Kevin Kilty
While reading the article “A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain’s Royal Society” by the Manhattan Contrarian a few days ago, I was reminded by Figure 1 of the variations in flow of the Nile River which was the inspiration for Mandelbrot’s development of fractals.[1] This naturally brought to mind Hurst’s algorithm for determining the required storage of a reservoir.[2]
Hurst’s explanation of the algorithm is very simple.
“For example, if a long-time record of annual total discharges from the stream is available, the storage required to yield the average flow, each year, is obtained by computing the cumulative sums of the departures of the annual totals from the mean annual total discharge. The range from the maximum to the minimum of these cumulative totals is taken as the required stornge(sic).”
If we think of energy conversion as equivalent to river inflow, electrical demand as equivalent to reservoir discharge and water storage behind a dam as the equivalent of chemical energy storage in a battery, then we can make use of this simple algorithm to explore the storage needed to get us through any hypothetical period with only intermittent wind or solar or some combination available to us. Hurst didn’t consider evaporation – we won’t consider inefficiency of charge/discharge.
Rather than base my analysis on seasonal weather from Monte Carlo modeling, I thought to take some of my own advice. I had made a suggestion in a public service commission hearing last January that a regional utility could do no better than to take the most inclement weather period of the last sixty or seventy years, real data in other words, and show us how their hypothetical energy system would fare. Thus, I decided to marry Hurst’s algorithm with data from this past summer gathered from the EIA hourly grid monitor for the Northwest region which is where I live.
I decided on the time period stretching from June 24, 2023 through September 30, 2023. This period includes the season of heavy demand for air conditioning and irrigation and probably the poorest wind resources overall.
Conditions of Analysis
Here are my assumptions for this first cut analysis:
- Wind energy only
- I assume wind can be scaled up to meet season demand without degrading capacity factor
- Storage level ends the season at the same level it began (one of Hurst’s conditions)
- Storage level is adjusted upward to avoid negative storage
- I include no losses from internal battery leakage, inefficiency of charge/recharge, no provision for line losses
- No provision for equipment outages or reserves
- No inter-balancing area transfers
Pattern of Demand
Figure 1 shows the pattern of demand in the Northwest. The EIA uses units of MWhr of demand during each previous hour. One might think of this more simply as the hourly average power in MW required from all sources to meet demand. There is a single daily peak that may rise above 60,000 MWhr each hour of the day when there is great demand for air conditioning and irrigation (these two sources of demand are highly correlated). The full daily swing in demand is typically around 20,000 MWhr per hour. On any given day this swing might have to be met with a combination of coal, natural gas, hydro, and solar – natural gas generally balances the swing in solar that occurs early and late in the day and has a rapid slew rate. Only gas turbines can follow it easily and it would wear a typical thermal plant to tatters to try to follow solar and wind each day. A combination of hydro, coal, and natural gas is needed to balance the fluctuation in wind generation. The seasonal average demand is 42,661 MWhr each hour.
Figure 1.
Wind Generation
Our analysis assumes wind generation alone. Figure 2 shows actual wind generation during our test period. The generation is highly variable. It rises above 12,000 MW on some days but drops well below 1,000MW on others.The swing in output can take place in a matter of hours. Extended wind droughts lasted as long as 36 hours during the season.
The seasonal average wind generation is about 5,140 MW. Thus, in order to provide all demand in the Northwest, and not leave storage in any worse condition when the season is over, wind has to supply at a minimum the seasonal average demand (the actual figure turns out to be 42,735). Thus, current wind energy capacity has to be scaled up by a factor of about 8.32 to accomplish this. It is not very likely that this can be done without having to place wind farms in less than optimal locations. The best locations for wind production are very likely taken, or at least planned to be taken, already. So, this is a minimum figure.
