be cheaper than storing excess power for later high demand.
Storage is relatively costly because the storage medium, batteries or hydrogen tanks, must be larger for each additional hour stored.
One of several new findings is that a very large electric system can be run almost entirely on renewable energy.
“For example, using hydrogen for storage, we can run an electric system that today would meeting a need of 72 GW, 99.9 percent of the time, using 17 GW of solar, 68 GW of offshore wind, and 115 GW of inland wind,” said co-author Cory Budischak, instructor in the Energy Management Department at Delaware Technical Community College and former UD student.
A GW (“gigawatt”) is a measure of electricity generation capability. One GW is the capacity of 200 large wind turbines or of 250,000 rooftop solar systems. Renewable electricity generators must have higher GW capacity than traditional generators, since wind and solar do not generate at maximum all the time.
The study sheds light on what an electric system might look like with heavy reliance on renewable energy sources. Wind speeds and sun exposure vary with weather and seasons, requiring ways to improve reliability. In this study, reliability was achieved by: expanding the geographic area of renewable generation, using diverse sources, employing storage systems, and for the last few percent of the time, burning fossil fuels as a backup.
During the hours when there was not enough renewable electricity to meet power needs, the model drew from storage and, on the rare hours with neither renewable electricity or stored power, then fossil fuel. When there was more renewable energy generated than needed, the model would first fill storage, use the remaining to replace natural gas for heating homes and businesses and only after those, let the excess go to waste.
The study used estimates of technology costs in 2030 without government subsidies, comparing them to costs of fossil fuel generation in wide use today. The cost of fossil fuels includes both the fuel cost itself and the documented external costs such as human health effects caused by power plant air pollution. The projected capital costs for wind and solar in 2030 are about half of today’s wind and solar costs, whereas maintenance costs are projected to be approximately the same.
“Aiming for 90 percent or more renewable energy in 2030, in order to achieve climate change targets of 80 to 90 percent reduction of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the power sector, leads to economic savings,” the authors observe.
The research was published online last month in the Journal of Power Sources.
=============================================================
So they say all this can happen by 2030. Riiiiight.
Exhibit 1:
CHART OF THE DAY: The Epic Implosion Of The Green Energy Bubble
Exhibit 2: Renewables have a long way to go:
![640px-Total_World_Energy_Consumption_by_Source_2010[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/640px-total_world_energy_consumption_by_source_20101.png?quality=75)
Source: Total world energy consumption by source 2010, from REN21 Renewables 2012 Global Status Report.
Exhibit 3: Other credible sources figure only an 8% growth over current levels by 2030.
![World-Electricity-Generatio[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/world-electricity-generatio1.jpg?quality=83)
Source: Sustainable Energy Review, Oct, 2012.
Exhibit 4:
![wind-turbine[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/wind-turbine1.jpg?quality=83)
During the study period, wind generation was:
* below 20% of capacity more than half the time;
* below 10% of capacity over one third of the time;
* below 2.5% capacity for the equivalent of one day in twelve;
* below 1.25% capacity for the equivalent of just under one day a month.
Source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/06/whoa-windfarms-in-uk-operate-well-below-advertised-efficiency/
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Why don’t we focus on what does work?
Ground sink heat pumps.
LED lighting when its ready not with subsidies.
Solar when its ready not with subsidies.
Double and triple pane windows.
Diesel car and trucks.
More insulation.
Good maintenance of cars ie oil changes, proper tire inflation, timely changing of air filters.
These things are by far cheaper and easier than covering the planet in inefficient windmills and solar cells that are to inefficient.
Hummm, if we substituted the renewable’s completely how would things work?
How much land would turn black with solar panels and how many wind turbines would it take to fill the energy hole with no fossil fuel ?
Could that path cause Climate Change?
Did anyone else see how much of the pie chart in Exhibit 2 is contributed from biomass and hydro?
What exactly is biomass heat anyhow?
Just sayin,
It makes up a majority of the re-doable energy, but not the MSM’s re-doable energy coverage.
