Essay by Eric Worrall
The diesel generator would only be needed for “backup”.
How the South Pole research station could run on 100% renewable energy
Joshua S Hill
May 15, 2024American researchers have completed an analysis that demonstrates how renewable energy could almost completely replace diesel at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, resulting in millions of dollars in savings.
The analysis, published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, was conducted by scientists at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), some of whom have worked at the South Pole and wanted to understand if renewables could replace the use of diesel.
“All of the energy at the South Pole currently is generated by diesel fuel and a generator,” said Amy Bender, a physicist in Argonne’s High Energy Physics division, a corresponding author on the paper, and a scientist who has spent time working at the South Pole.
“We were asking if it is possible to transition to renewables. This study is the beginning of trying to make that case.”
…
Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/how-the-south-pole-research-station-could-run-on-100-renewable-energy/
The abstract of the study;
Techno-economic analysis of renewable energy generation at the South Pole
Author links open overlay panelSusan Babinec a, Ian Baring-Gould b, Amy N. Bender a, Nate Blair b, Xiangkun Li b, Ralph T. Muehleisen a, Dan Olis b, Silvana Ovaitt b
a Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Avenue, Lemont, 60439, IL, USA
b National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 15013 Denver West Parkway, Golden, 80401, CO, USAHighlights
- •Renewable energy generation at the South Pole, Antarctica is explored.
- •South Pole conditions require unique renewable technical design.
- •South Pole renewable system possible with mature, commercially-available technology.
- •Least-cost hybrid renewable system reduces annual diesel consumption by 95%.
- •South Pole renewable energy creates positive economic impact across many scenarios.
Abstract
Transitioning from fossil-fuel power generation to renewable energy generation and energy storage in remote locations has the potential to reduce both carbon emissions and cost. This study presents a techno-economic analysis for implementation of a hybrid renewable energy system at the South Pole in Antarctica, which currently hosts several high-energy physics experiments with nontrivial power needs. A tailored model of resource availability and economics for solar photovoltaics, wind turbine generators, lithium-ion energy storage, and long-duration energy storage at this site is explored in different combinations with and without existing diesel energy generation. The Renewable Energy Integration and Optimization (REopt) platform is used to determine the optimal system component sizing and the associated system economics and environmental benefit. We find that the least-cost system includes all three energy generation sources and lithium-ion energy storage. For an example steady-state load of 170 kW, this hybrid system includes 180 kW-DC of photovoltaic panels, 570 kW of wind turbines, and a 3.4 MWh lithium-ion battery energy storage system. This system reduces diesel consumption by 95% compared to an all-diesel configuration, resulting in approximately 1200 metric tons of carbon footprint avoided annually. Over the course of a 15-year analysis period the reduced diesel usage leads to a net savings of 57 million United States dollars, with a time to payback of approximately two years. All the scenarios modeled show that the transition to renewables is highly cost effective under the unique economics and constraints of this extremely remote site.
Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032123011322
I admire their optimism.
Perhaps they should try powering a small part of the installation with a small number of wind turbines and solar panels, before they commit the entire facility to weather dependent energy sources.
I guess if all else fails, they could always burn the lithium battery for warmth.
Update (EW): Mr Ed posted a fascinating video from 1962 about a nuclear reactor being delivered to McMurdo Station. Nuclear seems an obvious solution for such a remote location, but the harshness of the Antarctic environment was too much for the technology of the time. As Curious George pointed out, the reactor was plagued by problems, and was shut down in 1972. The reactor site was contaminated (there has been a number of radiation accidents during operation), so an expensive cleanup operation was required.
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They always fixate on their hopes and dreams rather than what really works.
And here goes Argonne. NREL has been gone for a long time.
They could definitely power the base with wind…
If they can manufacture turbines that can operate at -77°F (the current base cold record) and in wind gusts of 185 KPH with sustained winds of 115 KPH without sustaining damage. (Current records)
Similar for Solar which may shine there for 6 months but then also doesn’t shine for 6 months AND never rises much higher than 23.5° elevation above the horizon which is about where the sun is at 7:30am at 37°N and generally solar produces ZERO at 7:30 am at 37°N latitude. Even if the panels are aimed at the sun they will produce only a fraction of nameplate. Then require constant maintenance to clear drifted snow. And there is that Nasty little factoid that Solar doesn’t like to function well at below freezing temperatures
Who would they get to service the wind turbines in Antarctica?
Definitely have to be on site 24/7 as otherwise it could take days to get there and response is needed in minutes to hours given the local climate
They are always going to have to have backup diesel generators. Maybe they can risk only bringing in half the normal fuel delivery. I wouldn’t want to cut it much finer because there could be a protracted period of bad weather with no delivery possible.
The typical air pressure is 600mb, so ~60% of that at sea level. On the other hand, the temperature at around 220K offsets the 285K or so typical of the North Sea. Net result is about 22% less power due to lower air density, perhaps slightly less as the air is arid whereas over the sea it will be moist and thus lower average molecular weight/density.
