![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.
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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/
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NoAstronomer says:
December 11, 2012 at 6:02 am
Batteries!?! The University of Delaware is seriously proposing that we can run the northeast United States on batteries!?!
Using one extremely large Energiser bunny ……
Maybe California would sign up to be the guinea pig.
“Willett Kempton, professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy in UD’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. ”
As a previous commenter noted, there lies the problem. The clown, uh, I mean author, isn’t an engineer. Willie boy….how about you go back to playing with fish, m-kay, and leave the solving of engineering problems to the engineers.
What about the wildlife? Someone call the WWF.
Fairy-Tales have always been very popular reading. The older ones had some sort of moral basis too.
Today 11 Dec is cold in the UK and it’s going to be pretty cold tonight. The current supply of electricity includes coal 46.3% of total and wind power 0.6% of total.
Which underlines the versionof the Christmas Carol found in the pages of an engineering journal –
See amid the winter’s snow
Temperature is 5 below
With no power it’s such a pain
Wretched windmill’s stopped again…..
Am I the only one who thinks this statement is literal non-sense? If they’re generating more than needed, what the hell are they doing with the excess if they’re not storing it?
About the pie-chart: Interesting that the only two segments of renewable energies that get above 1% are Hydropower at 3.34%, and Biomass at 11.44%. While hydropower is, strictly speaking, a renewable, it has been a conventional energy source for well over hundred years and has large enviornmental consequences. Ditto for Biomass sources – extremely dirty & destructive.
@PaddikJ
“Am I the only one who thinks this statement is literal non-sense? If they’re generating more than needed, what the hell are they doing with the excess if they’re not storing it?”
Excelent point, the energy has to go somewhere. Hmm, there is a word that comes to mind “BOOM”.
Sonja A Boehmer-Christiansen says:
December 11, 2012 at 9:55 am
Dear Anthony, Don’t laugh too loudly too early, but have a look at the history of innovation and how much was considered impossible or funny at the time.
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Solar and wind have both been around for over one hundred years. They are not NEW by any means. Heck my boyfriend in 1970 was selling commercially made solar panels. So the innovation and engineering has mostly been done unless we get a real break though. Solar is about the same age as the car and lets face it a 1970’s car is not that much different than one now except my 1976 V8 olds got a heck of a lot better gas mileage compared to my 1997 V6 Ford!
The one fact the Greenies can not get around is energy density. Petrochemicals and nuclear are energy dense, wind and solar are not and therefore there is a major limit to how much energy can be extracted from an X by X foot print on the earth’s surface. The other problem of course is both are highly intermittent.
We, as a civilization, are much better off pursuing Thorium Nuclear since the proof of design prototype was already run. ORNL successfully built and operated a prototype of an aircraft reactor power plant by creating the world’s first molten salt fueled and cooled reactor called the ARE (Aircraft Reactor Experiment) in 1954. http://ucs.berkeley.edu/energy/tag/flibe-energy/
It is an incredible waste of time, energy, money and resources to pursue Wind and Solar as anything but niche use energy. I have looked hard and long at various alternate energy sources for my own use and the only one I have found to be reasonable is Geothermal for heating and cooling since I have a nice big pasture to lay the pipes in.
As far as petrochemicals go, as a chemist I would rather save them for the starting stock of all the wonderful things modern chemistry and engineering makes from them.
I stopped reading at the twelfth use of the word “model”. I usually stop sooner than that, but I’m getting into the Christmas spirit.
Craig Moore says:
December 11, 2012 at 10:04 am
Gail Combs, I believe the Zinc Air Redox approach was developed with DoD money with the basic research work at Lawrence Livermore.
_______________________________________
Molten Metal was also financed with DoD money.
DoD money has finance the following:
(The 19 asterisked companies have already filed for bankruptcy. The others are near bankruptcy.) 80% of start-ups go belly-up so I would not hold my breath until it is commercially proven. There are a lot of great ideas out there that never ever made it off the shelf.