Why ……
@mbw
Here’s a simple way to figure it out. Take your electric bill and figure out how much electricity you use. Quote renewable sources to supply your house, remembering you’ll need a 4:1 renewable to grid ratio in order to store up enough electricity to last when the renewable source isn’t operating. Then just see how many electric bills you could pay for the price of the system. Chances are the system wouldn’t even last that long.
Creating an expensive energy resource and connecting it to an energy grid, will raise the cost of production for consumers, raising the cost of energy restricts local economic growth, restricting economic growth will also reduce the rate of affordable technological advancements.
Well the ultimate proof of the concept of operating without subsidies, is to build such a composite system , containing all the elements their study shows is required; and of course using funding from investors, presumably from that Delaware community college staff, and U-Del, and then use the unsubsidized renewable energy from that plant to build a bigger one.
So you have to lift yourself using your own bootstraps.
We know it can be done, since we already did it. Well Lucy and the rest of our ancestors did it.
Wasn’t any gummint subsidies or any gummints, at the start of the chemical energy age, so the system had to grow from its own profitability. Yes it used renewable energy technology; starting with fig trees, until eventually we got out of the trees, for the more available renewable energy on the ground.
Fire eventually got us into the high tech energy business.
So Delaware; have at it. Joe Biden can run it for you.
Well, Delaware IS a very small state,you know. My personal favorite :”Storage is relatively costly because the storage medium, batteries or hydrogen tanks, must be larger for each additional hour stored.” As a rule, things change. A solar panel loses 20% of its capacity by around the 18 year mark and continuously degrades. The installation costs of rooftop arrays is more than the arrays cost these days and those labor costs are not going to go down and I’m not sure how much lower solar panel costs can go. And of course, shingles need to be replaced, which means disassembling the array, shingling the roof, and then re-installing the array. And there are many roofs that are shaded by trees or don’t point in a southerly direction and therefore wouldn’t be a good spot for an array. Windmills have a bad reputation for excessive down time and cannot run when wind speeds rise above, I think, about 40 MPH. I don’t know of any reason to expect their production costs to go down in the future. They should go up. And I’m certain installation costs won’t go down and that is a very large portion of the total cost. And I’m not sure the public would buy into ruining large tracts of land for windmills. Offshore windmills don’t apply to inland areas or even most seashore areas. While 4 years of data may provide a basis for allocation and location of renewable generators, those weather conditions and/or demand requirements can change. While they specify a large system covering a large area in order to handle local losses of renewables, due to weather conditions, unfavorable weather conditions can extend over a very large area and for a considerable period of time. Regardless of how often this occurs, when it does, large amounts of controllable generation capacity will be needed,and therefore those plants will have to be maintained and kept around and that means a lot of costs, even if they are infrequently used. This article simply doesn’t give enough specifics as to cost and strategy to enable one to evaluate its merits. And exactly how is renewable energy (electricity) going to “replace the natural gas used for heating homes and businesses” ? You mean those places will now need two heating systems? Why didn’t they mention nuclear power, which provides 20% of our power, is not going anywhere. My suggestion : quit trying to appease the greenies, get some guts and common sense and propose an elegant, rather than a Rube Goldberg solution. Go all nuclear, including small modular reactors, which can provide peak generating capacity as well as baseload. And nuclear plants can easily last 60 years, especially the newer models, Gen 3+ and Gen 4 and can actually replace existing fossil fuel plants.
@John West
If you even read the abstract you’d know the point is that one can distribute power sources over a large grid and average out the down times together with storage. I have no idea if they are right or if the work is even credible because I haven’t read the article (it’s paywalled) and neither has anyone else here as far as I can tell. Did you check their 28 billion combinations?
David L Hagen wonders how to off-load surplus power so that peak power is always present.
We had this problem on a small scale when we built a remote town for about 100 people. We imported diesel by truck for 300 km, used a 240 volt a.c. generator. As midnight switch-off curfew approached and the load started to fall, we more or less short circuited the excess through large iron bars sitting in 44 gallon drums of water.The climate was hot tropical, so there was not use for hot water which cooled down naturally by the next day. It was easy and effective load management, but not recommended for populations of 100 thousand – as opposed to 100.
