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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Since most “isolated” installations require their diesel to supply their energy needs for at least 40% to 60% of the time, this 95% would seem to require a pact with the netherworld, in addition to the solar panels and wind turbines.
“The analysis, published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews”
What if they discover there’s no such kind of energy? Remember the journal ‘Advances in the atomic structure of phlogiston‘ … I thought not!
Actually, “renewable-sustainable” energy violates the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. The ambient system is changed in reaction to the drawing down of its energy by ,say from the wind, by windmills. Converting wind energy to mechanical rotation for generation of power increases entropy.
For example, imagine a super dense deployment of windmills in a mountain pass such that there is a damming effect on the air mass. The demand for air itself is created by a low pressure area downwind that must be satisfied. This causes air to be drawn from other directions than the pass. In other words, a large proportion of the air then bypasses the wind farm and alters the regional weather! Example:
wood energy is both renewable and sustainable
Renewable yes. Sustainable depends on volume.
Perhaps I should have said “potentially sustainable” because much logging/forestry work is poorly done- which is why I spent my entire 50 year forestry career bitch*ng about it. Currently, total wood in the forests of America is increasing, though the quality of that wood is sub ideal due to past poor logging. What’s needed now is excellent silviculture and that will include harvesting the “junk wood”. To improve the forests for the long term, it may mean cutting more than growth, for a while, until the forests consists of desired species and high quality stems.
A big unthought about aspect of wood as a renewable is it grows back in competition with with the progress in the general global greening activity, i.e., you reduce photosynthesis that would have taken place without the burning. Regrowth is also lagged over 50yrs, plus you also have to recover the added 30% CO2 generated in logging, chipping, pulverizing, sea shipping, connecting trucking both ends and replanting, and all this repeated annually!! Ohhhh, the entropy!!!
Whatever…. if humanity likes wood homes, wood furniture, and paper products- so be it. Any alternatives are worse.
Some forests in Germany have been managed for a thousand years. Not perfectly, mostly monoculture, but those forests still grow trees.
Provided you don’t burn more in a year than you harvest in a year and regrow in a year
see my reply to MarkW
And see above you.
Let’s see . . . the sun not shining at the South Pole for six months out of a full year, sure, NOT A PROBLEM . . . wind turbines at the South Pole being subjected to severe icing conditions, becoming unbalanced/low in efficiency/failing as a result, sure, NOT A PROBLEM . . . storage batteries at the South Pole being subjected to low temperatures in the range of -70 to -80 °F for the months of March through September, sure, NOT A PROBLEM.
/sarc off
Advice to reneweconomy.com as well as DOE-NREL : consult with some engineers having real world, practical experience before publishing such tripe.
The sun doesn’t shine at the equator for 4,380 hours in every 8,760 hours either…
At the South pole it is continuous (less cloud cover) during summer. Average is about 2,700 hours p.a., though there would still be weak output even with cloud cover.
Do you see a difference, in terms of required storage battery capacity, between having to accommodate intermittent solar power every 12 hours (maybe extending up to as much as a week for bad weather) versus an assured six months continuous absence of solar power at the South Pole during its winter?
I would not want to go there under this scheme unless there was 100% diesel backup and 100% diesel backup of the diesel backup.
They could review Hydro Tasmania’s “Hybrid Success Stories”. Hydro Tasmania set up wind, solar, battery and diesel on 3 islands – King Island, Flinders Island and Rottnest Island. Sort of close to Antarctica.
Hydro Tasmania’s web site seems to be missing data that shows how “successful” they are.
But they do have real time data dashboards that bell the cat..
I have viewed these close to 100 times for each island.
Most of the time, diesel seems to be the dominant power source.
I would say Game Over for Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
Why not ground sourced heat pumps. How far down would you have to drill?
BTW, they should try it and fast because the USA is going bankrupt.
Going bankrupt?
Hugely overbuilt:
“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.”
And yet only gets rid of 95% of diesel? So they still have to run monthly checks and make sure the fuel is ok, even though they might use it only during the middle of the Antarctic winter.
I’m surprised that they haven’t tried to super-Goldberg the system by adding H2 production and storage, and converting the diesel engine over. But maybe they don’t dare touch their “lifeline”.
But you know what? I don’t mind the scientists trying to walk their talk, trying to have a so-called green grid. I wish them luck, and when it fails utterly, I hope there are enough survivors to spread the word to other scientists that one cannot run a 21st century society and weather dependent power systems.
