Guest post by David Middleton
Real Clear Energy is always good for a daily laugh…
The problem with today’s power grid isn’t the lack of electricity but rather the lack of it at certain times. The United States has progressively moved towards adding renewable energy to the grid but solar and wind power are rather intermittent. Worst of all, some of this power is completely wasted because our grid is unable to store it properly. Tesla, along with other companies, has begun to solve this pressing issue.
Three new storage plants are in the works and they’re unlike anything before. The plants will be completely reliant on lithium ion storage. Lithium powered batteries have seen rapid reductions in price in the past several year’s thanks to the high demand for electric cars. Tesla is also developing a gigafactory in Nevada to mass produce these batteries, some of which will be used in the storage plant. AES Corp. and Altagas Ltd. are the other two companies creating battery plants in California. The Altagas plant was activated January 27th. AES has another battery plant in Arizona scheduled to go online within the next several months as well as a project internationally in India.
These plants will reduce the number of blackouts due to power shortage at peak hours and prevent loss of power generated but not used. When it comes to renewables there’s virtually no carbon dioxide emission or risk of spills harming the environment. Electricity generated from renewables will be stored appropriately and reinforce the notion that our power grid really can go green.
[…]
It’s unlikely crude benchmarks will react towards this news but future plans may prove otherwise. Oil majors are beginning to worry when demand will peak, knowing that cloud may be just over the horizon. Investors shouldn’t concern themselves with an approaching downward trend yet and should continue to ride out the OPEC supply cuts.
“When it comes to renewables there’s virtually no carbon dioxide emission or risk of spills harming the environment. Electricity generated from renewables will be stored appropriately and reinforce the notion that our power grid really can go green.”
“AltaGas” sounds like an odd name for a *renewables* company…
[…]
AltaGas also continues to work on repowering the existing Pomona Facility. In the first quarter of 2016 AltaGas submitted an application with the California Energy Commission to repower the Pomona Facility to a flexible, fast ramping peaking facility under the small power plant exemption process. It is anticipated that the application review process will be approximately 12 months and include a review of the emissions profile by the local air district. The existing Pomona Facility is a 44.5 MW gas-fired peaking plant strategically located in the Los Angeles load pocket. The repowered facility could be comprised of more efficient gas-fired technology with capacity up to 100 MW. Following approval, AltaGas will be ready to bid the repowered Pomona facility into upcoming RFOs or enter into other bilateral contract arrangements.
AltaGas owns six natural gas-fired power generating facilities in California that safely produce power. AltaGas has a long-standing history of building trust and treating stakeholders with respect in the communities where it develops and operates projects.
AltaGas is an energy infrastructure company with a focus on natural gas, power and regulated utilities. AltaGas creates value by acquiring, growing and optimizing its energy infrastructure, including a focus on clean energy sources. For more information visit: www.altagas.ca
Okay… So… Let me get this straight… Southern California Edison signed a 10-yr deal to purchase 80 MWh/d of stored electricity… Electricity stored from a peaking natural gas-fired plat??? Why not just build a combined cycle natural gas plant?
At least Professor McDonald got one thing right…
“It’s unlikely crude benchmarks will react towards this news…”
The AES storage system will actually store solar PV generated electricity… A whopping 2 MW worth.
Lets see if I have this right. The folk in LA are excited because they’ll be producing a whole 44.5 Mw from a simple cycle gas plant to serve a 20 Mw lithium storage plant that can produce a piddling 80 Mw-hr for four hours a day. To prevent blackouts? For whole 10 years of service life? How about when one of those lithium batteries blows burning down the whole storage facility with it (I’ve seen it happen)?
Hmm… well if your really really worried about energy storage… an easier solution would be to build your plant to the Tennessee Valley region. Here you will enjoy 99.999 percent system reliability and you’ll have access to TVA’s Raccoon Mountain’s 1,652 Mw of proven water storage – which provides 36,344 Mw-hr of output at daily operating capacity for 22 hours per day. The storage unit was built in ’78 and TVA just install new turbine… so it should be good for another 30 years or so.
And as bonus well throw in the Allen 1,000 Mw combined cycle gas plant my team recommended to the TVA board (just before I retired). The TVA board of directors approved the $975 million project. The combined cycle plant will be using GE’s high-efficiency H-Class gas turbines making it likely to be one of the most efficiently gas plants in the world.
Boy… Do these west coast liberal think small or what?
Typos here… properly speaking the LA plant produces 80 Mh-hr per day over a 4 hour period. Likewise the Raccoon Mountain facility produces 33,344 Mw-hr per day over a 22 your period.
Sorry folks… dyslexia.
