Many recent posts on this blog have dealt with the theme of the infeasibility of a fully wind/solar/storage electricity system. Today I will deal with another study of the subject, this one from German authors Oliver Ruhnau and Staffan Qvist, titled “Storage requirements in a 100% renewable electricity system: Extreme events and inter-annual variability.” The Ruhnau/Qvist study does not have a date other than “2021,” although it appears to have come out toward the end of that year.
Although Ruhnau and Qvist do not say it explicitly, my conclusion from their paper is that it is a further demonstration of the complete infeasibility — indeed the complete absurdity — of attempting in the short term to replace all fossil fuel electricity generation in a modern economy with only wind, solar and storage.
The background of this issue is that large numbers of green activists, up to and including the current President of the United States, make regular statements indicating that they believe that fossil fuels can be eliminated from the modern economy by simply building sufficient capacity of wind and solar electricity generation. Such statements rarely consider or mention the necessity of energy storage, or the feasibility or cost of same. And yet any serious consideration of the intermittency of wind and solar inevitably leads to the conclusion that without dispatchable backup (fossil fuel or nuclear) they require vast amounts of energy storage to cover the periods of intermittency. Understanding the amount of storage required, its physical characteristics, and its cost, is completely essential to answering the question of whether a fully wind/solar/storage system is feasible.
And yet our governments are currently marching ahead with religious zeal with plans for “net zero” electricity generation, based almost entirely on wind and sun, without any serious consideration of the amount of storage required or of the cost or feasibility of the project. Nor has there ever been a demonstration of a workable prototype system that could achieve net zero emissions with only wind, sun and storage, even for a small town or an island.
Previous posts at Manhattan Contrarian on this subject have reviewed detailed work by Roger Andrews and by Ken Gregory. In this post from November 2018, I reviewed work by Andrews dealing with actual wind and solar generation data from the two cases of California and Germany. Andrews concluded that due to seasonal patterns of wind and solar generation, either California or Germany would require approximately 30 full days of energy storage to back up a fully wind/solar generation system. Based on current costs of lithium-ion batteries, Andrews calculated that building sufficient wind and solar generation plus sufficient batteries would lead to a multiplication of the cost of electricity by approximately a factor of between 14 and 22. In this post from January 2022, I reviewed work by Gregory dealing with actual wind/solar generation for the case of the entire United States. Gregory considered how much storage would suffice as the sole back up where the U.S. had fully electrified all currently non-electrified sectors (e.g., transport, home heat, industry, agriculture), thus essentially tripling electricity demand from the current level. His conclusion was that the batteries alone would cost about $400 trillion — about 20 times the full GDP of the United States.
Clearly, if either Andrews or Gregory is anywhere near right, converting a modern economy to fully wind, solar and storage is not remotely feasible.
Into this mix now come Ruhnau and Qvist. The focus of R&Q is once again the amount of storage needed to back up a fully wind/solar generation system, once fossil fuels have been eliminated as a back up option. The R&Q study deals only with the case of Germany, and only with supplying its current level of electricity demand, rather than demand that may be tripled or more by economy-wide electrification of transport, heating, and so forth.
The bottom line is that the result of the R&Q study is approximately in line with the findings of Andrews and Gregory. Where Andrews and Gregory had calculated that about 30 days of storage would be required to back up a fully wind/solar system, R&Q come up with 24 days. However, to get to the 24 day result, R&Q require massive overbuilding of the wind/solar system, to the point where its nameplate “capacity” is about triple Germany’s peak electricity demand, and five times average demand. The result is a system where vast amounts of surplus electricity on sunny/windy days must be discarded or “curtailed.” However, R&Q say that their model is based on cost minimization, because building vast excess capacity and discarding electricity by the terawatt hour is actually cheaper than adding additional storage.
The starting point of the R&Q study is a critique of prior authors who have calculated relatively low storage requirements by only looking at a supposed worst case multi-day wind/solar “drought” of calm and cloudy days. Some such studies cited by R&Q have derived storage requirements in the range of 4 – 8 days as supposedly sufficient to back up a fully wind/solar system. (Even those levels of storage requirements would likely make the cost infeasible.). But R&Q use available hourly wind and solar generation data over the course of entire years for Germany to show that much longer periods of relative calm and dark can occur, causing the storage requirement needed to avoid blackouts to be much higher.
