Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

Idea here for storing excess RE in heat (hot sand) for later leccy generation. The storage medium means that the cost of storage is very low, but spoiler alert, no figure given for round trip efficiency.

Using Hot Sand To Store Energy

When it comes to short-duration energy storage, lithium-ion batteries are considered the front-runner, but batteries are not the whole story. Our buildings, businesses, industries, and grid need more storage, at lower cost, for longer durations, and at larger capacities than batteries can provide to displace fossil fuels for a sustainable future.

To meet this energy storage challenge, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are in the late stages of prototype testing a game-changing new thermal energy storage technology that uses inexpensive silica sand as a storage medium. Economic Long-Duration Electricity Storage by Using Low-Cost Thermal Energy Storage and High-Efficiency Power Cycle (ENDURING) is a reliable, cost-effective, and scalable solution that can be sited anywhere.

ENDURING uses electricity from surplus solar or wind to heat a thermal storage material — silica sand. Particles are fed through an array of electric resistive heating elements to heat them to 1,200°C (imagine pouring sand through a giant toaster). The heated particles are then gravity-fed into insulated concrete silos for thermal energy storage. The baseline system is designed for economical storage of up to a staggering 26,000 MWh of thermal energy. With modular design, storage capacity can be scaled up or down with relative ease.

ABrass

Martyn1981 said:

Idea here for storing excess RE in heat (hot sand) for later leccy generation. The storage medium means that the cost of storage is very low, but spoiler alert, no figure given for round trip efficiency.

Using Hot Sand To Store Energy

When it comes to short-duration energy storage, lithium-ion batteries are considered the front-runner, but batteries are not the whole story. Our buildings, businesses, industries, and grid need more storage, at lower cost, for longer durations, and at larger capacities than batteries can provide to displace fossil fuels for a sustainable future.

To meet this energy storage challenge, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are in the late stages of prototype testing a game-changing new thermal energy storage technology that uses inexpensive silica sand as a storage medium. Economic Long-Duration Electricity Storage by Using Low-Cost Thermal Energy Storage and High-Efficiency Power Cycle (ENDURING) is a reliable, cost-effective, and scalable solution that can be sited anywhere.

ENDURING uses electricity from surplus solar or wind to heat a thermal storage material — silica sand. Particles are fed through an array of electric resistive heating elements to heat them to 1,200°C (imagine pouring sand through a giant toaster). The heated particles are then gravity-fed into insulated concrete silos for thermal energy storage. The baseline system is designed for economical storage of up to a staggering 26,000 MWh of thermal energy. With modular design, storage capacity can be scaled up or down with relative ease.

Round trip efficiency isn't the only metric that matters.

If the system only does one charge/discharge cycle a year, charging in the summer and discharging in the winter) then the efficiency may be less important than the ability to store GWh of dispatchable power.

Bit I did think the exact same thing 

I think several studies say that overbuilding renewables by multiple times the need is the cheapest way to net zero. If you've got routine periods where electricity is more or less free then it doesn't matter of you're losing 50% of it of you can return it later for much much more.

michaels

ABrass said:

Martyn1981 said:

Idea here for storing excess RE in heat (hot sand) for later leccy generation. The storage medium means that the cost of storage is very low, but spoiler alert, no figure given for round trip efficiency.

Using Hot Sand To Store Energy

When it comes to short-duration energy storage, lithium-ion batteries are considered the front-runner, but batteries are not the whole story. Our buildings, businesses, industries, and grid need more storage, at lower cost, for longer durations, and at larger capacities than batteries can provide to displace fossil fuels for a sustainable future.

To meet this energy storage challenge, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are in the late stages of prototype testing a game-changing new thermal energy storage technology that uses inexpensive silica sand as a storage medium. Economic Long-Duration Electricity Storage by Using Low-Cost Thermal Energy Storage and High-Efficiency Power Cycle (ENDURING) is a reliable, cost-effective, and scalable solution that can be sited anywhere.

ENDURING uses electricity from surplus solar or wind to heat a thermal storage material — silica sand. Particles are fed through an array of electric resistive heating elements to heat them to 1,200°C (imagine pouring sand through a giant toaster). The heated particles are then gravity-fed into insulated concrete silos for thermal energy storage. The baseline system is designed for economical storage of up to a staggering 26,000 MWh of thermal energy. With modular design, storage capacity can be scaled up or down with relative ease.

Round trip efficiency isn't the only metric that matters.

If the system only does one charge/discharge cycle a year, charging in the summer and discharging in the winter) then the efficiency may be less important than the ability to store GWh of dispatchable power.

Bit I did think the exact same thing 

I think several studies say that overbuilding renewables by multiple times the need is the cheapest way to net zero. If you've got routine periods where electricity is more or less free then it doesn't matter of you're losing 50% of it of you can return it later for much much more.