An interesting calculation at this point is to estimate how much land area is required for this much wind generation and what the first cost, the cost of capital expenditure, is likely to be. Assuming an annual average capacity factor of one-third means we will have to install three times our 42,735 MW of actual capacity to reach a minimum needed nameplate rating. This is 128,205 MW of nameplate wind. A couple of the most recent applications for wind plants in Wyoming propose to use 125 acres per MW of nameplate rating. Thus the required wind would need something like a minimum of 16 million plus acres. For comparison this is a bit greater than one-fourth the State of Wyoming itself. The cost of constructing and equipping a wind farm I would have estimated at $1,200 per kW, but after the inflation reduction act (IRA) has raised costs this might be as high as $1,500 per kW. Total is then maybe between $150-192 billion dollars.
Figure 2.
The Resulting Required Storage
With a few iterations of guess, assess and modify, I arrived at the following solution to the problem posed here. Average wind energy generation is 42,735 MW. By starting the season (on 6-24-2023) with 4,600 GWhr in storage, we will end the season at midnight on 9-30-2023 with 4,600 GWhr of storage. The maximum energy in storage over the season is 5,221 GWhr. This is 122 hours of average demand. The minimum is only 71,000 MWhr, which considering this has occurred during a lull in the wind and in mid-summer with air conditioning and irrigation demands is little more than an hour of reserve. During 172 hours of the season there is less than 24 hours of reserve. In other words, this is not a robust solution by any means. There is a lot more work to do. Figure 3 shows what goes on in this particular season. Storage rises a bit at first only to be whittled away as the wind dies and the season becomes hot and dry. As summer recedes, storage rises again to finish the period with the same storage it began.
Figure 3. The storage level time-series.
What about cost? The last time I checked on lithium battery storage in the form of a Telsa Megapack it was $600 per kilowatt hour. This would put the cost of the maximum storage energy of 5,221 GWhr at around $3.13 Trillion (yes capital ‘T’ dollars).
Before any battery storage proponent tries to tell me that I am over-estimating because such batteries are only $200 per kWhr, let me state something about estimating industrial facilities. One does not just purchase batteries and wire them together. One needs a facility with all sorts of services in order to house said batteries – land, grading and foundations, roads and parking, a building, environmental control, safety systems, switching, transformers, AC/DC conversion, lines, labor and so on. The same is true of chemical plants or power plants or any major facility. Take the functional part of a facility and multiply its cost by around 1.5 for all this ancillary stuff. Take a GE quotation for a 300MW ultrasupercritical boiler and turbine of $240M (probably a bit too low after all the inflation reduction of the IRA); multiply by 1.5 and the rest of the power plant is probably $360M – $600M in total. Under-estimating costs is common – let’s not do it.
This estimate for an all-wind/storage system is not likely to be an order of magnitude in error. You see, 3.3 or so trillion dollars is probably an under-estimate considering my liberal assumptions. Storage needs equal to 122 hours of average network demand, or more, is something one should expect. It’s like 5 years worth of national savings just to supply energy for the Northwest with its roughly twenty million people (7% of the U.S.). In order to make a fantasy modern energy system work, a person needs a fantasy modern energy storage system too; and to pay for that a person needs modern monetary theory.
Making Better Estimates
Keep in mind that what I have done here is a first cut. I’d have to begin adding the complications that I assumed away early-on to do better. Maybe I could get a lower cost by adding solar energy and reducing wind. Maybe not. But keep in mind the big plan is to rely on wind/solar and storage only in the future. No coal. No gas. Even hydro is a target. Nuclear? What a horror. No way!
Also, this is just one realization of something that is a stochastic process. I’d get a bit more robust estimate by not only adding the losses of a real system, but by looking similarly at multiple seasons back in time. It takes about 25 years to gain another standard deviation of uncertainty. Thus, those 60 years worth of seasons I suggested to the PSC would reach around 2.5 standard deviations which translates to 99% certainty. Except, weather and climate don’t follow a gaussian distribution, but rather something like that of a fractal – a hyperbolic or power-law distribution. There have been weather events in the past which in their extremes of magnitude and persistence we have never observed before.