While our time series analysis supports previous findings that periods with persistently scarce supply last no longer than two weeks, we find that the maximum energy deficit occurs over a much longer period of nine weeks. This is because multiple scarce periods can closely follow each other. When considering storage losses and charging limitations, the period defining storage requirements extends over as much as 12 weeks. For this longer period, the cost-optimal storage capacity is about three times larger compared to the energy deficit of the scarcest two weeks.
At pages 5-6 of their paper, R&Q lay out the generation (installed capacity) and storage requirements for their view of an optimized system.
First there will be a vastly over-built system of wind and solar facilities:
On the supply side, almost 300 GW of variable renewable generators are installed: 92 GW solar PV, 94 GW onshore wind, and 98 GW offshore wind . . . . For solar PV and onshore wind power, this is nearly twice as much as the installed capacity in 2020; for offshore wind power, this means more than a tenfold increase.
For comparison, Germany’s current peak demand is in the range of 100 GW, and average demand is in the range of 60 GW.
Then there will be some 56 TWh of storage, equivalent as discussed to about 24 days of full electricity consumption for the entire country of Germany at near-peak usage levels. To get a handle on how much that is, consider that a Tesla battery is in the range of about 100 KWh, and sells for about $13,500, or $135/KWh. So, if you were trying to cover the 56 TWh of storage with Tesla-type batteries, it would run you around 56,000,000,000 x $135, or about $7.56 trillion — which is about double the GDP of Germany.
But R&Q think they have a better idea than batteries, namely hydrogen as a vehicle for the storage. In their model, almost all (54.8 TWh out of the 56 TWh) of the storage comes from hydrogen. In the first instance, this requires adding yet another massive new cost element to the system, namely an entire network of some 62 GW of hydrogen-fired CCGT power plants, almost sufficient on their own to supply Germany’s grid at average levels of demand.
Add together the cost of three-times overbuilding of wind turbines and solar panels, 56 TWh of storage, and a network of new hydrogen-fired power plants almost as extensive as Germany’s entire current generation system, and you have a collection of costs that can’t possibly be feasible in any rational world.
And yet somehow, when R&Q get to their conclusions with respect to feasibility, they wave their hands and say there is no problem. Although they concede that there exists no utility-scale hydrogen storage, distribution and combustion system anywhere in the world as a basis to calculate costs, they somehow come up with a figure of 30 euros per MWH of load for the cost of the storage — less than the cost of Tesla-style batteries by a factor of over one thousand. Is there any basis? The closest they come is this:
As underground hydrogen storage is currently limited to pilot systems in Germany, the currently 250 TWh of German natural gas storage, which is mostly underground storage in salt caverns, may serve as a reference.
Unfortunately I don’t think that underground storage of natural gas is at all a valid reference. Natural gas can effectively be stored in non-airtight things like salt caverns because it does not ignite when it goes above about a 15% concentration in the air. Sadly, not so for hydrogen. Hydrogen also rapidly corrodes and leaks from pipelines and containers, causing potentially extreme hazards. I don’t claim to know all the engineering challenges of making a safe hydrogen-based electricity system, but they are clearly huge. If dealing with hydrogen in massive quantities were safe and easy, plenty would be doing it already. There is a reason that no massive hydrogen storage facilities or hydrogen pipelines exist.
The simple answer to all of this is that we must demand from our politicians a demonstration of feasibility of any replacement energy system before we embark on these multi-trillion fantasy building projects. Show us a fully wind/solar/battery or wind/solar/hydrogen system that works at reasonable cost for 5000 or 10,000 people over the course of a few years, before requiring entire countries of tens or hundreds of millions of people to be the guinea pigs.
Fossil fuels run the whole of our civilization on earth, and those idiots actually are stupid enough to believe that can just stop it in the United State and the rest of the world will follow suit.
Ain’t gonna happen folks.
Everyone who buys into and is pushing this idiocy, are SCAM ARTIST and decidedly do not have our best interest at heart, let alone, battery back up is still in its infancy and we cannot yet count on nature to divvy up sun and wind on command.
AOC’s Green New Deal sounds all nice a cozy, but the facts are that it cannot be approached at this time, as everything is tied to OIL, and we mean EVERYTHING !!!