1.Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
2.SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
3.Solyndra ($535 million)*
4.Beacon Power ($43 million)*
5.Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
6.SunPower ($1.2 billion)
7.First Solar ($1.46 billion)
8.Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
9.EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
10.Amonix ($5.9 million)
11.Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
12.Abound Solar ($400 million)*
13.A123 Systems ($279 million)*
14.Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
15.Johnson Controls ($299 million)
16.Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
17.ECOtality ($126.2 million)
18.Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
19.Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
20.Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
21.Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
22.Range Fuels ($80 million)*
23.Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
24.Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
25.Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
26.GreenVolts ($500,000)
27.Vestas ($50 million)
28.LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
29.Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
30.Navistar ($39 million)
31.Satcon ($3 million)*
32.Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
33.Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)
Craig Moore says:
December 11, 2012 at 10:12 am
Gail Combs, we’ll see. I believe the Zinc Air REdox approach was developed with DoD money at Lawrence Livermore.
________________________________
It still seems to be in development
So as you said we shall see if it makes it out of the pilot plant.
@Sonja A Boehmer-Christiansen 09:55
RE: solar thermal power plant Puerto Errado 2
It does involve storage; a half hour’s worth.
To evaluate the sanity of Puerto Errado 2, it is necessary for me to convert some of the statistics into common units (per Hayden 2009 APS PPT)
Size of plant: 300000 m^2 = 74.1 acres
Annual Gen: 50 million KwH/yr
2190 solar hrs/year
Gen per Solar hr: 22.8 MW each solar Hr
Power density per Solar hr: 310 KW(solar)/acre 6 hrs/day; zero KW 18 hr/day
raw solar density: 1 KW(Peak)/m2 = 4 MW(peak)/acre
Plant Efficiency (solar hour): 7.6%
Tarriff (first 25 yrs) 0.269 Eur/kwh = about US$ 0.32-0.40/kwh
Plant Turbine Capacity Net: 30 MW
Carbon Offset: 16,000 tons annually
Tarrif per Carbon Offset ton: 840.6 Euro/C-ton
Cost: 160 million Euro
Base Cost per kw: 7008 Euro/kw (solar peak)
Compare to:
Pampa Wind project (4GW) 10 KW(Nameplate)/acre, with 99+% farmland still used.
Keck Solar 2 tower: 71 KW peak/acre
And other base costs per kw from:
Table 8.2EIA Electricity Market Module such as
$3,300/kw for Adv Nuclear,
$620/kw for Adv Combustion Turbine
Fred2 says:
December 11, 2012 at 11:44 am
Another one of those studies which, while probably well intentioned, obviously didn’t have an actual power systems engineer involved….
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Excellent comment Fred. Engineers are nothing if not practical.
“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.”
Aye, there’s the rub: the “documented external costs”, determined, of course, by computer models based on input levels determined by other computer models.
I have been involved in many proposals that purport to create net savings though the adoption of new, increased cost-items that reduce downstream costs or “otherwise would be” incurred costs. Only when A directly removes B do these proposals work. The claim to increase efficiency of material use or reduce time of production, evidence of which can only be found by running the cycles, i.e spending more upfront, fail without fail.
Non-deterministic, i.e. stochastic, proposals to improve life are terrible in that their benefit is so problematic that it is probabilistic. Dumb, dumb, dumb, and ultimately unfalsifiable. Which is why academics and marketing types promote them: make money and never be “wrong”.
(“Okay, it is more expensive. But it is better/cooler, right?)
Guys,
Don’t sweat this stuff. Just give it a little more time. California is already seeing some major issues coming to the fore that no one bothered to consider in putting renewable mandates into place. Check out today’s article in the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-unreliable-power-20121210,0,6250142.story
I’m sure the zealotry behind green and renewable energy supporters will result in at least some attempt to ignore reality and it being California, they will have some success. But eventually rate payers will revolt and even politicians are not immune to the flight of businesses due to high cost and the associated erosion of their tax base.
California will be the beacon on the hill. Showing the rest of the nation what happens when you believe you can ignore physical laws and basic financial number crunching in order to legislate your way to an energy policy.
This report is complete garbage.
The proposed 200 GW (peak) of wind and solar, installed in the PJM territory, will only generate an average of 53 GW if realistic capacity factors are assumed. This is less than the required 72 GW.
As someone else pointed out earlier, the cost of energy storage will dwarf the cost of the wind and solar installations.
It will be fun to see the solar police arresting neighbors for not cutting down their centuries-old trees that violate zoning rules known as ‘shade infringements’ on a homeowner who desires to install panels.