I love how these guys don’t think that chopping birds up or robbing plants of sun doesn’t cause environmental damage
Greenscaping means windmills everywhere, piles of dead birds, and solar panels covering vast tracts of land. Beautiful to behold. Naturally.
Stay tuned for a “re-announcement” of this every year for the next 10 or so before it goes away.
I stopped reading at “PhD, Finance”…
“When it comes to renewables there’s virtually no carbon dioxide emission or risk of spills harming the environment. Electricity generated from renewables will be stored appropriately and reinforce the notion that our power grid really can go green.”
This is obviously an inaccurate statement as liquid renewables are also an important part of the package for the greenies. Some of those liquid fuels are used for electricity generation and some are used for transportation fuels which emit massive CO-2 during production and use. The US Navy was required to purchase renewable biofuels at $26 per gallon for shipboard use. I worked on a project for months that was based on taking e-grass and through the pyrolysis process they were converting it to liquid fuels to run gas turbines to generate electricity. And these uninformed folks fail to realize that this generates lots of CO2 and cannot be spilled?? Did they forget that numerous RR cars full of ethanol fell into the river dumping ethanol into the waterway fouling the environment. Do they not know that ethanol cannot be transported with existing pipelines and the alternative means of movement is much less safe.
Finally what do they have in mind for the “appropriate” storage of electricity. Intermittent, unreliable electricity is a flawed concept that requires other impractical and expensive storage and a greater grid system to compensate for its fatal flaw. Are they unaware of the failures of wind and solar in other countries with blackouts?
Two words: Rate Base
The heart of utility rate making is the Rate Base.
They are allowed a return on equity on Net Plant and makes up much of their stock price and value.
What goes into it?
Generation, transmission, distribution and now…drum roll please storage.
Hmmm. A massive Lithium-Ion battery mega-array in a closed building? What could go wrong? ….
“Why lithium-ion batteries go up in flames”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/09/02/samsung-battery-lithium-ion-fire-burning-explosion/89782856/
The money quote…
“Lithium-ion batteries were also implicated in at least two fires in Tesla electric cars after they ran over road debris that damaged the battery pack under the vehicle. The car company added three underbody shields to the Model S to further protect the electric cars’ batteries from impacts.”
So how much CO2 or god forbid carbon, will be spewed out to build all this to store wind and/or solar? Batteries are not easy to build. Plus they don’t last as long as other components used in hydro, nuclear, or fossil fuel generation. The math just doesn’t add up but I could be wrong.
Assume you could solve the grid-scale battery problem. Assume you could equal or beat the current leader in storage recovery efficiency — pumped hydro at ~80% . Assume your battery had vastly higher energy density, cycle lifetime and safety properties than anything we have now. Assume all this could be done at a price per MWH equal or less than current peaking generators.
So we’re all set for the wind/solar renewable revolution, right? Nope.
Your best use of that wonderful grid storage technology is co-locate it with the most efficient baseload generation facility you have and run that sucker flat out between maintenance periods. Your saving is the elimination of less efficient peaking sources. Use slack demand times to charge the battery up and draw it back down to cover peak demand. Meanwhile keep your baseload system running at its most efficient setting. This is feasible if the storage cost is less than cost of an intermittent-use peaking facility of the same capacity.
In fact, the better your grid storage battery is, the less sense it makes to couple it with intermittent renewable sources.
What’s wrong with this picture? Yes you are burning fossil fuels which are finite. But what’s the point of leaving resources in the ground that future generations are never going to use?
People get hung up on the “renewable” label without considering the timescale. Known uranium supplies are “sustainable” between now and the probable next major glacial epoch. If we go to breeder technology and add known thorium supplies then we’re totally sustainable through the next several major asteroid strikes. How much more sustainability do you need?
Wind turbines optimistically have a service lifetime of 25 years. Replacing them requires steel, either new or recycled. So if we go to 100% renewable power and it’s not enough to keep the steel mills working, technical civilization ends in 50 years or less. Steel is the single most useful material human civilization has come up with in 5,000+ years of trying, and it’s only been available in quantity for the past 150 year or so — think about that.
If you don’t like fossil fuels, your current choices are nuclear or a one way trip to the 18th century. Magic could come along, but it’s not the smart bet.
Very well said, Sir.
“next major glacial epoch”
By then we will be mining the asteroids.
It’s all well and good Tesla and others building giga factories but the current supply of lithium is fully utilized (approx 180kt/yr). The Tesla giga factory requires 180kt/yr (ie a doubling of world lithium production) to meet its needs, which is not going to happen. Current new mine supply is unlikely to exceed 25kt/yr at best. Whilst there are lithium deposits in the pipeline it takes up to a decade to bring on new mines.