However, I have yet to see a large scale design that would have more benefits. Compressing air, as noted above, has possibilities but oh! the cost and the waste!
Paywalled!? This fright fest trash is paywalled?
Scanning over the abstract and bait, er graphs I am mystified. Checking out Fig. 5, just because I’ve always despised pie charts as worse than useless, (What can I say, as an ex Budget Manager I know pie charts are for smoke, not understanding). Just in quick looking, I can not reconcile the vertical bars with their corresponding pies above.
In the first 2008.30% sample, the two vertical bars are “inland wind” and “fossil fuels” with the fossil fuel bar the higher of the two. Yet the pie above reverses which provides the lion’s share giving greater credit to “inland wind”. This is before I get any info about where “inland wind” provide anywhere near that percentage of power. As far as I can see, none of the supposed percentage optimum power percentage bars or pies match.
To me this appears as another visionary series of charts done without real world information or costs. We can save the world, based on our estimates… That is, if you fools will pony up all expenses and future costs before we start officially tracking. Plus maintenance and health costs are not used for green power. Gaia would not allow it.
Bogus math, false assumptions, fake scenarios, fantasy grids and technology. Yup, GIGO!
Inland wind? I think not; flatulent air maybe…
I read a great article on Spice modeling of RF circuits.
The spice program made an assumption that a resistor and capacitor were not necessary.
Once included by an override, it then worked.
One of the commentors remarked about a quote from his boss.
“All models are wrong. Some are useful.”
Since the engineering and physical sciences need to back up models by hard data from prototypes, why don’t the climate sciences need to validate their models?
“gnomish says:
December 10, 2012 at 7:37 pm”
I guess if one was in the business of supplying the technology,turbines and PV panels, that would be a nice little earner.
[+emphasis]
One has to wonder about the unintended consequences to weather patterns of using 183GW
of wind power. Wind power potential is large but not infinite and probably not without undesired results – and that is not just about bird kills, which one suspects would be astronomical.
Also, it is not clear to me from the text whether this model is intended to supply the entire United States or just 1/5 of the nation.
[+emphasis]
Ah well, it is just another RTW model anyway.
Thing is, even if the Greens got their wet dream and the lands were all covered with solar panels and windmills, and we accepted less energy and brown outs and blackouts, those same Greenies would look around in a few years and see the destruction. And decide, for the Good of Humanity and to Save the Planet, to ban solar panels and windmills.
This is salami tactics. They wanted us off the power grid since before they even thought of CAGW as an excuse. They want us slapped all the way back to the stone age, and even then it wouldn’t be enough. We wouldn’t be allowed fire. We wouldn’t be allowed anything. We wouldn’t be allowed meat – they already want us all to be vegetarians. We might have to resort to eating Greenies… er… I mean greens… greens, right, I’m sure that’s what I mean – dang! I can’t find the backspace button. Wot a shame.
with theft or fraud, the proper verb is not ‘to earn’.
speaking as a retired power system dispatcher they did not even mention power system dynamics with all that variable power flow.I am glad being retired.
Mention is made of hydrogen tanks and using hydrogen for storage. Neither of these mean what they imply.
Tanks for storage can be made of many things but hydrogen isn’t one of them. Hydrogen is very difficult to handle and store, so a relevant question for these authors would be to explain just how they would handle this task. What are the tanks made of, how big, and where? — . . . come to mind as formidable issues. Just saying “hydrogen tanks” and running the computer for hours (28 billion combinations) is what one might call basing the future on a wing and a prayer, or hope. Hope is not a plan. For background reading:
http://www.mavery.com/academic/Hydrogen_Corrosion_Report.pdf
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/storage/hydrogen_storage.html
Most of these ‘studies’ are off by at least 3 decimal places. This one appears to be about a 5 or 6 decimal place error.
About 10 or 15 years ago, a student came to my office to explain his idea to PV our institution and disconnect from the evil grid. Our institution is about 6 million sq-ft on 450 acres with a peak demand that varies between 12 to 18 MW. I explained that just for daytime power 8 to 10 hours w/ no storage, PV panels would need to cover every square foot of DOUBLE our property acreage and that the cost would be more than the value of our entire institution. Payback > 70 to 100 years. Well past the equipment life. He did not like my math.