Beware. Expect surprises. Expensive ones.
References:
- Benoit Mandelbrot, The fractal geometry of nature. 1982, ISBN: 0-7167-1186-9
- Hurst, H.E., Long-Term Storage Capacity of Reservoirs, Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers Archive, Vol. 116, No. 1, January 1951.
I think the assumption made by the WEF and Greenies is that there will not be electricity all the time, just when the sun shines and the wind blows. More like most of Africa. The analysis above assumes constant supply.
Very nice Kevin.
Welcome to the energy storage wars!
Note that the longer the time period you analyze using this “Hurst” method, the longer a maximum storage requirement you will likely find somewhere in the period. You analyze about a 3+ month period from June to Sept 2023, and you find a storage requirement of 122 hours. I have presented analyses on my Manhattan Contrarian blog of year-long periods for California, Germany and the Continental U.S., with a wind/solar/storage-only system, which have found maximum storage requirements in the range of 500-700 hours, depending on the year analyzed (and allowing the storage balance to run down to at or near zero before refilling). The Royal Society report covers a 37 year period for Great Britain (1980-2016) and finds a maximum storage requirement of close to 200 TWh on annual usage of 570 TWh (see figure 7 on page 21), which would be more than 4 months’ worth, or almost 3000 hours. If you figure you would want to maintain at least 1000 hours worth of stored energy at the bottom in the worst case wind drought, then you would need to build for 4000 hours. Kindly calculate the cost for that and get back to us.
Well 4000 hours of storage would not only break a society, but keep everyone busy full-time operating and maintaining it. It would be our equivalent of Easter Island. Future anthropologists would ponder what sort of religion had led to our vanishing.
What I didn’t want to do in this simple exercise is resort to modeling. Weather as archived is only a proxy for demand and supply. Yes, we have pretty decent data for wind speeds and temperature, but not really for sunshine, cloud cover, or snow on the ground. By the time I used sparse and distributed sightings I’d be putting up an analysis a lot like what the IPCC or NASA GISS does — full of guesses and bias.
Instead, right out of the gate, using only observed supply and demand, in one region of the country without great population, on one not very remarkable summer, we need 122 hours to just squeak by. The renewables enthusiasts have struggled against anything like addressing real storage. It’s taken them years to finally start talking about “long duration” and even longer to quantify this as 100 hours — the analysis of this most recent summer is already 22% longer. That alone should be sobering.
A person can imagine what present consumption patterns would have been like in 1935-1936, but because of sparsity of data and the uncertainties contributed by modeling we wouldn’t know for sure — we can only imagine. We’d have very little idea of what the provision of energy supplied only by wind would have been like. Small changes to this observed season would cause different estimates — if the heat of summer decided to show up in late June or early July, if those three becalmed periods of 20-36 hours were to cluster more closely together, we’d find that 122 hours isn’t nearly enough.
So, I’d like to look at 37 years worth of supply/demand data, but there isn’t any short of modeling.
Do some simple math, at $200/KWH 100 hours of storage is too expensive.If the batteries in a connected and commissioned packet system had free batteries it would cost $200/KWH, $200000/MWH, 100 hours $20000000 ($200 million). Storage for a conventional 1000 MW = $20O BILLION (100x more than the power plant). Remember this is BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED.$500 BILLION with batteries. This subject is not worthy of discussion! Now you know why no one is storing more than four (4) hours.
I agree with you almost entirely. Almost any amount of required storage is way too expensive. However, that does not mean the discussion is pointless. There are people who believe otherwise. Repetition may eventually convince them. Some of these folks are on my PSC here who think that there is some battery chemistry that will work. I point out the magic in their thinking and the superstition just moves on to another scheme. I have to keep pounding away until they admit defeat. Otherwise something stupid will get approved.