The USS Enterprise and the Millennium Falcon aren’t powered by biomass!
If they’re lucky, given the low incident angle of the sun at the south pole and the vagaries of wind…
170KW of solar might give them 17-20KW on a good day and 570KW of wind could give them 70KW in favorable wind conditions on a daily basis
But would either be able to both power the base and recharge a depleted battery in -20°C~-70°C conditions???
A good day would be 24 hours of sunshine. The plan for the panels is to have them back to back so assume 42.5kW facing at 90 degree angles around the horizon to even out the generation a bit. Each will be illuminated for 12 hours at an average cosine factor of close to 2/pi, so 1/pi over 24 hours. So each 42.5kW panel would generate roughly 13.3kWh, or around 40kWh in toto for the 4 panels.
The wind is trickier: it depends on the turbine design, which will need to be optimised for fairly steady winds of 6m/sec if the BAS are to be believed. If the winds are steady, then so will be the output, even if it is relatively inefficient.
Even at $40 a gallon it is surprising the most cost effective system is still the same old answer as everywhere else that doesn’t have nukes, geothermal or hydro, a mixture of fossil fuel peakers, solar, wind and battery. As the UK discovered, one year’s weather is not enough data, their storage estimates went way higher when they considered wind and solar droughts.
That is, battery storage is still more expensive even at $40/gallon diesel, for storage for significant durations.
Except, the fossil fuel peakers tend to produce cheaper electricity than wind or solar.
The closest, and also cheapest, any country can get to net-zero is nuclear base with FF peakers, but instead we’ve spent the last 25 years trying to go back to the 18th century.
Some countries can replace the FF by hydro. It’s the main basis for France. Some are lucky enough to be able to rely on hydro alone more or less, like Norway. Iceland in unique with its geothermal, but it relies on industry (aluminium smelting) taking most of the output so demand fluctuations are just a ripple on top.
The amount of power needed there is so high that it is a prime candidate for a reliable small nuclear reactor system… the problem is you can’t build a foundation.
Tho there is one “renewable power” solution I think they could use. You raise a flag up a pole and let it build ice for a day and then use its weight to turn a generator by gears and when the next flag is drawn over the top and freezes up… you see where that’s going.
They TRIED windmills but the amount of power needed to keep ice off them was more than the wind could provide.
The diesels aren’t optional: they use the “waste” heat from the generators to heat the base. That means as far as heat and lighting go the generators are converting more than 93% of the energy in the fuel into usable supply.
There is coal in the Antarctic. Just sayin…..
And regarding the use of nuclear generation at McMurdo, one wag economist calculated that it would have been far cheaper if they had bought dry cells from a convenience store in the US or New Zealand. As it was, they had to cut supply to each building in the base in turn, thus ruining many an experiment. Oh, the military.
When I was down visiting McMurdo in the ’70s the clean up covered a huge area. All the hills were rounded and smooth. Quite interesting. New Zealand refused to let the US authorities dump the contaminated “soil” in NZ, so it resides still in some spot in Texas. (Wasn’t it an atomic pile and not a reactor?)
It was replaced by large diesel tanks situated on the hill above the station. But the tanks were not surrounded by bunds as they should have been in case of tank failure. This in an volcanic zone with the occasional earthquake thrown in. Oh, the military again.
200 mph winds and a 24 hour crew to clean the solar panels? It might work!
of course.
ah, yes. There’s always THAT problem. Maybe not so “obvious” after all.
$57 million. That one hell of a lot of diesel. I’m sure they are assuming all the “renewables” won’t need renewing and what the cost of that might be.
It’s the air freight from Christchurch, NZ that makes it costly.
At least the optimum orientation would be near vertical you would not need to go out every day and clear the snow of the PV.
Now how about the ice build up on the wind turbines. IIRC Texas found out that was not a negligible problem in freezing weather.
I doubt it would happen at Amundsen-Scott. At local temperatures the snow is more like a desert sand.
FFS. So this is just about virtue signalling academics with ZERO common sense going to insane lengths to make a meaninglessly small contribution to “saving the planet”.
Regarding the photograph—assuming no elite-class athletes, one could reasonably expect about 100W per white lab coat.
There is a very simple solution, those at the station can decide for themselves which power source is best for them. The base will continue to use diesel but part of the base will be disconnected from the diesel energy supply and depend only on wind and solar. That way everyone is happy. If one part of the camp runs out of energy they must buy it from the other part of the camp. If anyone from either side decides the made the wrong choice they are free to move to the other camp.