Reposted from the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN
At this current crazy moment, most of the “Western” world (Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia) is hell bent on achieving a “net zero” energy system. As I understand this concept, it means that, within two or three decades, all electricity production will be converted from the current mostly-fossil-fuel generation mix to almost entirely wind, solar and storage. On top of that, all or nearly all energy consumption that is not currently electricity (e.g., transportation, industry, heat, agriculture) must be converted to electricity, so that the energy for these things can also be supplied solely by the wind, sun, and batteries. Since electricity is currently only about a quarter of final energy consumption, that means that we are soon to have an all-electric energy generation and consumption system producing around four times the output of our current electricity system, all from wind and solar, backed up as necessary only by batteries or other storage.
A reasonable question is, has anybody thought to construct a small-to-moderate scale pilot project to demonstrate that this is feasible? Before embarking on “net zero” for a billion people, how about trying it out in a place with, say, 10,000, or 50,000, or 100,000 people. See if it can actually work, and how much it will cost. Then, if it works at reasonable cost, start expanding it.
As far as I can determine, that has never been done anywhere. However, there is something somewhat close. An island called El Hierro, which is one of the Canary Islands and is part of Spain, embarked more than a decade ago on constructing an electricity system consisting only of wind turbines and a pumped-storage water reservoir. El Hierro has a population of about 11,000. It is a very mountainous volcanic island, so it provided a fortuitous location for construction of a large pumped-storage hydro project, with an upper reservoir in an old volcanic crater right up a near-cliff from a lower reservoir just above sea level. The difference in elevation of the two reservoirs is about 660 meters, or more than 2000 feet. Here is a picture of the upper reservoir, looking down to the ocean, to give you an idea of just how favorable a location for pumped-storage hydro this is:
The El Hierro wind/storage system began operations in 2015. How has it done? I would say that it is at best a huge disappointment, really bordering on disaster. It has never come close to realizing the dream of 100% wind/storage electricity for El Hierro, instead averaging 50% or less when averaged over a full year (although it has had some substantial periods over 50%). Moreover, since only about one-quarter of El HIerro’s final energy consumption is electricity, the project has replaced barely 10% of El Hierro’s fossil fuel consumption.
Here is the website of the company that runs the wind/hydro system, Gorona del Viento. Get ready for some excited happy talk:
A wind farm produces energy which is directed into the Island’s electricity grid to satisfy the population’s demand for electricity. The surplus energy that is not consumed directly by the Island’s inhabitants is used to pump water between two reservoirs set at different altitudes. During times of wind shortage, the water stored in the Upper Reservoir is discharged into the Lower Reservoir, where the Wind-Pumped Hydro Power Station is, to generate electricity from its turbines. . . . The diesel-engine-powered Power Station only comes into operation in exceptional circumstances when there is neither sufficient wind or water to produce the energy to meet demand.
Over at the page for production statistics, it’s still more excitement about tons of carbon emissions avoided (15,484 in 2020!) and hours of 100% renewable generation (1293 in 2020!). I think that they’re hoping you don’t know that there are 8784 hours in a 366 day year like 2020.
But how about some real information on how much of the island’s electricity, and of its final energy consumption, this system is able to generate? Follow links on that page for production statistics, and you will find that the system produced some 56% of the electricity for El Hierro in 2018, 54% in 2019, and 42% for 2020. No figures are yet provided for 2021. At least for the last three years of reported data, things seem to be going quite rapidly in the wrong direction. I suspect that that’s not what you had in mind when you read that the diesel generators only come into operation in “exceptional circumstances” when wind generation is low. And with electricity constituting only about 25% of El Hierro’s final energy consumption, the reported generation statistics would mean that the percent of final energy consumption from the wind/storage facility ran about 14% in 2018, 13.5% in 2019, and barely 10% in 2020.
So why don’t they just build the system a little bigger? After all, if this system can provide around 50% +/- of El Hierro’s electricity, can’t you just double it in size to get to 100%? The answer is, absolutely not. The 50% can be achieved only with those diesel generators always present to provide full backup when needed. Without that, you need massively more storage to get you through what could be weeks of wind drought, let alone through wind seasonality that means that you likely need 30 days’ or more full storage. Get out your spreadsheet to figure out how much.