Bloomberg’s green-energy research team estimated it would cost $US 200 Trillion to stop Global Warming by 2050.
There are about 2 billion households in the world, that is $US 100,000 per household.
Ninety percent of the world’s households can’t afford anything additional. That means about $US 1 million per household in developed countries or about $US 33,000 per year for 30 years. The working people can’t afford anything near that.
The millionaires and billionaires have about $US 208 billion in wealth. That would cover it, but I doubt if they would go for that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-05/-200-trillion-is-needed-to-stop-global-warming-that-s-a-bargain#xj4y7vzkg
And yet Bloomberg is one of the main financiers of Just Stop Oil – like charities.
Don’t worry it’s renewable storage-
Chemical blaze burning out of control near Newcastle | Watch (msn.com)
There’s a theme here I’m scratching my head about but it will come to me…..?
PS: Yep it’s more of the usual-
Graphite storage technology gets ARENA funding for heat and power applications | RenewEconomy
We’re going to be a renewables taxeater superpower.
Hmm, I wonder what graphite is made of. Does it start with a C?
You are droll.
What do they heat the bricks it with?
Thermal exchange, with what ??
No wind or solar nearby.
I estimated the UK’s storage requirement, scaling up demand to accommodate electrification of transport, scaling wind and solar up to meet annual demand (2022), and computing the storage required to accommodate the intra-year seasonal variation. About 22 TWh.
How long would it take to accumulate the initial charge for this storage?
Now try 2021. Or 2010 and 2011. For extra fun, add in some heating demand. Even just some semblance of pro rata with domestic gas demand.
“computing the storage required to accommodate the intra-year seasonal variation. About 22 TWh.”
That just means you haven’t provided enough generation. FF generation would have the same requirement if you only provided enough generation to cover average load. However generated, you have to provide enough to meet the peak without storage.
After reading all the comments I have two thoughts.
One, Nick should produce a paper, and Anthony should post it here, which uses the 12 years of UK data readily available from gridwatch. It should quantify the amount of storage needed under the assumption of Net Zero – wind and solar and storage only – to deal with the current UK peak demand of about 45GW. The exact level is covered in gridwatch daa. And it should also cover what will be needed if this rises to 100 GW due to EVs and heat pumps. 100GW is probably unrealistically low, but the estimate for a doubling of demand will give a good indication of the kind of thing that is needed.
But it cannot be based on the last 12 years alone. It should cover what is needed in both wind and in storage to deal with a wind drought of the sort that happened in 2009-11. It should also ignore imports, lets just see what the case is for a standalone system.
Never mind the costs for the moment, lets just get Nick to quantify the amount of storage for the UK Net Zero, a real country with real weather and usage stats.
The second thought is, we need a pilot. We need to find some town or city where, and we will have to pay them handsomely to do it, the population, including all the businesses, agrees to move to solely electric cars and heat pumps, and to use only wind and solar generated power and storage for power. How long the pilot needs to run for? Don’t know. At least a year, probably a couple. Lets get the thing sized to levels which real utility engineers agree is necessary to deliver a decent service.
They must agree to be withdrawn from the UK grid. Their local grid fed only by some dedicated turbines and solar farms. Yes, they will have to be paid quite a lot to agree. And replacing all their cars and boilers will be expensive too. This is including businesses, think about that one for a moment.
But, as Francis Menton says, it will be a lot cheaper than taking the entire country down the same route on the current back of envelope fantasy arguments that characterize the activists claims of feasibility.
My feeling is that as soon as the magnitude of the numbers becomes clear in the preliminary work, the project will be abandoned. People will immediately see that this is nonsense, that you cannot bet the future of an economy and an entire society on this technology. But maybe I’m wrong. Lets find out.
I am working on a comparable model for Ireland using 2014-2022 actual wind generation data.
Preliminary results suggest the following:
The extent of overbuild of wind turbines relative to demand powerfuly influences the volume of Energy Storage required: marginal levels of overbuild (x3 to x4 times) require huge storage capacities.