You do not have to ask phd’s and universities about the feasibility of solar and wind power; ask an engineer at your utility provider. The amount of energy it will take to replace one nuclear power plant is astronomical. While the supposed transition is taking place; energy requirements are not decreasing but increasing, up to 50% in some areas. There are several other very good points in the article but:
Are American consumers going to:
This is like arguing with children. If you really want to see our future just find a middle class Chinese citizen in Beijing. Ask them if they can purchase heat, if they can use a clothes dryer, what tempoerature their apartment size refrigerator is, the number of goverment credits to purchase a bicycle, etc.
They green people think if they promote enough fear, you will give up. If these fascists continue to push “green fascism”; this is what you will get.
Everything we need to do 100% renewable energy (meaning wind and solar) is technologically feasible with current technology, and this includes storage. It’s all about economic feasibility.
As we used to say in the engineering world, “you can build anything once, but can you scale it and do it economically in volume? “
No, it’s about whether these systems will cause a reduction in CO2 emissions, which is their sole goal. Hint: It won’t.
Doesn’t matter if the technology is available today – if nobody can afford it, then the technology is useless.
And that’s the entire Greenie dream for 100% renewables – it’ll all just get magically built. Don’t need to consider how much it’ll cost, just start building anyway.
With that lone statement, you’ve proven you have no concept of wind and solar. There is not one wind farm located outside of migratory bird routes. Wind farms demand consistent wind to operate. A transmission line runs along side of a wind farm with a fossil fuel plant upline of the wind farm. An intertie substation owned and operated by the connecting utility, controls what is allowed to be fed to the system. Early morning the sun rises. Earth science simplicity. Sun up, surface heats, wind created, is the wind the correct speed to cause the motors on the turbine to turn on and start the turning of the propeller? Blades pitched to catch the wind and turn the turbine into the wind? A weather station on the turbine runs the on computer program to determine when to rotate the propeller and when to switch from consuming power and start producing. Plain simple, the public has been conned into believing that’a wind tower is a giant pinwheel from KMart. It takes power consumption to move the propeller and reach the switch to produce. At the base of each wind tower is a loop feed distribution transformer. That transformer must be capable of operating in forward or reverse without human interaction. I know of few wind farms fed from hydro plants. There are 91,000 dams in the US. Less than 2300 are hydros. Bonneville Power feeds several thousand towers along the Oregon Gorge. Without fossil fuel plant production and hydro production…a wind farm is nothing more than ridiculous looking paperweight.
Wish I had kept the photos of 5he Leaning Tree wind farms on black angus ranches on the the gorge. My presentation included a series of photos that caused Engineers to laugh about my attitude of wind towers. On the plateau’s on each side of the gorge, a line of black angus formed in 400 foot shade of the wind tower and followed only shade on the desert on the Oregon and Washington sides. “The only reliable purpose for each tower existing is shade trees for cows.”
Anyone who has been involved in a large scale industrial project knows that years of engineering and study are done before implementation. Clearly, no one in the government has ever been involved in such projects. Completely changing our energy systems would be the largest industrial project ever taken on by orders of magnitude. And all we have is “scoping” studies like this. That would be considered just a very early step before serious engineering started. Politicians don’t get how the real world works because someone else makes it work for them. In their world, it is all just magically happens. The whole reason the engineering and study is done is so that the project will be a success. An old saying comes to mind : ” Fail to plan …. plan to fail”.