As El Hiero did not work, what is different about the South Pole?
It’s so cold that there aren’t many people there to complain when their power goes out and they freeze to death in the cold and dark in an hour
Send the modellers to the Antartic for a winter to see if their models work. If they don’t the next set of modellers might be a bit more realistic.
Talk about sticking those solar panels where the sun don’t shine !!! 😉
💯
That made me laugh! 🙂
Places that are way, way off grid, are among the few places where renewables make sense.
The Antarctica bases have to have diesel flown in, so if renewables can reduce the amount of diesel burned every year, they could possibly save money.
They still need to deal with the darkness for 6 months of the year and the fact that even during summer, the sun is just barely above the horizon.
You are going to have to use panels that track the sun.
You also have to deal with the fact that you can only have one rank of solar panels, so the first rank will almost completely shade the second rank.
Finally, keeping them clear of snow and ice will be a problem.
With wind, they are going to have to be tough, because wind speeds there can be severe. There’s also the constant threat of icing.
As the author states, only a complete idiot would go all out for either wind and solar without several years of experience with small pilot installations.
“that track the sun.”
There is basically no sun for a large portion of the year !
I’d really like to see them try and honestly report the issues and expenses.
You’re right about costs for remote locations like that. The US military tried solar power for remote bases in Afghanistan. How did that work out? There should be some reports available.
Obama had an entire base convert to save money. It wasn’t remote. (Cost was about $100,000,000?)
It would take about 100 years to realize a savings … if everything kept working as planned.
(I don’t remember if that was before or after his plan (“under my plan the price of energy will skyrocket) was implemented.
I wonder what the generals thought of that idea.
They were too busy trying on dresses and new shades of lipstick to worry about silly things like military preparedness and deterrence.
Don’t be silly. That’s admirals.
Besides, the military leadership now thinks climate change is the greatest danger to the United States.
It’s a crazy world when radical leftists gain political control.
“No fighting in the war room”
(Dr. Strangelove)
Solar, wind and batteries have been used effectively for decades at remote installations like mines, cattle stations, etc.
But always realistically regarded as “supplemental” power sources to augment their fleets of diesel generators.
Saving $$$$s on bulk diesel that had to be transported in from thousands of kilometres away was / is a compelling incentive to reduce fuel use by every workable means.
But these remote outposts operators know that when the sun is weak or absent (eg monsoon season in north Australia), solar panels are not be relied upon, and wind tends to turn up or not whenever it feels like it.
So if the Antarctic stations keep these realities foremost in their thinking, planning and execution, they might save a few $$$$s on transporting and burning diesel.
Academics tend to not be very practical thinkers though 🙁
“they might save a few $$$$s on transporting and burning diesel”
if they ignore the cost of that green energy
You mean bug-out Biteme gave Solar Panels to the Taliban????
“,,,even during summer, the sun is just barely above the horizon.”
During the height of the Antarctic summer, there is a stretch where the sun never sets, it drops to just above the horizon at “night”. But for much of the day it is quite high in the sky.
Seldom above 23.5° elevation so very similar to about 7:30am at 37°N latitude. Not very effective for solar generation
The Sun is at most 23.5 degrees above the horizon during Antarctic summer days. Most people do not consider that as “quite high”.
That’s at the pole itself. As you get further north, the sun gets higher.
But Scott Base IS the south pole and one needs to travel several hundred miles from there to place the sun high enough to be effective, but then the sun doesn’t remain at a fixed elevation above the horizon, it travels from 10° to 37° above the horizon in a 24 hour period. So the hours between 23.5° lowering to 10° then back to 23.5° produces nothing while the hours from 23.5° to 37° back to 23.5° will generate some power. The farther from the pole you get, the more the suns elevation changes over a 24 hour period. By the time you get to Esperanza Base the sun still sets regularly even in July and August
Did they consider running a cable from solar panels in the tropics? I think that would be more cost-effective.
Nope. You aren’t sticking panels on a sloping roof. They’ll be on rotating billboards, pointing at the sun as it tours the horizon every 24 hours, and capturing reflected sunlight as well as direct.
Much like sails on ships masts and would act as such in the Antarctic winds as well
. . . which will happen two days (the equinoxes) out of every 365.25.
At the summer solstice at the South Pole, the sun will be at 23.5 degrees above the horizon for 24 hours, whereas at the winter solstice at the South Pole, the sun will be 23.5 degrees below the horizon for 24 hours.
[N.B. Yes, for the purists out there, the above times and elevations are approximations of smoothing varying parameters and do not account for refraction of the Sun’s disk through Earth’s atmosphere.]
And how will they insure that those posts continue to rotate in -50°C temperatures? Not much moves without being kept warm and doing that requires even more energy
Except for when you reach the North Pole.
But you can point reliably at the sun so long as you follow solar longitude with a “radar” rotating installation. Solar azimuth is not an important factor, except when negative!