Higher levels of overbuild initially greatly reduce the Energy Storage required but with diminishing returns as overbuild increases.
Overbuild ratios of 4 to 5 times demand result in Energy Storage requirements of approximately 12% to 8% of annual demand.
16GW wind requires up to 3.5TWH storage,
20GW wind requires about 2TWh storage.
But the price?
Using Kevin Kilty’s costs,
16GW of additional wind turbines(over 4 already installed) for Ireland would be a capital cost of $24billion
At 20GW installed Wind capacity, approx 2TWh Energy Storage would be required. NREL puts the cost per kWh as $360. KK uses $600. This give a cost range for batteries of $720 billion to $1.2 trillion.
Total cost: $1.1 trillion to $1.6 trillion for a country with GDP of $500 billion
UK has similar weather pattern to Ireland but 10 times the electricity demand. Multiply the Irish estimate by 10 to get a IK estimate.
Another preliminary result is that the period of maximum demand for storage in Ireland is not winter, but summer and early autumn.
My model fills storage during October to April, but from May to end September, demand depletes storage
Interesting. I no longer know where to find longer runs of Eirgrid data, other than whatever ENTSO-E will let you access. How did you treat the impact of interconnectors to the UK? They give a convenient 1GW of supply in low wind, and 1GW of dump for surplus wind otherwise. Effectively like storage, although prices tend to be high for import and low for export, so not free.
I downloaded the System Data Qtr Hourly spreadsheets from the Publications page on Eirgrid website.
The data available for download is for 2014 to April 2023.
I have data for 2004 to 2010 that I downloaded years ago.
I have requested the 2010 to 2013 data.
On their Contact Us page they say historical data in available on request.
I do not include interconnectors at all.
Two reasons:
I have a couple more months work on the model before I can finalise conclusions; all statements in these comments are preliminary
My point really is that the interconnectors act both to provide supply when it isn’t windy, and to provide a demand sink when it is. Therefore one has to be careful to ensure that demand figures are appropriate. Also, overnight when demand is low and wind is high Eirgrid have resorted to curtailment to ensure a minimum level of inertia on the grid from conventional power stations, so wind generation is not always what it could have been. A minor additional complication is the pumped storage at Turlough Hill.
I had a nice example dating from the time of Storm Ophelia (2017), the near-hurricane which showed all the modes of grid operation, ranging from maximum import/dispatchable generation through wind curtailment. Eirgrid used to publish a wind generation forecast which made the apparent curtailment easy to see, and the logic to limit wind as a percentage of generation.
“My point really is that the interconnectors act both to provide supply when it isn’t windy, and to provide a demand sink when it is.”
It other words, it functions exactly like a storage system is supposed to. And that is why I do not include interconnectors.
The purpose of my model is to establish the magnitude of energy storage required for a 100% renewable system in Ireland.
The technology used to provide the storage (interconnectors, batteries, pumped storage, etc.) is independent of the storage requirement and therefore I see no benefit in adding complexity to the model to include multiple or particular storage technologies at this time.
Curtailment:
I have calced the capacity factors based on actual wind power/nameplate rather than forecast. Two reasons: First, forecasts are just that, forecasts. No way to assess accuracy except by comparing them to actual curtailment records. Second, reviewing curtailment records to identify what actually could have been absent curtailment is massive work and I have no reason it would significantly improve the accuracy or utility of the model.
The model already includes a number of simplifications in order to reduce the number of variables.
For example, I have taken the demand data for 2014 to 2021 and multiplied each year’s data by a factor to make each year’s total annual demand equal. This removes demand variability from the problem.
Once I’m done, I plan to write it up, get it peer reviewed and published.
I hope you succeed. The more checks and balances in the form of realism the better. I’ve noted that Eirgrid have been more muted of late in their warnings to politicians about the considerable difficulties that their aspirations imply. See e.g. the run of 10 year plans. They could do with some spine reinforcement.