Roger Andrews did the calculation for El Hierro in a January 2018 post on the Energy Matters website. His conclusion: El Hierro would need a pumped-storage reservoir some 40 times the size of the one it had built in order to get rid of the diesel backup. Andrews provides plenty of information as to the basis of his calculations and his assumptions, so feel free to take another crack at his calculations with better assumptions. But unfortunately, his main assumption is that the pattern of wind intermittency for any given year will be just as sporadic as it was for 2017.
Then take a look at the picture and see if you can figure out where or how El Hierro is going to build that 40 times bigger reservoir. Time to look into a few billions of dollars worth of lithium ion batteries — for 11,000 people.
And of course, for those of us here in the rest of the world, we don’t have massive volcanic craters sitting 2000 feet right up a cliff from the sea. For us, it’s batteries or nothing. Or maybe just stick with the fossil fuels for now.
So the closest thing we have to a “demonstration project” of the fully wind/storage electricity has come up woefully short, and really has only proved that the whole concept will necessarily fail on the necessity of far more storage than is remotely practical or affordable.
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Actually, there are already lots of energy storage plants in operation, and lots more coming on line. Mercom Capital, an investor in renewable energy systems, forecasts a total of $5.1 GWH of new storage capacity coming online in the US in 2022, an increase over 2021 of 84%.
Florida Power & Light, the largest electric utility in the State of Florida, is bringing online lots of new solar storage facilities, with the largest to date, located in Manatee County, with a capacity of 900 MWH. Florida, with its abundant sunshine, is better suited than other places for solar development, but that is also true throughout the entire “sun belt” of the United States which includes roughly half the nation’s population today.
https://www.fpl.com/energy-my-way/battery-storage/manatee-battery.html
Tesla is selling modular Power Pack systems to utilities and commercial customers.
Whether storage is some sort of magic bullet for making renewables more feasible at a utility scale or not is debatable. But it’s being implemented already. In a few years we’ll see how well these storage systems perform.
Or not. I did some calculations that show that batteries have doubled in cost over the past year due to rising raw materials prices. Much of that rise is recent. That is going to kill the economics for wider deployment.
Why do people assume energy storage will use batteries? Large scale it will more likely be pumped hydro or compressed air.
100.000 rote Luftballons
Auf der Party ganz allein dachte ich sag alles klar
Alles sind hier super drauf nur du, du bist nicht da
Uberleg die ganze Zeit die ich das ubersteh
Doch auf einmal hab ich sie die rettende Idee!
100.000 rote Luftballons!
5 GWh? Be still my beating heart.
Call me when they get up to a couple hundred TWh.
The point being we are beyond “pilot projects” already with actually commercially operating storage plants. The author asserted that there are no known storage plants operating in the real world.
By the way, if storage plant capacity increases by 84% in a year, it would take less than 20 years to reach terrawatt capacity. It takes that long to plan, design, permit and build a conventional power plant today.
“The author asserted that there are no known storage plants operating in the real world.” No he did not. The quote is: “we are soon to have an all-electric energy generation and consumption system producing around four times the output of our current electricity system, all from wind and solar, backed up as necessary only by batteries or other storage.”
And he proposed that someone actually build such a FF free test system. He also said that there were no such systems in existance.
Please give an example of a FF free end-to-end system that is currently operating and prove him wrong.
2 hours of power is not what I would consider a “commercially operating storage plant”. It’s useless, almost like Griff.
Almost double every year for 20 years?
As long as you are going to wish for things that can’t possibly happen, why not wish for magic batteries instead?
BTW, 5GWh is not storage in the sense that we are talking about. It’s job is to keep the grid running for a few minutes while the fossil fuel plants ramp up.
To have real storage you are going to need 10’s of TWh, at a bare minimum.
Storage as currently available is not a solution for days of power… but it is excellent at frequency response, at peaker power, at ‘smoothing the curve’, at replacing spinning reseve
Frequency response, peaker power and smoothing the curve are not storage.
That doesn’t mean anything when you baseload disappears because Russia turns off the gas 🙂
I live in central Florida, and haven’t seen much of that “abundant sunshine” for several days.
We have had windless thick fog for a week, the temps yesterday were a nice warm -4C (all day).
The car turned to a block of ice, and all water froze.
Without my propane and 230V (nuclear powered) hookup I would be in hospital with severe exposure or dead.
I was discussing a solar panel with a big backup truck battery (for when the sun was out!)