Which at Scott Base happens for the 4392 straight hours of night as well as the subsequent 1080 hours that the sun is at or slightly above the horizon yet still ineffective leaving 3312 hours of potential daylight per year that’s still subject to blizzard conditions during storms … brutal storms and sub zero temperatures that will also prevent battery storage from recharging … unless you also expend the heat energy to keep them warm
Huh?
At the South Pole, solar azimuth is directionally equivalent to solar longitude in the sky, although the zero reference points may be offset from each other.
I think you are talking about solar “altitude” in the sky, NOT “azimuth”, especially with reference to it having negative values.
“for much of the day it is quite high in the sky.”
Must be why the Antarctic is so warm in “summer”. ! 😉
These are “scientists”. Really? quite high in the sky would be 23 degrees max at the pole, give or take. Its bot useful at 50 degrees N in the UK which means 17 deg elevation in the UK during winter, when we need most energy cos its dark and cold, and there can be a week w/o wind.
These are idiots funded to waste public money. An SMR is the only way to do it cleanly, of course. It lives underground, produces no emissions, and keeps itself warm. To be sure what is most practical, check what Russians use….
If there’s a grant for it, some parasite child academics with no concept of engineering reality or care for cost will model it. Why should they care if it works. The people responsible for the sfaety of the site would have to be delusionally incompetent and wholly irresponsible.
The Soviet Union had to find a way to keep navigation beacons running above the Arctic Circle without a long supply chain for fuel. They settled on radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) fueled with strontium 90. The RTGs were designed to run unattended, and put out about 2 kW or so electric. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the custodial system for most things nuclear disappeared. Scrap metal hunters soon began finding these RTGs, and not knowing what they were would cut them up and leave the isotopes out in the open. There are numerous YouTube videos on the subject, including stories about scrap metal hunters being killed by radiation exposure. It doesn’t seem credible to me that Sr 90 could do that just by exposure, because it and its daughter, yttrium 90, are almost pure beta emitters, so maybe some of the RTGs used an isotope that gave off gamma as well.
The Chinese have come up with a beta battery which uses nickel 63 as the source, and it is a really soft beta source, and the Russians are headed in that direction to replace the beacon RTGs. Ni 63 has a half-life of 101 years, and puts out a 67 keV beta – no gamma – and its daughter is Cu 63, which is stable. That’s a safe isotope, but the specific power is only 0.0226 W/g. It couldn’t deliver much power with thermal conversion, so they must really have figured out the conversion to direct current using the beta flux.
They are DEI “scientists”. They never heard of engineering.
The maximum solar altitude at the December solstice is 23.5 degrees. Between the equinoxes the sun gets progressively higher each day and and then lower in the sky after the solstice, completing a 360 degree tour of the horizon every 24 hours. The average number of hours of sunlight at the South pole is about 2700 per year because of cloud cover etc. – just under 31% of time. The cosine factor will reduce the effective insolation to about 20%, so panels will produce about 6% of capacity – perhaps a bit more for cloudy days – over the course of a year from direct insolation, and will be largely useless for a week or two over six months. There will be additional insolation from reflection off the surrounding snow and ice. The cosine loss if the panels are pointed at say 10 degrees above the horizon will be very small: worst case cos(13.5 deg) is about 0.974 for direct insolation. I’d guess maybe a 7-8% capacity factor overall, which determines how many panels you need. The panels will need to rotate to follow the sun.
The exploration of the Buckland, AK system discusses a number of the problems and solution attempts with polar renewables.
https://euanmearns.com/a-brief-review-of-the-buckland-alaska-solar-project/
Ok, you have a point I guess. Much like ultra expensive first generation solar cells made total sense on satellites. It’s not cost-effective in most normal conditions where there are many better options, but maybe in the rare case.
To be fair, I understand that vertical axis wind turbines can operate at a wider range of wind speeds and withstand stronger winds. I don’t know if that means they can operate at most wind speeds or just that they can survive. It’s conceivable that it’s cheaper to avoid diesel consumption with wind power than to transport fuel from Argentina or Australia.
The thing that irks is that you just know that one of the main reasons we see these kinds of stories is that they want people to draw the erroneous conclusion that the same approach would be as economically viable in South Portland as at the South Pole.
Flights to the South Pole come from Christchurch NZ by way of McMurdo base.
Oh well thank God we got that cleared up. That really changes my point. And assuming that your facts are correct I suppose it proves that it would simply be impossible to fly from Argentina or Australia.
Also, wear and tear, providing short lifetimes for the equipment (and greatly more costs), is almost certain.
Rotating equipment requires lubrication.
Very, very few lubricant’s work well in -50 to -80 temps.
In so far as ranks go you just need to place successive ranks on taller masts which will expose them to stronger winds and damage susceptibility
Sail boat rule of thumb. Taller masts require bigger deeper keels to prevent capsizing. So clipper ships added more shorter masts on a longer vessel. And turns out a longer vessel is always more hull wave efficient. Hence the pre-engineered era of fast clipper ships.