Weirdly given the price differential over time of day and year it may make financial sense to sell none of the output when it is generated and sell the 50% recoverable from storage when the price may be more than twice as high as during the generation period....

Martyn1981

I wonder if rising gas prices will help stimulate more demand (or positive Gov policies) for RE? I don't have an answer, just thinking out loud.
Also shows the need for energy poverty policies.

UK energy bills to rise after record wholesale electricity prices

Household energy bills are to rise after prices on the UK’s wholesale electricity market soared to a record high last month, furthering concerns about more families being pushed into fuel poverty this winter.

The electricity market price passed the £100 a megawatt-hour mark last month for the first time since the market was formed in 1990, according to analysis by Imperial College London.

The average market price reached £107.50/MWh, up 14% on July, and well above the previous record of £96/MWh recorded in the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis.

The report, which was commissioned by the energy company Drax, suggested a boom in global gas prices was responsible for driving up UK wholesale electricity prices to record levels. Staffell said the surge in post-pandemic energy demand across the global economy may have been compounded by the impact of the climate crisis on global weather patterns.

Martyn1981

I thought this article was interesting, but the 'Hydrogen Ladder' image is a great and quick way to get an idea of where H2 shines ... or doesn't.

Chemical Engineer Paul Martin Reflects On Liebreich’s Hydrogen Ladder & #Hopium — Part 1

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

I wonder if rising gas prices will help stimulate more demand (or positive Gov policies) for RE? I don't have an answer, just thinking out loud.
Also shows the need for energy poverty policies.

UK energy bills to rise after record wholesale electricity prices

Household energy bills are to rise after prices on the UK’s wholesale electricity market soared to a record high last month, furthering concerns about more families being pushed into fuel poverty this winter.

The electricity market price passed the £100 a megawatt-hour mark last month for the first time since the market was formed in 1990, according to analysis by Imperial College London.

The average market price reached £107.50/MWh, up 14% on July, and well above the previous record of £96/MWh recorded in the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis.

The report, which was commissioned by the energy company Drax, suggested a boom in global gas prices was responsible for driving up UK wholesale electricity prices to record levels. Staffell said the surge in post-pandemic energy demand across the global economy may have been compounded by the impact of the climate crisis on global weather patterns.

Off topic but it is going to be an 'interesting' winter as the high summer gas prices have resulted in storage not being filled.  What started out as Russia flexing their muscles over the Nord Stream 2 may end up as a very uncomfortable winter in Europe, especially with lot of buildings trying to provide heat and more fresh air than usual.  I can see energy suppliers who haven't bought forward enough to cover their customer fixes going broke and people like me who have fixes ending next Feb/Mar seeing 50% plus price increases.

Martyn1981

You wait ages for a bus filled with hot sand or rocks, then two come along ........

So, not exactly the same as the hot sand idea from before, but here's a hot rock storage idea for excess leccy. Like the sand idea it's (literally) dirt cheap, and according to one of the comments has a round trip efficiency of 55-60% which sounds pretty decent for the medium size/term storage that will be needed once intraday batts reach an economic limit.

Just me pondering - these ideas, plus the recent CO2 storage idea (energy not sequestration), plus CAES, LAES, gravity storage and so on, and so on, does seem to suggest that solutions (to be clear, economic solutions) look like rolling out, and once one or two, or more, prove to have value, then they don't appear to have any scaleability issues, especially if they make use of locally sourced 'dirt', to be dirt cheap. So ..... optimistically, perhaps the medium term is now solved, and hopefully H2 can cover the longer and larger scale storage needed.

I won't shout 'Mission Accomplished', but perhaps we can start to whisper our excitement in darkened corners?

Hot Rock Energy Storage Will Soon Be A Reality In Denmark’s Electricity Grid

The Danish company Stiesdal, which is behind the TetraSpar full-scale demonstration project of the world’s first industrialized offshore foundation manufacturing and deployment system for wind turbines that I covered a few weeks back, is now realizing the first commercial demonstration energy storage system based on heating up rocks in big tanks on the island of Lolland in cooperation with neighboring island Falster.

Hot Rocks

The obvious strength of the system is its scalability. I covered test projects in development at DTU in March 2019 that have since shown that the approach of using rocks to store energy as heat is in fact feasible.

Martyn1981

If this article, and the report it's based on are correct, then new coal generation in India, and even the generation currently under construction, is now un-economical v's RE.

And the even better news, is that it looks like new coal generation is struggling to, or simply can't get, independent financial support/funding. Looks like the 800lb Economics Gorilla continues to rule supreme.

Just to stress my excitement on reading this article - if it's correct, and I'm reading/understanding it correctly too, then the negative pressures on coal generation in India exist today - they are not reasonable assumptions for the future, but actually starting to bite today, and not a day too soon.