Not in Delaware. You can have weeks in summer where it is in the 90’s and there isn’t a breath of breeze except maybe when a thundershower moves through.
And Invisible Pink Unicorns(TM) could solve every one of the world’s problems (patent pending).
Weather history for Dover, DE in July of 2012. I know this article isn’t specific about Delaware, but it is a good example. For most of the month the wind velocity was 5mph or less.
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/histGraphAll?day=1&year=2012&month=7&ID=KDOV&type=1&width=614
old engineer says:
December 10, 2012 at 7:14 pm
“There is actually a utility size storage system that has been used around the world for over 100 years. That system is pumped storage . . . ”
Utility size may be a bit of a stretch for one-fifth of the US.
I made the comment that follows on WUWT on 8/18/2012:
A look at pumped storage:
An example can be seen using Wikipedia and Google Earth. Of interest is the “pumped storage” associated with Kinzua (kin-zoo) Dam in northern Pennsylvania. Read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinzua_Dam
Use these coordinates [ 41.839736 n, 79.002619 w ] to get a better look. Zoom out until you can see the entire reservoir and compare it to the small circular storage basin on the ridge-top to the south. Can you scale this up to be really helpful? In whose back yard?
Be sure to read the section titled “Displacements” in the wiki link. Did then, and still do, have family from this area. Visited while the reservoir area was being cleaned out, and filling, and while the circular storage area was being hollowed out.
Using data from that evil oil company BP.
US installed wind capacity in 2011 was 47084 megawatts or 47.1 gigawatts or .0471 terrawatts. So it seems their imaginary system is larger than our 2011 installed capacity.
.0471*24*365=412.596 terrawatts-hours would be generated at full capacity 24/7/365.
2011 wind consumption was 121 terrawatts-hours.
121/412=29% capacity factor.(solar is even worse)
2011 total electric generation was 4308 terrawatt-hours
4308/.29=14855 terrawatts of wind turbines would be required.
Using 2.5 gigawatt wind turbines would require 400 turbine per terrawatt.
14855*400=5,942,000 turbines would do the job if none fail. I wonder how many batteries they would require for storage. How many little coffins for the birds?
Figuring 3,794,101 sq mi for the US that would be only about 1.56 turbines per sq mi over the entire country.
[sarc]
Why haven’t we done this already?
Just put it on the national credit card and provide everyone with ear plugs.[/sarc]
Hmmmmm… The big problem I have with this sort of modelling is that is not what I term a ‘complete system model’; i.e it only models a small part of what you would want to understand about a system and leaves as ‘undefined’ really import things like:
– cost of installation
– cost of maintenance
– cost of depreciation. (yes, things do wear out and become worthless).
– MTTF (mean time to failure) effects and general failures (i.e. rate of line failures, system failures, wind turbine explosions, etc)
Then and only then can you do a true opportunity cost analysis – without such info it is impossible to fairly evaluate what they propose when compared to what exists now or what else could be done in the future.
On that basis and just that basis alone, I call this a load of BS chasing a grant. Where was an economist consulted in all of this?
Models as I define them are a mechanism for making more informed decisions and to be useful need to give you as a complete information decision space as possible. Blinkered models result in blinkered thinking, with the usual end result.
Oops.
I see I calculated gigawatt sized turbines in my previous comment. They use 2.5 megawatt turbines. So we would need 1000 times as many or 1560 per sq mi. Just makes it more ridiculous.
Big mea culpa.
Boy did I blow those calculations in my previous posts. Guess I shouldn’t do such things late at night.
I forgot to divide the consumption of 4308 terrawatts by (365*24). Meaning about 0.5 terrawatts per hour would need to be produced to cover consumption.
0.5/.29=1.7 terrawatts required after adjusting for capacity factor.
Using 2.5 megawatt turbines that would require about 680,000 turbines.
About one turbine per 5.5 sq miles covering the whole country. Not nearly as bad, but bad enough. Especially when you include power lines, batteries, and bird coffins.
It’s even later now. Hope I got it right this time.