I am interested in keeping abreast of your project here. It sounds interesting. Maybe enough people could be inspired to do similar things that we’d have a crowdsourced estimate of storage requirements world wide. Give everyone a good estimate of truly unaffordable ideas.
Thank you.
My model uses system dynamics to manage the interactions of all the constantly changing variables.
The inputs are:
Installed Wind (or Renewable) name plate capacity.
Energy Storage System (ESS) Capacity
ESS level at Time 0
System Demand
Qtr Hourly Actual Capacity Factors 2014-2022.
Once finished, tested and validated, I believe any system of any size could be modeled simply by changing the inputs.
As it stands though, the intensive calcs required have broken my laptop. A single model run takes 95 minutes to model 9 years and the processor heat has warped the laptop baseplate!
I have Eirgrid data 2004-2010 and 2014-2022. Last night I reviewed the 2004-2010 data for the first time in a long time, I hadn’t been intending to use it because most of the time the installed wind power base is too small. But 2010 is a problem year and I need to include it. The average capacity that year was 21.59%, far lower than the average 28%, which has huge implications for storage requirements.
Does WUWT allow for private messages?
Not really, You can send a message in some way to Charles the Moderator, like through the tips page, and ask him to facilitate some two-way communication.
You may want to try the long run of data based on MERRA 2 weather information available here:
https://www.renewables.ninja/
Select the Country tab and click on Ireland on the map and you will get a popup with links to hourly data for wind and solar capacity factors. If your model is taxing you laptop so heavily you may want to break it up into chunks. Over 350,000 data lines to deal with!
You could make a useful comparison with the real data you have as well to see how good the modelled data are. I would caution that the “future wind” basis seems to have some improbably efficient turbines.
Perhaps your laptop would find it easier if you simplified your model a bit. I take the approach that it is much better to explore a range of alternatives to see how the answers vary, so rather than trying to calculate some optimum explicitly I look at solution surfaces. In the real world we have to make a guess about what to install, so it gives a feel for how sensitive the results are to wrong guesses.
Try averaging your 15 minute data down to hourly and see how much difference it makes to your answers. Let storage run free – even to negative: the minimum storage requirement is just the maximum in store less the minimum in store, and the starting storage needs to be increased by any negative minimum magnitude.
When you say ‘overbuild relative to demand’, could you explain a bit? Do you mean overbuilding in relation to average generation? To faceplate?
The UK has about 45GW peak demand, a bit more. So what would your faceplate wind provision be?
Overbuild relative to average demand.
Irish annual demand id about 31.6TWh
Divide by 365*24 you get 3.6GW average demand.
Wind Capacity factor averages 28.3% (range is 25.1% to 31.8% 2014 to 2022)
Minimum required wind capacity to meet annual demand assuming unlimited storage is:
3.6GW / 0.283 = 12.7 GW
12.7GW wind nameplate capacity /3.6 GW average demand = 3.5 times overbuild.
With marginal overbuild ratios, the storage needs are truly immense.
At 4 times overbuild and more, the storage needs reduce significantly, but are still very large.
You ask me to estimate for UK. I don’t have UK data, but crudely, assuming almost identical weather patterns and wind capacity factor equal to 25.1% (minimum Irish 2014-2022) , UK would probably need more than 225GW of installed wind capacity plus perhaps 60TWh of storage capacity
Yes, roughly what I had arrived at on a much sketchier basis.
Its obviously impossible. The UK now has about 28GW of wind, both on- and off-shore. There is no way its going to install anything like 200GW by 2035. Or indeed by any date. Nor for that matter the required level of storage. The Royal Society’s 900 evacuated caves and green hydrogen is pure fantasy.
And that is before the country moves to EVs and heat pumps, which, if it happens (and the move to EVs probably is going to happen) is going to more than double demand. Does anyone think that 400GW of wind and 120TWh of storage is possible?
