Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

markin

So £25.5B for 20 hrs? 

Martyn1981

ABrass said:

markin said:

Martyn1981 said:

For those that have put up with my waffle for years, LAES and Highview may ring bells as I've gone on about them so much. So here's the good news, they are now going full scale* in the UK with one of their larger and longer term storage facilities having previously deployed smaller proof of concept facilities.
*Even this 250MWh facility is just the start, as the units are modular, so they can be scaled up to a GWh+ by simply duplicating the build on site.

World’s biggest liquid air battery starts construction in UK

Construction is beginning on the world’s largest liquid air battery, which will store renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants.

The project near Manchester, UK, will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. When demand is higher, the liquid air is released back into a gas, powering a turbine that puts the green energy back into the grid.
A big expansion of wind and solar energy is vital to tackle the climate emergency but they are not always available. Storage is therefore key and the new project will be the largest in the world outside of pumped hydro schemes, which require a mountain reservoir to store water.

The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will be able to power up to 200,000 homes for five hours, and store power for many weeks. Chemical batteries are also needed for the transition to a zero-carbon world and are plummeting in price, but can only store relatively small amounts of electricity for short periods.

So 340M per GW for 5hr, Just over 1B to replace SC for 5hrs, so 5B for 24h of storage? £20B for 4 days, get building them now.

You've got the wrong units. That's a 250MWh storage system. Given its rated for 5 hours it's only a 50MW system.

But you're also assuming a linear price scaling mechanism, which has never been true in the history of anything, especially not when you're talking about the first of its kind to be built at any industrial scale. Doubling the size of the tanks to turn it from 5 hours to 10 probably would be a small fraction of the cost. Assuming anyone wanted that, which they don't.

Also, it'll probably be charging from HPC overnight some of the time. HPC can't be turned off when no one wants the power, or turned up when we do want it, so that nuclear energy will be shoved into the grid irrespective of anything else. LAES and chemical batteries will absorb that wasted power and keep it for another hour.

Yep, the set up is modular, and highly flexible. A point they made some years ago is that their technology is based entirely on off the shelf kit used by the chemical industry, so if you want to double the power, just install twice as much kit for processing the leccy, if you want twice as much energy, just double the storage element, or do both, from 20MW/80MWh up to 200MW/1,200MWh. From there you scale up by deploying more sites.

The benefits to leccy customers are reduced costs, as these storage facilities offer lots of services, not just the ability to increase generation during excess times when it's very, very cheap, but also many other ancillary services, such as:

Along with providing the same kind of baseload power as a conventional power plant, the new energy storage facility will also provide a full slate of grid services including market arbitrage, synchronous voltage support, frequency regulation and reserves, synchronous inertia, black start capabilities, and other services that monetize the facility while efficiently balancing electricity supply and demand, as described by Highview.

Air-Powered Energy Storage Knocks Out Coal & Gas — Wait, What?

ABrass

markin said:

So £25.5B for 20 hrs? 

No.
Happy to help.

ASavvyBuyer

Wind generation doing well today:

joefizz

Martyn1981 said:

Air-Powered Energy Storage Knocks Out Coal & Gas — Wait, What?

I was under an NDA until the start of the month on something similar, so if you ever wondered why I kept saying there were different definitions of the word 'battery', now you know ;-)

Martyn1981

joefizz said:

Martyn1981 said:

Air-Powered Energy Storage Knocks Out Coal & Gas — Wait, What?

I was under an NDA until the start of the month on something similar, so if you ever wondered why I kept saying there were different definitions of the word 'battery', now you know ;-)

I simply assumed that you (like all the rest of us) knew that there were many, many different forms of storage that we could mix and match. On here we've been discussing them for getting on 10yrs.
But good on you for finally catching up. 

michaels

ASavvyBuyer said:

Wind generation doing well today:

What are the economics of biomass?  Is there a CFD which it makes it economic for it to produce rather than Gas/imports?  Or is it just cheap?

Could the UK grid go FF fuel free/zero carbon currently (obviously for a limited period) or will there always be some gas or whatever switched on 'just in case'?

silverwhistle

I know I'm being lazy, but what is "other" in the above chart?

Martyn1981

Extracts from the carbon Commentary Newsletter. I thought No.9 was important, proving yet again the importance of 'negawatts' - you don't need to produce as much clean energy, if you need less energy.

1, Synthetic fuels. Spain’s Repsol made a €80m commitment to two synthetic fuels refineries. It will spend €60m to capture CO2 from the flue gases at an oil refinery near Bilbao and merge the gas with hydrogen from electrolysis to make hydrocarbons. The initial plant, to be opened by 2026, will initially produce about 3.5 million litres a year. This is a much smaller number than the Norwegian synthetic fuels refinery announced last week, which is looking to expand to about 500m litres by the same date. (Norway details from a web presentation here). Repsol will also develop a waste-to-gas plant near Bilbao and feed the gas into the oil refinery. It says that the plant could eventually use all the municipal waste from the local area. Curiously, Repsol, claims that ‘waste-to-gas’ can be part of the circular economy. This is a questionable assertion; the losses in such a process are likely to mean a significant amount of CO2 ends up in the atmosphere. (Thanks to Manu Sainz).
 