You mean like the old Viking long boats 😉
“Finally, keeping them clear of snow and ice will be a problem.”
I imagine they need some big machines there- for that purpose and to move stuff around. They’ll have to be EVs.
Antarctica – perfect place for nuclear! Heat and power and no fuel to transport. There are minireactor designs in the works, for the military, that are maintenance free and no need for refueling for years at a time – perfect for the Ice Station Zero.
I read “Ice Station Zebra” as a youth. Very good book and you could feel the cold flowing from the pages.
They will need to be like an airport radar, but moving through 360 degrees every day in summer, rather than every couple of seconds. Alternatively, simply tile the buildings with them on the walls, though that may bring other problems.
Do they get dunkleflautes at the south pole? If I were there I’d like to think the diesel generator was retained and tested regularly- at least once a week. Presumably heat from the diesels is usedvto heat the facility and not wasted?
Grant them a nice little peace of frozen hell, more than walking distance from anywhere else, and let them prove it.
Perhaps they should power their small lives, off grid & no subsidies, with solar and wind and batteries before they try to commit anyone else to such.
What an awesome idea. Let’s send Algore, Lurch Kerry, Brandon, St. Grrrrrrreta, and the pope down there this August to demonstrate the viability of the plan. I’m sure solar panels should do the trick. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s start out with just solar panels and then add a few bird shredders only if necessary. If they had to go a few days without power, I’m sure they could just bundle up. What do you mean the sun doesn’t shine in August? That might be right in theory, but have we tested it?
“add a few bird shredders”
De-icing will be fun….. and think about the danger to penguins. 😉
Penguins don’t fly. But I’m sure they can’t run fast enough when the inevitable happens and the tower comes crashing down, the gearbox/nacelle catches fire, or it throws a blade.
“Penguins don’t fly”
You did know that I know that, didn’t you. 😉
https://youtu.be/UNEuIZ0Vwmg 😉
The sun doesn’t shine in August??? My model says otherwise!!!
but it might be cloudy- too cloudy for decent solar? just guessing
oh, wait- its winter in August in the Antarctic
Yep and for almost 9 months out of 12 solar will be as completely useless as it is from 7pm until 7am elsewhere
So when there’s no wind or sun, they can all pedal as shown in the image at the top of this story.
Denier!! Antarctic solar is the cheapest energy known to man!
I’ll go with your model. Obviously the sun can’t just stop shining. Sheesh, it’s basic physics! Next thing we’ll be hearing that there are emergent phenomena that negate warming from the enhanced greenhouse effect. The sun hasn’t stopped shining for over 4.5 billion years.
I’m a faithful Catholic and I have no problem with what you wrote. I wish P. Benedict hadn’t quit- he made fun of the green fanatics.
I am also a faithful Catholic, PCMan. I don’t believe that the occasional bad popes we have had through the ages discredit the faith. Whether the current occupant of the see of Peter is an actual heretic I defer to God’s judgement. That he’s plainly wrong on climate where he has no teaching authority whatsoever, and that he’s a terrible communicator, I’m happy to say and continue to receive communion with a clear conscience.
Lion batteries in constant sub zero temperature? Really?
The diesel generators will keep them warm.
generators will be verboten!
No, no, no! In spite of the huge overbuild (about 4x over) they still need to keep the generator around for 5% of their needs – and still have to do maintenance checks and keep the fuel stable – and keep it warm, too, no? Don’t diesels have a hard time starting in the even the relatively milder Midwestern or Canadian winters?
I’ve often seen loggers struggling to start their log skidders on very cold days. They now have tricks that work. One guy had some kind of heater that would kick on a few hours before he would show up on the job- I presume to warm up the engine.
💯
But WHY? Is there nothing else to do? Oh, and where are these millions of dollars in savings.?
In this case, the fuel has to be flown in. The savings would come from having fewer re-supply flights.
Not to say that the over all cost would be lower, however it is worth a few pilot plants to test feasibility.
I wonder if a few truck size nuclear reactors might save some fuel resupply costs?
McMurdo Station had a nuclear power plant at one time
I know a guy who worked on it back nearly 50 yrs ago===========>
ANTARCTIC NUCLEAR REACTOR AT McMURDO STATION 26042
With a total of 438 malfunctions during its operational lifetime from 1964 to 1972, the reactor at McMurdo proved to be an unreliable source of power generation, available only 72% of the time.
I knew guy who signed up for the “Operation Deepfreeze”
as it was called ran a water unit. IIRC he called it a “multi-stage
nuclear powered flash evaporator”, or something like that.
Again from memory I think he said they slept a lot. I guess
it was better than Nam..
Not bad considering everything. Time for ice reactor 2.0.
That would make up for the 72% of the time that Solar and Wind combined would be unavailable for over the course of the year
“available only 72% of the time.”
So on average, several times the availability of wind.
That’s still more reliable than any wind or solar supply.