It would have given me 2kw for less than 1hr.
Wow, they can power 329,000 homes for 2 hours. Postponing the blackout for two hours doesn’t seem to be worth the cost. The sun still won’t come up until morning.
yes of course, utopia is only always a few years away.
Great post. Nice to see a request for real data, not models and limited calculations.
I had a discussion last Sun about something similar. I said I’ve seen prices for the cost of electricity from solar thermal vary from $.075 to $.35 . How can anyone make a sound decision with conflicting data like that?
So why doesn’t the US Dept of Energy set up some standard tests to determine these costs? Across perhaps 10-15 geographic zones.
Current Dept of Energy budget is $35B. It’s been over $20B each year for the past 20 years alone. Do the math, that’s roughly half a trillion dollars.
Seems like we should be getting some concrete answers to such questions for that kind of money.
One thing different about this place is it isn’t connected widely with HVDC transmission lines.
The UK is (increasingly so) – to 6 widely separated geographical areas.
There are also alternatives to that diesel generation.
Hi Griff,
Alternatives to diesel are you talking wood, biogas, biodiesel or what?
This is one tiny island. In an area as large as the USA, the wind will almost always be blowing somewhere. So they are not comparable.
I spotted the wind not blowing pretty much anywhere on land globally just a couple of days ago. Global stilling.
Blowing somewhere is meaningless.
1) Unless you are willing to put enough windmills to power the US everywhere in the US, the power from those windmills are going to be needed where the windmills are, they don’t have any to send to you.
2) Long distance transmission isn’t free. The further you go, the more energy you lose.
This past summer, almost the entire EU was becalmed for several weeks.
That other place where the wind is blowing had better have enough surplus to supply their own needs in addition to yours. What do you think that does to the efficiency of the whole system? How about you having extra RE energy to recharge any batteries in addition to your needs.
All I see is oversupply of RE devices which makes efficiency terrible –> higher and higher costs to the consumer.
Widely separated geographical areas? From the BritNed (1GW, fed by MPP3 coal fired power station next door) at Maasvlakte, Rotterdam to NEMO link (1GW) at Zeebrugge is about 100 miles: another 80 gets you to Coquelles and the start of Eleclink (1GW) through the Channel Tunnel, and another couple of miles gets you to les Mandarins, the start of IFA1 (2GW) – both fed by Les Gravelines nuclear power stations. Another 200 miles along the Channel coast gets you to Caen near IFA2 (1GW, also nuclear fed).
France just told the UK to stick it’s interconnector up it’s butt because they have twigged to the energy security issue. Going forward if anyone wants to squeeze the UK just cut the power and listen to the screaming.
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/uk-france-interconnector/
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/planning-permission-refused-for-1-2bn-uk-france-interconnector-20-01-2022/?tkn=1
quote
“The French have already said they will turn off the power, they will use future energy supply as a bargaining chip,” she told The Times. “That doesn’t help our energy security.”
So how long before the rest of Europe tells the UK to generate it’s own power 🙂
So lets have the Grifter prediction of how the UK goes forward in power?
A number of ongoing small pilot projects is a cost effective way to prevent huge wasteful spending on major projects. The mistakes discovered in a small project means one can address these and make signifcant changes. Mistakes in a huge project totally deplete the resources and funding with no financial return.
Excellent suggestion. The scale we are tinkering with (sabotaging) the worlds energy, social, and economic systems seems to demand some prototyping and testing before jumping in fully. To be effective the sales pitch might have to be angled more to demonstration site to find the best ways, as opposed to the more confrontational prove it could work first.
I know there will be a lot of cheering, jeering, and backslapping about this here, but really, failure is nothing to be wished for. As it is, we are probably wasting tons of money pursuing failed green dreams. I’m not sure what good comes out of this, except that if it ultimately convinces people to not bet big on weak ideas, then maybe there will be some benefit in the long run. More likely, it’s like trying to convince true believers that communism will never work. Some people never get it.
I’ve been saying this for years. Do a proof of concept before attempting to do away with fossil fuels for generating electricity. Seems obvious until one realizes the intent of promoting AGW is to destroy Capitalism not fossil fuels use.
Right. I’m not sure why we’ve put the cart before the horse on the issue to the extent that we have. It’s not like these things are immune to normal cost benefit analysis. Of course, when your do nothing option is, supposedly, the end of the world, I guess you’ll try anything.