Kevin
Battery recycling plants are so convient and easy to recycle batteries. Off the top of my head I can’t name one . Where do most of those batteries from smoke detectors go ? There has to be millions of them. And they last so long too ! Is it any wonder they start chirping at 2 am ? And where do you recycle the smoke detectors with a radioactive substance in them ?
And the current choices of nuclear or a one way trip to the 18th century? Every time I see something from the nuclear accident in Japan, I become more disheartened. If one accident can be this big and so widespread, it’s the end of nuclear.
The earthquake and tsunami killed over 15,000 souls, with 2500 additional reported as missing. The nuclear plant failures killed noone, and caused a small fraction of the estimated $300 billion in damage from the tsunami.
The design problems which made the plants susceptible to failure have been solved. It is the irrational fear of nuclear power which will prevent the plants from being rebuilt, not the actual threat they pose.
John, you are minimizing an extremely nearly out of control event. It’s six years later and the situation is no where under control. Checked the milk you feed your children lately ? Oh, and by the way, has every American nuclear power plant with the same design flaw been fixed ?
Let me tell you what my big fear is, a New Madrid earthquake with multiple nuclear power plants failing and infrastructure so badly damaged that events really get out of hand.
On the one hand climate change alludes to potential lose of life from a warming climate, to which there is no basis. Then on the other, you make light of 633 siverts/hour. Who knows where the core is, and further I don’t have the slightest idea how to contain it.
You have no idea how dangerous this is on so many different levels. It will be the end for nuclear power.
A simpleton idea that nobody died from the accident. It doesn’t have the power to kill a few thousand, it has the power to permanently end life as we know it.
” it has the power to permanently end life as we know it.”
Alarmist nonsense, it has nothing of the sort.
Stop making stuff up.
Three generations.
The design flaw was the failure to protect the diesel-powered backup generators from an almost unimaginable tsunami. While still many years away from full decommissioning, the situation at Fukushima is far better now than it was 5 years ago. A recent report that radiation levels had risen was 99.9% fake news.
rishrac: Not even close to being true.
“A simpleton idea that nobody died from the accident.”
An idea which happens to be true. Please provide evidence to refute this.
I’m waiting…
I always laugh that everyone calls the Tesla plant a gigafactory. What the heck defines a gigafactory? Is it bigger than the Boeing plant in Seattle?
I think it’s just the Musk of Elon seeping into the minds of greens and distorting their perception.
Marketing is ‘selling the sizzle, not the steak’.
Dear Editor.
There is a mistake in your headline.
If its Lithium it should read “Energy storage set to go ‘Boom!’ In 2017″…
Dave: The People’s Republic of California is requiring electricity distributions (and their customers) to purchase electricity storage capacity and electricity from such storage.
“California’s energy storage mandate (AB 2514) added a twist to existing demand for energy storage. Adopted in 2010, the bill required California’s three largest power generating utilities to contract for an additional 1.3 GW of energy storage power generation (meeting certain criteria) by 2020, coming online by 2024.”
In other words, the only reason they are doing this is because they are required to do it. Not because it makes economic sense as our various trolls have been proclaiming.
The authors of the law believe that by creating an artificial market for energy storage they will create an situation where the technology and economy of scale will eventually deliver economic energy storage. California did this with subsidies for roof-top solar in the early 2000’s and developed an industry that is now viable without state subsidy. However, I don’t expect this to occur with most schemes for energy storage.
In Europe, almost every dam in the Alps now has the ability to pump water upward when electricity from excess German wind power is almost free. The Swiss make a profit selling it back to the Germans when the wind isn’t blowing in winter. California probably has too little water to do this. There is some possibility that electricity could be economically stored as compressed air in salt caverns, but this hasn’t been demonstrated on large scale.
“to contract for an additional 1.3 GW of energy storage ”
1.3GW is not an amount of storage.
Hint: The storage is already in the ground dudes 🙂
We tried renewables and whale oil didn’t work out 🙁
“Energy Storage Set To Boom In 2017″
My dear. Seen on reality TV ‘Oroville’.
Go on, nothing new to see here.
you aren’t looking in the right place perhaps…
All I know is the history of mankind’s ability to store energy is rather pitiful, apart from in the form of calories and pumping water uphill and I’m still starting the car with the same lead acid battery Henry was plonking in the Model T. I remain the eternal optimist and ready to serve, but it would appear it has been tempered with a large dose of realism, unlike Gaia’s chosen ones, although I figure such is Gaia’s great ways.
Batteries are rated in MWHours. That is an energy rating. MW is just a delivery rate. It says nothing about the amount of charge/energy stored.