According to some of the advocates here, they have new models of SMRs that are supposed to be maintenance free.
Though I suspect that there will need to be some type of modifications in order to work in those kinds of temperatures.
It’s weird that the narrator and the script writer forgot that penguins live there, as well as elephant and leopard seals, skuas and other birds.
The S Pole is an awful long walk for a penguin.
Thanks Mr Ed, Curious George – absolutely fascinating.
A single new 2 unit plant could power the base, carbon free, until 2100 with minimal effort and regularly scheduled refuelling outages
And oh so easy to keep spent fuel rods Coooold⛄
I suspect that nuclear would be the best solution. Just make sure that you have some mechanism for removing the reactor when the station closes. I’ve been reading about a military base in Greenland that was designed to be a secret military base complete with a complement of ICBMs. The station had to be abandoned when it turned out that glacier it was built into was moving much faster than anticipated causing portions of the base to collapse. Anywho, the station was powered by a nuclear reactor that was left behind when the base was abandoned. There have been recent efforts to try and clean up the site. A real mess.
Another point is that I suspect that running nuke plant in Antarctica will not be the same as running the same design in a more temperate environment. Temperatures that kind of cold presents problems that aren’t easy to predict ahead of time.
Once again, I would think that a small, experimental plant to gather data for a year or two would be a good idea.
Since it’s pretend anyway, renewable jet fuel would be an easy drop in replacement for supplying the flights and diesel generators.
Look up the story of the scientist at the South Pole diagnosed with breast cancer. One of the difficulties with a medevac flight was the need to re-fuel in Antarctic winter. The aircraft had to keep engines running to avoid freeze up and used jet fuel faster than the fuel could be thawed out enough to flow.
Wasn’t there a story about a medic who had to do an appendectomy on herself because she couldn’t get out and another medic could not get in?
I suspect that storing diesel would be safer than storing jet fuel.
Two years to payback installing wind and solar in an extremely hostile work environment?
No chance!
Their study is literally physically impossible. See comment below. So pretending to calculate the payback just shows their arrogant ignorance.
Let ’em try. Let’s see it work.
Cool. They can use blubber stoves to keep warm like Shakleton’s Party did. Blubber is renewable, isn’t it?
Wood pellets.
Wood pellets.
Locally sourced.
I’ve read that there are big deposits of coal in Antarctica.
Oops, aussiecoal beat me to it.
They tell me there is a lot of coal down there…
It’s a great idea, with the best of intentions, what could possibly go wrong?
It turns out there’s a lot of snow at the South Pole, which means someone’s got to go out and clear the snow off the solar panels and de-ice the wind turbines. Also, lithium-ion batteries don’t do so well in the subzero temperatures at the poles, so energy storage is a problem.
The result? Additional diesel generators needed to keep the batteries and wind turbines at operating temperatures increase the total diesel needed at the site by an order of magnitude, excluding the diesel used by the cargo vessels to get it there.
Unintended consequences. Good intentions, bad results.
(Thanks ReasonTV! Keep ’em coming!)
the installed power is 570 is 3.5 * the daily load. I.e. a 3.5 overbuild which sounds about right but the lithium battery has only 1 day’s baseload energy. Therefore there will be many days when they have to curtail the wind generator. . Wind power can make sense in an off grid situation , and in this case they save many gallons of deisel but at what cost. we need more information on capacity factor remembering that on many days when there is too much wind that must count as down time . I cant see that the solar panesls will make much difference to anything. certainly not in winter, and even in summer the insolation miust be low due to oblique angle of incidence
Some quick numbers. A Google search discovers that a 230 kW diesel generator at 75% load uses 12.5 gallons per hour to satisfy a 170 kW load. 1,642,000 gallons over the 15 year analysis period. If they are saving $57,000,000 over the same period, and if the savings is the 95% reduction in diesel fuel, then their cost for diesel fuel must be about $36 per gallon.
I realize that transporting the fuel costs a lot, but wow, something doesn’t add up. There must be more to it to claim a 2-year payback.
I’ll need to dig in to the paper to check this out.
Rats. The details are paywalled.
I can get a copy and post a pertinent table or two. If you have any specific questions, I can try to address them.
Thanks for your replies here! Very informative. I found these documents from 2005. They’ve been studying this for 20 years! Nice career if you can get it.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37504.pdf
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/38124.pdf
What percent Democrat is NREL?
I haven’t been there in some time, but several years ago their bulletin boards were like what one might find in a dem campaign office.
NREL is part of the industrial research complex that launders money back to politicians, mostly to dems.