I think they tried it in the Canary Islands. I swear they tried to get pumped storage to work. Per post above they are still using diesel generators.
10-15% are numbers we see a lot. I think dividing 12 by what they were hoping for will become a rule of thumb on what to expect.
What I don’t understand about battery and solar are two things.
1) why not have the DC to AC conversion at each panel. Driving DC any even small distance to the centralized converter involves fat copper (expensive) wires, and large losses. We have advanced electronics these days, cell could host a small converter.
2) why not have a smaller batter on each solar panel. When charging, charge directly (with regulation) to the battery. No conversion from solar DC to AC, then to battery DC, then to chemical, the from chemical to DC, then to AC again. Each of these conversions involve losses. Here, the converter can source power from two sources, the solar cell, or the battery.
Its all about cost and efficiency. If it was better to do as you suggest, some engineer would have already figured that out.
This idea has been floating around since the 1990s. The biggest issue is that the lifetime of an electronic inverter is much less than that of a typical PV module. When the inverter dies, the module is rendered useless.
The weight issue aside, this is pretty much the same problem. A lead-acid battery is only useful for a few years.
Transmission losses are determined by current and resistance. In industrial sites voltages can range into the thousands of volts, which means that current can be reduced tremendously.
That friends is why Tesla won over Edison. AC can easily be transformed between various voltages and the grid only needs the minimum amount of wire to do it. No back to back inverters to accomplish the conversion.
Right off the bat, a large part of solar panels costs are the inverters required. Batteries are another cost and possible weak point. I know that most batteries, on almost any scale, include controllers that will automatically sense a failing cell and cut it out of the circuit.
There have been several small scale ‘net zero’ pilots like El Hierro. They have all failed. That is why there won’t be any more; further proof of ‘net zero’ idiocy is not something the warmunists would welcome.
We can just use my house. I have 7.5 Kw of solar panels that are designed to make 105% of my monthly demand. All I need are some batteries. Who’s up for writing that check? It’s quite sunny where I live, so it won’t take more than 10.
Washington first .
I believe Germany is worried that they may become the next demonstration project if Putin withholds gas. Seems only fair.
Assuming they had space for the storage, could there be anywhere near enough wind power to fill the reservoir while providing daily electricity needs?
I seem to recall a small town in Texas bought that plan. I also recall it was a total failure and the townspeople were stuck with a huge bill.
This article at Forbes claims the energy storage problem for renewables can be solved using ‘energy vaults’. These energy vaults use massive deadweight blocks raised to a height when excess energy is available, and then are dropped when the energy is to be recovered.
We Can Store Our Excess Renewable Energy In An Energy Vault
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2022/01/27/we-can-store-our-excess-renewable-energy-in-an-energy-vault/?sh=437f0a603334
The Energy Vault corporations web site is here:
https://www.energyvault.com/
“At Energy Vault, we envision a planet where science and deep respect for our natural resources herald creative technological advancements in sustainable, clean, renewable energy. Our Board of Directors and Executive Management Team consist of experienced industry professionals with deep technical backgrounds in mechanical energy storage as well as energy storage market and customer requirements.”
A similar idea was proposed more than fifty years ago in the mid 1960’s as a means of matching supply with demand. Huge skyscraper energy towers would be constructed in or near major cities to store energy produced in the off hours in order to handle the peak demand curve.
But we haven’t seen any of these built since they were first proposed. So the question is … why?
My guess would be that the huge initial expense, plus the amount of energy lost during conversion would make them economically unsound.
Actually the losses are not too bad – slightly less than for batteries in fact. But the energy storage is somewhat limited.
http://euanmearns.com/short-term-energy-storage-with-gravitricity-iron-versus-ion/
Well actually we have. Gravitricity have built a demo version up in Leith, Scotland. It can produce 250kW for a few seconds. They are now looking at the possibility of using a mineshaft in Czechia for a 4-8MW, 2MWh system. It competes with batteries in the grid stabilisation market, and is incapable of serious quantities of energy storage that would be required to sustain a renewables grid through a few weeks of Dunkelflaute.
https://gravitricity.com/projects/
The massive deadweight blocks could have a great demand among certain people as an alternative to concrete boots.
It was rumoured that the concrete pillars on the bridges around London’s M25 orbital motorway could tell a few tales.