The renewables still need 100% fossil backup to satisfy power reliability regulations. You cannot finance a fossil plant that will likely operate less than 100 hours per year, unless you charge a huge premium (10X or 100X) for the power delivered.
Running billions of combinations to see what works is not something to brag about in a report such as this. It exposes a stunning lack of specialist knowledge that would normally be necessary for such a report. It reminds me of the undergraduate student who frantically tries hundreds of different resistor values in their proto-board, trying to stumble on one combination that works well enough to get an acceptable grade. They have no idea what is going on.
Chris Y wrote;
“It reminds me of the undergraduate student who frantically tries hundreds of different resistor values in their proto-board, trying to stumble on one combination that works well enough to get an acceptable grade. They have no idea what is going on.”
Well, I knew an engineer once that decided that figuring out individual resistor values was just too hard. So he filled his proto-board with “variable resistors” (“pots” in sparky language). This thing had 200 pots on it at least, in a 3 by 5 inch card. He tried to “align” it for a few months and then it went in the trash. Turns out the setting of each pot interacted with all the other pots, you could never know what the heck the gain or offset was through any part of the circuit. Kind of like a climate model…
Cheers, Kevin.
It is unfortunate that Press Releases like this are taken up as “proof of concept” by those with ‘green minds’ and lead to me unrealistic claims.
We have a similar group in Australia, also University based, which was called Zero Carbon or some such, which claimed renewables were all we needed. It attracted a certain amount of criticism, largely informed. Now it is more like Nearly Zero Carbon with their latest model claiming that in addition all we had to do was convert all our grain growing areas to bio-fuel production.
As a Chemist Gail Combs will be interested that they propose transporting the dry stalks etc. to processing plants where the biomass will be anaerobically pyrolysed to liquid. Said liquid(s) will then be piped to gas turbine power stations to cover what the Model suggests would be a few months of deficient renewables. Certain problems suggest themselves to a chemist’s mind. Yields, calorific value, toxicity, corrosiveness etc.
There are other problems, like counting hydro power twice, having pumped storage running at the same time as hydro generation and “optimistic” guesses as to the likely output by solar towers and wind turbines. The cost is also underestimated at 12-15% of real costs.
It would be amusing and only slightly irritating if only the gullible didn’t believe it.
I have to ask, just how much dirty electricity went into powering the computer(s) running the model considering the 28 billion combinations?
Jimbo says:
December 11, 2012 at 2:07 am
I will take their word for that they are in no way influenced by BIG WIND. Imagine if a paper came out in support of shale gas and its lead author had similar links to the gas industry. There would be howls of “shills” / “under the pay of big gas”.
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Already happened. Look at the fracking report out of Texas that was withdrawn and caused the resignation of a school administrator. The double standard is alive and well.
chris y says:
December 11, 2012 at 6:53 pm
This report is complete garbage.
The renewables still need 100% fossil backup to satisfy power reliability regulations. You cannot finance a fossil plant that will likely operate less than 100 hours per year, unless you charge a huge premium (10X or 100X) for the power delivered.
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That is the point that is really bothering me. How can the cost possibly be comparable when at any moment a significant fraction of the demand might have to be sourced from conventional backup? That means you get to pay for the conventional backup as well as the renewable plant. OK, you get to save some on fuel costs because let’s assume that you only build fast response turbine backup. Still, as you point out, the conventional plant will be very inefficiently operated and depreciated which adds significantly to the overall cost. It just doesn’t make any sense, but I’m not going to waste any more time on it if they expect me to pay $40 to actually fix their work for them.
Build that much wind and storage capacity by 2030?
Got news for you lady — You will be lucky to have finished the court fights to get the permits to start construction of your first units by that time. And then the same people who object to your windmills will fight against the additional transmission lines you need to connect them in hopes that you will give up and build the windmills to supply their power somewhere else.
What this really needs to work is a dictatorial government agency that can run roughshod over the public ignoring all the laws… Quick, someone page the EPA.
Mean while in OZ we have had this for some time http://www.ies.unsw.edu.au/docs/Solar2011-100percent.pdf You all forget the technology to be invented like the perpetual motion machine!
Have these bozos the foggiest idea how much STORAGE would be needed..?
Either batteries or hydrogen – I bet the area is several hundred square MILES….
Oh, boy – what a terrorist target….