Its a dangerous fantasy and if attempted would lead to social and economic disaster. The people who are most to be condemned in this are the activists from the professional class, people who by background and ability are well capable of proper analysis, but who get into a sort of obsessional advocacy for a program they must in their hearts know cannot work. Trahison des Clercs 2.0.
Trahison des Clercs: Julen Benda’s famous book of 1927. From Wikipedia:
“C’est en cela que consiste leur « trahison » : ils tiennent un discours qui se veut désintéressé et rationnel, alors que celui-ci est fondé sur des émotions idéologiques et non sur la raison.”
It is this that constitutes their [the intellectuals] ‘treason’: they indulge in arguments which purport to be disinterested and rational, whereas in fact they are founded on ideological emotion and not on reason.
“The people who are most to be condemned in this are the activists from the professional class, people who by background and ability are well capable of proper analysis,”
The activists from the professional class you refer to are in the main, uneducated in science, technology or engineering. In the Green Party in Ireland, there is only 1 civil engineer, but civil engineers do not study thermodynamics or power systems and therefore this guy is operating outside the area of his expertise and his opinion regarding what the energy delivery system is no more or less valid than the typical non-technically qualified citizen. None of the other persons in leadership positions in the Irish Green Party have any STEM qualifications. They are know-nothing Luddites zealots who refuse to listen to reason.
I regret to say, the persons I hold responsible are the leaders of the engineering professional institutions. Many engineers work for companies providing renewable technologies. Many others, probably more, do not. I believe most professional engineering institutions have failed in their duty to the public by jumping on board the renewable bandwagon rather than standing up against this technological lunacy and path to impoverishment. That said, there are huge pressures and several are onboard but trying to rein in the horses.
“Higher levels of overbuild initially greatly reduce the Energy Storage required “
Yes, it must. Scaling wind to average demand forces use of storage to cover the seasonal variation. No existing system has to do that; enough generation is provided to cover peak demand, and then some. The initial big drop comes when you cover peak demand and mostly remove the seasonal effect.
“Total cost: $1.1 trillion to $1.6 trillion for a country with GDP of $500 billion”
This is where the failure to allow for imports shows up. The imports are already happening, and do a lot to alleviate hard times. People say, well, if Ireland has no wind then other sources won’t either. But if you are doing a quantitative analysis, you need to quantify that too, else it is for naught. I chose CONUS partly because it is mainly self-contained. It shows up a lot better because it’s rally true that the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the national wind data reflects that.
The key difference between wind and conventional appears from the charts on gridwatch.co.uk. When all else fails, look at the facts.
The UK has 28GW of wind installed. At the moment, a few times a year this delivers well less than 5GW for periods of a week or ten days. For dozens of days a year it delivers less than 0.5GW. And this is in a period with average levels of wind. If there is a wind drought, as in 2009-11, those numbers will be disastrously worse.
The difference is that whether you like it or not, your wind, unlike conventional, is going to stop delivering at a period when demand will be peaking at around 45GW. Whether you have sized its average output to deliver 45GW or not.
This is why mikeq arrives at 225GW requirement for the UK and 60TWh storage. If you were doing it with conventional you’d be talking a quarter of that. And minimal storage. You’d have some peaking plant of course.
You size your conventional to peak demand, you know its going to deliver. You size your wind to peak demand, you know at some point its definitely going to fail almost totally during a period of the peak demand you have sized it to. You just don’t know when that will happen or for how long.
As to ‘the wind is always blowing somewhere’. Yes, this is what the activists say, as if that was all the sort of rigor that you need when planning a grid. In Europe the wind is not always blowing somewhere. The assumption you are making is that it will blow somewhere where there are wind farms, and in those places it will be generating surpluses, and those surpluses will be in places with grid connexions adequate to delivering them to (in this example) the UK, and that the operators will cooperate.