First Part of Discussion (they plan to examine impact of waste heat recovery in the future)
This work presents a feasibility analysis for renewable power generation at the South Pole. Detailed solar and wind resource profiles for one year are generated using on-site meteorological data. A technoeconomic optimization is performed using these profiles as well as highly tailored economic inputs, modeling the least-cost solution to generate 170 kW of electrical power for a period of 15 years. A hybrid renewable system consisting of PV solar panels, wind turbine Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 193 (2024) 114274 11 S. Babinec et al. generators, a Li-ion energy storage system integrated with an existing diesel system is able to reduce diesel fuel consumption by 95% resulting in a net present value of $57M. Such a system would require an initial capital investment of $9.7M with a simple payback period of 2.1 years. Several additional scenarios are modeled, with results ranging from 40%–100% diesel fuel reduction and the associated decarbonization. In all scenarios, renewable energy generation is highly cost effective.
This study represents a significant step in the evaluation of the potential of renewable energy at the South Pole. Future iterations will incorporate additional levels of detail and work to address several of the limitations in the analysis presented here. These include expanding the set of weather and irradiance data beyond the average year used here to account for the full range of conditions over longer timescales. Effort is currently underway to verify the performance of bifacial PV panels under the uniquely high albedo considered here. The assumption that the performance of the energy system remains constant is sufficient for this analysis, however, it is expected to degrade over the 15-year lifetime. A model for degradation under the charge and discharge profile shown in Section 4 will be developed and included in future system-wide optimization. Additionally, costs for an enclosure to house the energy storage system and maintain its thermal environment will be developed and added to the economic model inputs. Section 4.1 compares the optimized system under differing assumptions of fuel cost and economy to probe the impact of uncertainty in these parameters. Reducing this uncertainty in the future will be valuable, but the resulting optimizations find that strong economic impetus for a renewable transition remains even in significantly less favorable scenarios. As also noted in Section 4.1, future analysis will also include variation in the electrical load, verify assumptions regarding the existing diesel generator system, and incorporate the impact of waste heat recovery from generators…
With regard to wind turbines, this is interesting.
A fundamental assumption of the wind resource modeling is operation down to a lower temperature limit of −70 ◦C. The turbine identified here was originally designed to meet that goal but is only currently guaranteed to a temperature of −40 ◦C. The turbine will need to be evaluated for modification and operation at the necessary lower temperatures demonstrated. Finally, the foundation design for the turbine will require development to determine the viability of a compacted snow foundation. A devoted campaign of engineering development has the potential to address the technical challenges noted here, which would pave the way for renewable energy resources and energy storage to become an integral part of decarbonized power generation at the South Pole.
At least they are planning to address some of the issues raised here.
Realizing the benefits of a hybrid renewable system also requires addressing several key technical challenges in the on-site implementation of renewable energy technology in the South Pole environment. Future work will focus on relevant engineering developments for each component, such as developing mitigations for snow drifts created by the PV panels as noted in Section 2.1. One of the main complications of Li-ion energy storage is its flammable nature. While not a unique concern for the South Pole, fire has amplified consequences at such a remote site. During the course of this study, emerging non-flammable Li-ion storage technology was identified and going forward should be preferentially evaluated to meet the storage needs. Additionally, continued tracking of already identified as well as nascent LDES technologies should occur.
Several elements of wind turbine implementation require development. As noted in Section 2.2 the predicted power generation profile for a wind turbine can be improved through collection of additional wind data at a height of 30 meters above the ground. A more complete wind resource assessment will also include combining this new data with an investigation of long-term trends in the existing meteorological data.
Thanks for those snippets of information.
This appears to be a valid exercide, but is at the early stages of planning.
Basically, the way it works is an iterative process.
If the answer is “no” at any stage, give it up as a bad joke:
Stage 0 – come up with an idea. “Could renewables be useful at the South pole?”
Stage 1 – some quick mental arithmetic.
a) How much does the diesel for a year cost now?
b) The site has sunlight half the year, so whack up enough solar panels to meet demand plus a bit for luck. How much will they cost?
c) Wind turbines have about 30/% CF, so plant 3x the capacity, plus a bit for luck. How much will they cost?
d) It’s going to need some battery backup. How much is needed for a day, and what will that cost?
e) Some diesel generation will still be needed. Let’s say 5%
f) Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines seem to last about 15 years or so, so calculate it over that period?
g) Could that save lots of money?
Stage 2 – back of the envelope calculations. Write down what we did in our heads, and try to get a bit better figures. Maybe even put in a discount rate to make it look like a proper NPV analysis.
For extra points, look into the ratio of wind and solar.
Could it have a decently positive NPV?
Stage 3 – preliminary engineering analysis. This might be mental arithmetic again, because “engineers are good with numbers”.
How far off the mark are the back of the envelope assumptions?
Does the appropriate equipment even exist?
How many of each are needed?
How much diesel will be needed?
Did they miss something big? (e.g. the diesel generators providing heating)
Is the NPV still positive?
Stage 4 – Engineering analysis.
As above, but with proper numbers, and thinking of even more things which can go wrong.
Is the NPV still positive?
Stage 5 – seek expressions of interest.
Will anybody touch it with a barge pole?
What will they optimistically claim they’ll charge.
Is the NPV still positive?
Stage 6 – go out to tender.
Will anybody really touch it with a barge pole?
What will they really charge?