Similar conclusion for Texas:
What is will change so the key is not to get stuck there. Even with the recent global thrust in all-temperature superconductivity R&D and the R&D of scalable SCMES, the tech remains too expensive in part due to it’s relatively low energy density for massive grid application. Yet there is much to love about SC tech (high efficiency, instantaneous charging and discharging, long functional lifespan), especially if it can achieve all-temperature status and be commercialized at similar expense of home installed climate control systems. The timeframe of these developments is indeterminable. Yet, regardless of the timeframes, the fact remains that there is no better electrical storage system available for a decentralized unitized model of electrical generation (all HC-fuels, and renewable inputs), storage and generation for the homeowner, small business owner, the local neighborhood cooperative.. SCMES can and do currently support grid functions but will never be viable for the colossal job of grid storage and distribution regardless of the inputs.. The energy density will never be there unless the tech advances beyond our wildest dreams. Surprisingly, the viability SCMES at the Home Depot level of commercialization for the home owner isn’t a wild dream The reason there is no clamoring for SCMES as an off grid solution is because the media reports only the ridiculous, (wine makes better SC) and so the emerging SC tech remains on the fringes and beyond the horizon of the general public. The other reason, is the GRID is the untouchable paradigm. We see this as the grid is receives regulatory protection form the off grid movement in states that are passing carbon tax bills. But the global race is on to develop all temperature affordable SC wire. Much of the quantum/SC research is focused on advancing gadgets and quantum communication systems because of intense competition and demand. Fortunately, there are enough smart people who would see the potential of all temperature carbon based SC wire for Home Depot commercialized SCMES and right now most of them are Chinese. Once affordable and commercialized and scalable all-temp SCMES become the rage,…Katy-Bar-the the Grid Door. Notes: All temp affordable SC generators would be very quiet and efficient with no bearings to wear out. Current grid efficiency is about 33%. An off grid system using using The Next Gen SCME storage and distribution system with SC generators in a 3 tier HC fuel powered thermal systems would be greater than a 2.5 factor increase in efficiency. Profitability is helped by the avoidance of grid taxes, fees and monopolized prices. Adding renewable inputs will increase profitability for the homeowner.. Put Next Gen SCMES in cars and lawnmowers, tractors, green houses,….. you get the idea. The purpose of this RANT is to encourage people to think beyond grid and beyond the climate change conundrum of renewable grid solutions. Renewables are good if they have real economic viability for the homeowner…. which they currently do not have due lack of good electrical storage systems. Current solar systems are a tax boondoggle and people are losing their solar shirts due to the political shifting sands. This doesn’t mean the solar input with the proper tech would never be a variable economic solution for the homeowner. There is no better way to destroy a good industry than to make it totally dependent on the whim of politicians.
WTF is a “SCME”? You’re just babbling.
You’re not an engineer and/or planner are you? Lots of ifs, and’s, and maybe’s in your rant. Remember, we have to get from here to there first. You’re not a magician that can snap your fingers and poof, we’re there.
I am glad that worldwide, the investors do not agree with this article. 90% of the new energy between now and 2050, will be renewables.
You’re glad that so many would-be pensioners will find their retirement got pissed away on this unscientific nonsense? So, what, when you dont have money to retire on and can’t work we will just set you adrift on an ice floe?
Only the money spent, not the energy produced. And most of that money will come from futile expenditures of government.
If Renewables are such a slam-dunk investment, you should invest your entire net worth in them. What could possibly go wrong?
In the real world, the Renewables business runs entirely on government subsidies. Take them way and investors drop the sector instantly.
It will never get as far as described in the article. Today, 65% of US citizens live pay-check-to-paycheck and could never afford a conversion to electric cars, electric home heating, or even electric cooking. I am a retired strategic planner and energy economist from the largest electric utility in the state of Texas, USA. A confidential study I did before retirement indicates that less than 45% of people in my former employer’s service area have a garage or driveway that would provide access to at-home charging of an electric vehicle (people living in apartments and central-city residents). This means that a large number of US citizens would be subject to daytime charging and very high demand charges which will be inevitable and non-sustainable!
There will be a slight delay with your Lambo due to a lithium warming tipping point-
Lamborghini Aventador Production Restarting, 15 Cars Will Be Made (msn.com)
Having read though the paper I conclude that they are at least on the right track: I have done similar work covering multi year hourly granularity data that concluded the UK would need over 30TWh of storage for a wind and solar system. However, there are some significantly optimistic assumptions: hydrogen storage assumes electrolyser efficiency at 80% and CCGT at 63%. Real world PEM efficiency is about 60% and will struggle to improve on that given intermittency. The capital cost at €450/kW is less than half of what the Shell REFHYNE project considers a feasible target i.e. €1,000/kW (and current real world costs of double that or more). CCGT operated in intermittent renewables support mode fails to achieve 50% efficiency because of ramping losses. Lower real world round trip efficiencies require more generation to cover the losses, and require more hydrogen storage because of the lower CCGT efficiency. Batteries are generously rated at 90% round trip while real world experience suggests when new they achieve just over 80% but that deteriorates with age, and pumped storage is also generously rated at 80% when 75% is a more realistic figure. The higher costs and lower efficiencies overall would imply an even greater overbuild of renewables, but not much saving in storage.