Assuming no losses, how heavy and how tall to store 1 MWh of energy? The math is pretty simple so I know you can do it.
Very simply, as has been said so many times storage cannot compenste for intermittency because it lacks the capacity. There are so many crackpot ideas that it’s obvious the people who think them up have no concept of the magnitude of the task they are trying to do.
King Island is a remote community between Victoria and Tasmania. The King Island Renewable Energy Integration Project (KIREIP) provides a glimpse of what’s achievable in renewable energy. And when I just clicked on the live feed, diesel was providing 85% of demand. 🙂 On average 65% is “renewable” energy. Apparently the record is 33 hours without diesel.
Quite large amounts get shed into the resistor when it’s windy and gusty. It must make a notable contribution to King Island warming.
In the 1970s we operated the King Island Scheelite mines, one of which was an open pit that could have been like the lower reservoir for a pumped water storage system. However, green pressure groups convinced the government to order us to fill in the pit when the ore was mined out, which we did.
All this was before the green plan to make King Island operate without fossil fuels, so this was the second example of King Island being stuffed around by green ignorance.
Not that it is such a nice location. The large population of rather venomous, aggressive Tiger Snakes somewhat dampens the enjoyment of bushwalking.
But, do not try to learn from what I write because I am a realist more than a dreamer. Geoff S
Instead of dumping excess energy, why aren’t they able to drop the current through the stator so that less energy is being generated?
Because it would destabilise the whole system. Try watching it at a time when it’s gusty to see what they have to cope with. Any reactive components would set up wild oscillations, so they went for pure resistance.
How about a whole country and/or a major trading block, so we can all watch a full-scale test with major fallout?
note the bottom of the pond is covered with plastic — made from petroleum…
But was it designed with being a pilot for net zero in mind? Or simply to provide cheap power?
I also have doubts about the storage. Whenever I’ve been to the Canaries (the “Windward Isles”) it has been quite breezy. I’m surprised there are long periods with no wind.
Having said that, the islands also have an enviable climate. Daytime temperature rarely below 20 degrees C in January and rarely above 30 degrees C in summer. So if net zero can’t work here it certainly can’t in Britain.
Besides that the replaceable’s (wind and solar) will have to be entirely replaced every 10 to 15 years at greater cost to the environment than any other form of energy. This of course assume that green globalist elite are going to allow you personal transport, effective heating/cooling, hot food (cooked cockroaches) or any other :luxuries!” The only good news is whiners will not be able to charge their phones and there will be no free wifi…. they might have to contribute to society.
While a pilot project would be a reasonable, it being proof of concept step, this is only done to identify and resolve issues not discoverable beforehand. Doing it to convince the unconvincible is a fools errand.
If one wants to do something productive, attack wind power for the collosal failure as an energy solution. From the narrow and intermittent limits of energy production, its dependence on an unachievable storage system, through its hugely inefficient use of resources compared to other power production options, to the environmental and ecological havoc it wreaks, wind power should be banned.
Since its unlikely to achieve a ban on its merits alone before the damage done — first and foremost, with the slaughter of our avian friends — becomes irrepairable, it would behoove us to demand an operational limit to ba lade tip speed of 40 mph, down from the current optimal operating speed of 180 to 200 mph for the smaller ones.
In addition more comparative stats should be made use of. For instance, some back of the envelope calcs indicate the materials dedicated to one to two wind turbines are a close equivalent to what is needed for a standard ng power plant. As for the braggadocio associated with windfarms having ratings similar to nuclear (or ng) plants note that footprint comparisons are acres to square miles of dedicated land.
I don’t believe you can get more energy from the drain down than was expended pumping the water uphill.
The same reason we don’t get government report when the outcome is certain to be unfavourable.
The closest installation of wind turbines, solar panels and battery storage that I am aware of is King Island close to Tasmania, Australia.
But back up diesel generators are also installed because as astute people realise wind and solar is unreliable energy supply, intermittent and average or capacity factor under 30% in Australia, being the result of observers over one year compared to The Australian Energy Market Operator’s 30% to 35% capacity factor for wind turbines and much less for solar.
And from an article I read some time ago about King Island electricity supply it would have been more cost effective to have supplied from mainland Tasmania where an excess supply is produced with hydro power stations the main generators. There already is an interconnector to mainland Australia from Tasmania.