2, Hydrogen trains. Alstom announced another potential customer for its hydrogen train. SNAM, the Italian gas grid operator, will provide the hydrogen infrastructure for a possible start in 2021 in Italy. The Alstom iLint has been working successfully on a route in the north east of Germany and trials in France and the UK have also been announced.
3, Fast fashion. An interesting small academic study looked at how attitudes to fashion purchasing were changed by education on how clothes are made. Some training was also given to participants on how to repair or redesign clothing. The researchers noted substantial changes in how fashion items were envisaged, shifting from being seen as short-lived consumables, similar to food, toward articles capable of being continuously refashioned and reused. Most participants said they would not buy 'fast fashion' again. The principal author commented ‘we have… shown that it is possible to change people’s shopping behaviour by providing them with new skills and knowledge, with appropriate equipment and meeting spaces, and peers with whom they can share their thoughts.’ In the UK, an item is typically worn only about a hundred times before being thrown away, making ‘fast fashion’ an increasingly large fraction of carbon emissions. (Although the full environmental cost of clothing is often not directly measured in national CO2 accounts because most clothes are made in a small number of Asian countries ).
 
4, Hydrogen in steel-making. Another major steelmaker announced an intent to switch to hydrogen. Liberty Steel, one of the top ten manufacturers outside China, confirmed it is seeking to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. CEO Sanjeev Gupta said ‘Renewable energy becomes cheaper by the day’ and hydrogen from electrolysis should be competitive with coal at prices of $1-2/kg or about 3 to 6 cents per kilowatt hour. ($2/kg is highly likely to be achieved in the best locations within a few years). Gupta said that the group would make its own hydrogen using electricity from solar PV. (Thanks to Steven Edwards). 
 
5, Climate conventions. The French citizens’ convention drew to a close. The proposals will now go directly to the government, which has indicated a willingness to legislate on the recommendations, or even to hold a referendum. I guess that the proposed measures are likely to be very different to those to be proposed by the UK Climate Assembly. The French group has voted, for example, to reduce the speed limit on main roads, to try to cut the numbers of new cars sold and to constrain the use of advertising. More than in the UK’s equivalent convention, the members seem to want change society and its consumption patterns as part of the decarbonisation endeavour. 
5, Hydrogen storage in salt caverns. If the world does move to ‘renewables plus hydrogen’ as the basis of its energy system, it will need huge storage capacity for the gas. A study showed that the space available in salt caverns in northern Europe is easily sufficient. The German researchers estimated that the total capacity is about 84,000 Terawatt hours, with particular good storage capacity in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. For comparison, the UK’s total current annual energy demand is about 2,200 TWh. 
 
7, Liquid air storage. Highview Power announced the financing of a storage plant in Manchester, UK. Air is chilled to a liquid when power is cheap and then expanded through gas turbines when electricity is needed. The project is reported to have a storage capacity of 250 MWh and a cost of about £85m. This equates to a capital cost of about £340/$420 per kWh, probably about 3 times the figure for a large battery system. It will have a round-trip efficiency of 60-75%, compared to 80%+ for lithium ion and more for a flow battery. Response times to power emergencies will also be significantly slower, meaning it will not be able to access some payments for grid services. It will also require more people to run and maintain the plant than other energy storage methods. The big advantage is its long life but I doubt whether this is a sufficiently strong financial justification.  (Thanks to the several people who wrote to me about this new project).
8, Efficient buildings as storage media. An impressive Italian study commissioned by insulation firm Knauf looked at the possibility of using domestic buildings for energy storage. The academic work examined how long a large fully renovated four story development in Milan would retain heat on an average winter day with outside temperatures ranging between 0 and 6. If the building operates its heating system for two days to get the interior up to 24 degrees, followed by turning off the heating, it would then take five days to fall below 19.5 degrees, the minimum regarded as acceptable. The unrenovated building would have seen the temperature fall to 19.5 degrees in under 12 hours in the same circumstances. The core argument of this impressive paper is that not only does radically improved insulation decrease the total heat need of homes but it also allows buildings just to use heating when energy supplies are abundant, such as during times of windy weather.
 
9, BP Statistical Review. The new CEO adopted a very different tone to his predecessor, mentioning the importance of hydrogen for the first time and stressing that the technologies to get to net zero do ‘exist today – the challenge is to use them at pace and scale’. Last year, Bob Dudley had said that ‘coal-to-gas switching’ was likely to be required but Bernard Looney focuses entirely on renewables and CCUS. However BP still avoids any direct statement of its own responsibility to act urgently, stressing that it is ‘committed to playing our part’ but continuing to place responsibility on wider society to ‘make a radical shift in all our behaviours’. I thought it was also interesting that Looney used the phrase ‘build back better’, a phrase associated with the political left and not a comment I expected from an oil major. But the challenge continues to be immense: BP also points out that increased renewable power is still not covering the global growth in electricity consumption, let alone reducing it.
 
10, Uses of hydrogen. I wrote a post that looks at the main experiments/pilots/trials on the use of hydrogen in the main sectors that cannot be completely electrified, such as long distance aviation and steel-making. The examples are mainly from north-western Europe. My main point is that, with the partial exception of cement production, every single greenhouse gas emitting sector can either run on electricity or hydrogen, or some combination of both. Many governments around the world, and some oil companies, now see this possibility. A leaked document suggests the EU Commission agrees and sees potential for the chemical industry, steel and transport saying ‘Hydrogen is one of the enablers in the context of the Green Deal for decarbonising sectors like chemical industry, steel industry and transport’. The UK, with the notable exception of Scotland, has largely chosen to ignore the opportunity.

michaels

michaels said:

ASavvyBuyer said:

Wind generation doing well today:

What are the economics of biomass?  Is there a CFD which it makes it economic for it to produce rather than Gas/imports?  Or is it just cheap?

Could the UK grid go FF fuel free/zero carbon currently (obviously for a limited period) or will there always be some gas or whatever switched on 'just in case'?

So looking at the history graphs I can't see gas ever having gone below 3gw even when they have been paying a fortune to have power taken off their hands so there would seem to be some requirement for at least some FF to be kept in operation at all times.  Does anyone know why?