What are the gotchas in the fine print? How many $10,000 hammers?
Is the NPV still positive?
Stage 7 – do it for real.
How long were the schedule overruns?
How big was the cost blowout?
How much was really delivered after descoping for success?
How negative was the NPV?
Anecdotally, the NPV halves at each stage, apart from stage 7 where it increases by an order of magnitude,
Amazingly, something was published between stages 1 and 2 🙂
I’m looking forward to see how that compacted snow foundation for wind turbines works out for them.
If it’s taken 20 years to get this far, expect the preliminary engineering analysis around 2080.
The Buckland study I cited up thread reports that brittleness issues start to be significant below -40C. Airframes benefit from some drag related heating. De-icing is a potential problem from build up of windblown snow, although the air itself is very dry.
re “A technoeconomic optimization is performed” – I think that several much longer words are needed for it to become cost-effective.
It becomes cost effective as soon as the South Pole multiplies.
Hmmm… so the solar panels would be mounted back to back rather than on rotating units. So you would get a sinusoidal variation of output going to zero every 12 hours when the sun was pointing at the panel edges, perhaps offset by having 2 sets of panels pointing at longitude 90/-90 and 0/180. Each panel face would only see the sun at best half the time, but avoiding rotation and lubrication and power for it may make more sense.
I was wondering about putting the panels in a square. That way the panels never end up shading each other.
This web page describes the fuel delivery to Amunsen-Scott by C-130. The fuel is not the typical diesel fuel but what they call AN-8 jet fuel. And yes, the delivered cost of the fuel works out to the figure I gave above. This is from 2012.
https://www.jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2012/12/the-south-poles-fuel-supply/comment-page-1/
AN-8 mainly contains a fuel icing inhibitor, as one can imagine the need for it.
Jet A-1 winter grade goes IIRC to -49C freeze point: regular version -47C, US Jet A just -40C. Getting lower gets really hard.
Since the renewables work so well, and provide free wind and solar power, we must insist they dismantle the diesel generators immediately.
I did some quick Amundsen Scott (AS) research, and call total BS on this Argonne/NREL ‘study’. Two easily findable online facts from the South Pole AS station suffice to demolish its published electricity ‘findings’.
No amount of battery storage can fix those two (useless) renewable facts. Plus, they also deliberately overlooked that LiIon batteries are effectively useless at the below cited AS ambient temperatures.
This BS ‘study’ also did NOT (very tellingly) consider that the diesel electricity generator exhaust provides all the needed heat for AS station. The annual average AS outside temp is -50C, the typical range is -76C winter to -18C summer. So the study just ignored the AS heating requirement. Embarrassingly stupid of two US National Labs. Biden bias? Cognitive impairment?
Good point about the diesel waste heat. You can look at it either way – power your facility with diesel and get your heat for “free” – or heat your facility with diesel and get your power for “free.”
Speaking of the NREL, is it widely known that the NREL has banned e-bikes and e-scooters with Li-ion batteries on their headquarters premises?
Spontaneous combustion incidents apparently.
Who could have foreseen?
Neat factoid.
https://electrek.co/2024/01/08/why-the-national-renewable-energy-laboratory-just-banned-electric-bikes/
How much energy is needed to keep the nacelle warm enough so that the grease doesn’t solidify?
They’ll use seal fat for lubrication because it’s already climatized.
Or penguins?
OK, whales because we’ve used them previously and it worked.
Sorta . . .
Don’t know about using penguins. The feathers might get caught in the gears.
PV does get a substantial boost in efficiency at very cold locations, and the vast majority of PV off-grid installations use lead-acid batteries. There are radio/microwave communication stations in Canada above the Arctic Circle that are 100% PV-lead acid powered, so it isn’t impossible. But I’m guessing the power requirements at AS are quite a bit higher.
ON wind resource: the measurements are at 10m not the likely 30m hub height, which would be a bit higher. Online calculators suggest that an average speed of 5.4m/sec at 10m might give about 6.2m/s at 30m, assuming the landscape isn’t too “rough” (at least there are no trees!). Back of envelope estimates then use a Weibull distribution of wind speeds with shape parameter 2. Since the station is at about 2800m, the average pressure is much lower – around 600mbar, and the air is very dry so the average molecular weight will be higher than e.g. offshore UK. OTOH, the average temperature is also around 220K which will serve to increase wind density. The net result is that air density, and hence power of the wind are reduced by ~20%.
The dimensions of the turbine will be constrained by the size of blade to fit in a C-130 transport – about 16 metres by 3 metres: the tower and erecting cranes could be shipped in sections. The design will clearly favour a low cut-in speed, perhaps as little as 3m/sec given the wind resource, and therefore have a relatively low powered generator for the blade diameter/swept area. Again, online calculators suggest perhaps around 16% capacity factor for this kind of WTG vs 1.225kg/m^3 air at sea level and 15C that is the base spec. Not great, but the important thing is does it work at all? If it can withstand the low temps it might do.