To get a flavour of this, look at the simple evaluation I did for the UK for 2021 for wind+storage.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZmrQw/1/
Any evaluation of a long term nature has to include the renewables disaster year of 2021. The idea that we could rely on renewables is at the back of the problems Europe now faces, because it never managed to fill its gas storage over the summer because of renewables failure. It would produce even more challenging numbers to include it.
I should perhaps add that there are two other very important factors that can only be evaluated through detailed examination of the data.
Firstly, whether the demand profile is realistic. The demand assumption is quoted as being an estimate for 2030. However it may not adequately reflect real seasonality, particularly if there is supposed to be a move towards electrifying heat.
Secondly, the refactored production assumptions derived from the weather. These are best compared with metered outputs adjusted for capacity to check for realism. Among the ways I have seen the data manipulated for similar studies are unrealistic assumptions about wind turbine efficiency at lower wind speeds and an almost square wave output from solar that seems to ignore the reality that most solar lacks single let alone twin axis tracking on grounds of cost and space, and all of it gets subjected to cloudy days etc.
These can make an enormous difference to the amounts of storage needed to balance a grid, and oddly they are not mentioned in the paper’s discussion.
From long long ago in underground ventilation I recall explosive range of hydrogen at normal pressure was 4% to 75%. Was drummed into us at length just how nasty it is, and how fighting coal fires underground was so dangerous.
“…over the course of a few years, before requiring entire countries of tens or hundreds of millions of people to be the guinea pigs.”
That logic didn’t stop countries from mandating experimental vaccines by threat of job-loss or even fines, so building out a unicorn power system is no big deal for Biden and his cronies waiting to cash in on the green gravy-train, regardless of how many lives and livelihoods are at stake.
“and five times average demand” of course.
Pumped hydro, the only viable storage. And when it rains you get extra power for nothing.
While the enormous cost is one unacknowledged hurdle, the huge geopolitical impact of carbon free by 2020 is that we will be serfs of China. The lithium, rare earth metals, much of the cobalt and other materials necessary for wind turbines and solar panels come from China. We cannot afford to make the same mistake that Germany and the Europeans have made and allow ourselves to be dependent on energy from our biggest geopolitical rival.
The US has enormous energy resources of coal, oil, gas, and nuclear. Full scale development of our own resources makes us energy independent, exporters of LNG to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, enhances our security and retains our traditional advantage of low cost of energy to sustain and improve the strength of our economy and raise our standard of living.
Our energy resources are a potent geopolitical strategic economic and military assets that are better than bullets and bombs.
Just because the goal of the greenies is unachievable doesn’t they won’t, with the very best of intentions, screw up the electrical system and economy. The agenda is what matters to them not the result. The fact that logic, reason and data do not support their agenda means, in their minds, the logic, reason and data are wrong. That’s how they operate; no engineering is required to work towards the goal of the agenda.
“Based on current costs of lithium-ion batteries”
But you’re making a straw man arguments Unless we find massive deposits of Lithium, Lithium batteries certainly won’t be be solution to grid scale energy storage. Grid storage needs to be cheap and last over many charge cycles. It can be large and it can be heavy. Lithium batteries are light and suited to transport and portable devices.
And then following it up with the poor storage choice
“But R&Q think they have a better idea than batteries, namely hydrogen as a vehicle for the storage.”
It’s a poor choice because it’s very inefficient to produce, hard to store and needs substantial infrastructure to distribute.
Much better to find a battery solution that is suitable and locate them around the grid as a distributed storage to reduce the load on the transmission network. Also don’t push wind, it needs way too much maintenance. Better to have much more distributed PV solar and less wind IMO.
I live on the West end of an industrial wind facility. Wind-farm is a misnomer. I can and often do make a short videos of the idle turbines. I set my camera on the same trellis post each time, and take a short video. This facility was touted to produce enough energy to power 68,000 homes. This facility consumes 32 square miles, all of it in prime farm ground. Forty-eight turbines that require approximately two acres each.
The acres consumed do not take into account the damaged tile system used to properly drain this farm land. Tile systems in most cases over 100 years old. The soil has been compacted whereever the cranes, the trucks, or the caterpillars moved. That severely hampers crop production. At any rate.
Turbines v Coal and Gas;
Just a thought- If R&Q suggest building enough extra capacity, wind and solar farms, in Germany to cover electricity needs at all times, is there enough unoccupied land in Germany to support the facilities?