What this amounts to in the example given by mikeq is that you have, in your commissioning program, built still more wind than the 225GW he estimates for the UK in places which are not affected by UK wind droughts and you have connected those places to the UK grid with enough capacity to use them.
If the UK cannot conceivably install several hundred GW of wind and over 100GWh of storage, its even more inconceivable that it can install and connect still more wind someplace else at the same time. Not to mention the costs.
Before you could embark on the Net Zero generation project, you would have to have contracts in place with appropriate operators with appropriate connexions. And you’d have to factor in the costs of obtaining them. Whereas the usual mantra of the activists in the phrase ‘the wind is always blowing somewhere’ is to suppose that this available capacity will simply be there without your doing anything, so shut up. It won’t be. The result of relying on imports for the UK is simply to hope you can get reliable generation from conventional sources in other countries not in the grip of the mania. Its only Net Zero in name.
Or, its the usual activist procedure of claiming wind and solar are cost effective by leaving out half the costs.
Thanks. Agreed 100%. Your reply is far better written than mine would have been.
“As to ‘the wind is always blowing somewhere’. Yes, this is what the activists say, as if that was all the sort of rigor that you need when planning a grid.”
And the inactivists say it is not. But this is supposed to be a data based analysis. You need numbers to back that up.
I found with CONUS that the wind is almost always blowing somewhere. That comes from the national grid hourly figures. Hard numbers. Of course, total wind varies, but you can see just how much shortfall there is, and what the storage cost is. Ireland clearly does have a major import capacity; you can’t just ignore it.
Ireland’s import capacity is a replacement for building sufficient dispatchable capacity to service demand. It depends on there being sufficient supply in or via the UK to service it.
That has been truly demonstrated by the actions of Eirgrid on the export side, where they imposed export restrictions down to zero on the E-W interconnector, precisely to prevent the GB market from outbidding them and leaving them with a severe power shortage at times of low wind across Europe. It was the UK that was left restricting demand to keep the lights on.
The Norwegians and the French have also found ways to limit exports in the interests of their domestic market. On the other side of the coin, Poland and Czechia have installed phase shift transformers to block transfers of German power between North and South to avoid overloading their grids.
When the going gets tough God bless the child that has its own dispatchable capacity and a grid that can deliver it.
These problems exist because investment in grid capacity is costly, and because proponents of renewables have sought to brush under the carpet the true costs and investments needed to handle intermittency once renewables penetration becomes significant. A trillion here, a trillion there and you’re soon talking real money.
SSE in the UK has just announced that its output from its wind farms was 20% lower in the last 6 months than expected. This follows a similar period in 2021 when UK and Europe suffered a similar period of prolonged wind drought which reduced SSE’s output by 32%.
That’s a year of reduced production over the last 3 years. Unreliables – you’ve just got to love em!
In 2021 SSE in the UK reported a 32% drop in power from its unreliable assets as a prolonged wind drought hit UK and Europe. It has just reported that its Dogger Bank wind farm, the largest offshore one in the world, will start “producing power in the coming days” but warned that output from it’s existing turbines was almost 20% lower during the 6 months to the end of
September due to adverse weather conditions.
That’s two periods of around 6 months each in 2021 and 2023. But, hey, the “wind is always blowing somewhere”. 🙂
It may be true that wind is always blowing somewhere and sun shines someplace too. Yet, that doesn’t mean there is enough to supply everyone elsewhere or that there is line capacity to transport it. People hold on to this fantasy tenaciously.
I keep an eye on the wind maps at ventusky, which give estimated winds globally outside the extreme polar regions. There have certainly been times when winds have been no more than gentle zephyrs, barely enough to turn a turbine or less, across the vast majority of the global landmass, with nearby offshore similarly affected. A global stilling. Indeed, that is surely what we should expect from climate change as the poles warm and the temperature driven energy transfer from the tropics reduces. We are not going to establish large floating wind farms in mid ocean to try to harvest the remaining winds.