For solar the sun angle is not quite as limiting as you assume. Remember the sun altitude remains essentially unchanged for each 24 hour rotation around the horizon. If you look at winter outputs of solar panels at midday on sunny days at northerly latitudes where the maximum sun angle is similar (e.g. at 50N at the solstice that is just 16.5 degrees), and then correct for the cosine factor of panels being fixed at a suboptimal angle for maximal winter capture, and add in extra for reflection off the snow you might get up to 8% capacity factor when averaged out and allowing for cloud cover. IIRC Buckland, AK (a bit N of Nome) managed about 9%.
The British Antarctic Survey reports:
Winds at the South Pole are mostly controlled by the slope of the snow surface and are a relatively uniform 6 ms-1 (12 kt) from a direction of longitude 22° East. There are few calms or gales.
That probably helps with turbine design optimisation.
I’d suggest adding another diesel generator with a larger fuel tank before making “the switch”.
A side note: Are there any stats about how often “reliable renewables’ had to fall back on FF backups to keep the grid supplied?
GD, I have your requested side note data for the US. Based on NREL data.
Recall these are for the most favorable, first built out locations. More renewables inevitably means worse numbers.
For solar PV, the annual capacity factor is about 22% (SoCal) For onshore wind, capacity factor is about 32% (north Texas, Iowa). So, as a rule of thumb, FF backup is needed about 3/4 of the time—in the best locations! Europe numbers for both are worse, but I don’t recall exact figures. UK wind CF 26% compared to US 32% is precise over the past decade.
Sounds like renewables are “Lots of pain, but no gain.” 😎
Some years ago, during a discussion with an true believer Iowa relative, I found an official Iowa web site with data on Iowa wind generation at that time. One interesting little table showed 48% capacity factor during the 6 coldest months (not specified) and 16% during the 6 warmest months. It seems unlikely to me that those numbers could improve much over the intervening years. It doesn’t seem to add up to much justification for building the things.
If there ever was a place for a small modular reactor this is it
A slightly better on than “old leaky” at McMurdo but it worked for many years saving heaps of diesel
Does anyone build SMR’s in the sub-MW range?
My guess is that if they do, the cost is astronomical.
Voyager spacecraft is an example.
A couple of SMRs would make a heck of a lot more sense. Loads of reliable process heat and electricity, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
For a 170 KW load? Are you sure?
Why don’t they just tap into the ZPM at the Ancients’ old base?
OH! Wait. That was a Sci-Fi thing from Stargate SG-1.
(Maybe instead of spending huge amounts of money on pinwheels and mirrors, they spend a lot less on making a real ZPM? That would keep them busy and out of our hair. If money is to be wasted, that would be worth it.)
ZPM utilizing the inherent energy of matter at absolute zero.
I covered several variations of that physics nonsense in an energy chapter of Arts of Truth. Or, to quote you, the inherent energy at absolute zero is also zero, by definition. All the contra quantum arguements are bogus, since by observational definition they average to zero. Very hard to avoid the fundamental law of conservation of energy.
There are some UFO buffs who really think there are secret alien bases there. Maybe they could run a power line to the base. 🙂
Maybe they could get power beamed down from the alien base on the moon.
There are multiple otherwise rational people who firmly believe that Nicolai Tesla-free energy-electrogravitation technologies are real but are suppressed by the Powers That Be.
I saw a story a week or two ago that claimed that it was Tesla’s death ray that caused the Tunguska explosion, not a comet or asteroid.
How many kwhs of batteries will be needed to keep the batteries warm enough to function?
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One projection that is easy to make with 100% confidence: it will cost much more
Wind power was used in Antarctica very successfully nearly a century ago===>
https://www.jacobswind.net/history/original-company y
“Admiral Byrd and Little AmericaIn 1933 Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd made his second expedition to Antarctica and took with him a 2.5kW Jacobs machine. This machine provided power for lights and radio broadcasting at Byrd’s Little America base camp. The expedition ended in 1935 and the wind machine was left along with most of the camp.
In 1947, Byrd returned to the location of his old base camp to find it mostly covered except for the a section of the once 70 ft radio tower sticking out of the snow with the Jacobs machine on top, its blades “still turning in the breeze.” The machine remained at the Navy’s base until it was taken down in 1955.”
A local businessman had a Jacobs windmill running next to his house in town for years.
He ran an electric motor repair shop and was very respected, one of his sons is
still around the area. That Jacobs seemed to be reliable, well designed and built..
I was told the were used on a good number of ranches in central/eastern MT. My
granddad had a old “hit n miss” engine/generator and his father-in-law had a portable steam power
plant. I have some photos of him and his threshing crew from the 1920’s.
Not completely. He also had a stack of number 6 dry cell batteries possible to operate the radio if needed. Eveready what quite proud of this because when they returned to the camp latter, there were still a few left. One of them was returned to the lab after years of being frozen. When it was tested, they found it produced more power than one fresh off the assembly line.