IEEFA Says New Coal Power Plants In India Will Become Stranded Assets

The Institute For Energy Economics And Financial Analysis says India is hell bent on building a fleet of new coal-fired generating stations — 33 gigawatts (GW) currently under construction and another 29 GW in pre-construction. All of them will  wind up being stranded assets, says Kashish Shah, a research analyst at IEEFA. “Coal-fired power simply cannot compete with the ongoing cost reductions of renewables. Solar tariffs in India are now below even the fuel costs of running most existing coal-fired power plants.

“In the last 12 months no new coal-fired power plants have been announced, and there has been no movement in the 29 GW of pre-construction capacity. This reflects the lack of financing available for new coal fired power projects, and also the flattening of electricity demand growth, which has impacted coal the most.”

Only India’s state-owned Power Finance Corporation and Rural Electrification Corporation continue to tout new coal-fired power capacity, but that may have more to do with politics than economics. Nearly half of the 33 GW of capacity now under construction in India is sponsored by those state-owned companies. IEEFA suggests they should “walk away” from those “under construction” projects now to avoid the risk of them sitting idle after they are completed.

Martyn1981

Carbon Commentary Newsletter time.

 1, DNV Energy Transition Outlook. When looking at forecasts, I think it's often helpful to compare this year’s numbers with those in the previous edition. It is the direction of movement that is most useful to study, not the absolute numbers. In the case of the extremely thorough DNV report, the first comparison should alarm us. Global 2050 energy emissions were forecast at 17 gigatonnes last year. The number has risen to 19 gigatonnes in the report published this week, with the new forecast exhausting the 1.5 degrees budget by 2030. The reason for the increase is that in 2020 the effects of Covid on energy emissions were seen as permanent. That turned out to be incorrect and forecast 2050 energy demand is 12% up on last year.
 
Other numbers are more encouraging. Aided by the arrival of hydrogen as an excellent mechanism for storing surpluses, renewables are seen to provide 82% of all electricity by mid-century compared to last year’s 60%. Estimated hydrogen production, still much lower than many recent other forecasts, has been increased by nearly 50% in the last year. Much more H2 is expected to come from renewable electricity, not fossil fuels. Cumulative solar installations have gone up 17% to 12.4 TW in 2050, almost twenty times today’s level. But, as a result of the increase in energy use, the share of electricity in final demand has fallen slightly to 38%, leaving the world still consuming almost as much natural gas as today for heat and other uses. Net zero will still be a very long distance away. 
 
2, Hydrogen trains in Italy. A plan to convert a mountainous railway line in Italy into a hydrogen-only route was backed by the EU. Partners in the project include the Spanish utility Iberdrola and US construction company Aecom. The 300 km line, which runs through regions damaged by recent earthquakes, is only partly electrified and uses ageing diesel locomotives. I think this may be the first railway line to plan full conversion to hydrogen. 
 
3, Passivhaus and low energy use buildings. The UK has a very poor record in constructing homes and other buildings to good insulation and airtightness standards. The building industry has successfully blocked government attempts to improve construction methods by claiming that better insulation would cost too much. One of the most demanding standards is called Passivhaus, which was developed in Germany and will usually allow a domestic home in the UK to run comfortably without central heating. A Passivhaus study two years ago suggested that it should be possible to build home to high standards at about a 4% premium to conventional techniques. Another study this week suggested a likely cost penalty of less than 1% for buildings constructed in the University College London estate. And this is before the benefits of lower operating costs and reduced maintenance expenditures.
 
4. Biochar. This is the carbon-rich charcoal that remains after wood, straw and other organic material have been heated to very temperatures in the absence of oxygen, driving off gases and liquids. Biochhar is easy to make with rudimentary equipment in the Tropics. Does it improve agricultural yields and hold carbon in the soil? Scientists and practitioners have argued about this for a decade because of the wide variety of experimental results in different parts of the world. Now a recent article looks at the evidence from 1700 academic studies showing, on average, strongly beneficial effects. Yield increases typically range from 10%-46%, say the authors. The carbon in biochar is stored in the soil for centuries. Emissions of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide are lower in biochar treated soil. Fertiliser use can be reduced. So the effect of biochar on emissions may be strongly positive. One previous study suggested that biochar application might result in the storage of the equivalent 0.7-1.8 gigatonnes of CO2 per year, or up to perhaps 5% of global emissions. And there is the increased soil productivity on top of this benefit. Alongside rock weathering (mentioned in last week’s edition), biochar is one of the easiest ways of achieving negative emissions.
 
5, Hydrogen pipelines. My guess is that pipelines will supply a large fraction of the hydrogen needed in energy-poor countries such as Germany. The cost involved is far lower than liquefying gas for sea transport or converting to ammonia. Energy-rich states are beginning to investigate the use of pipelines to get the hydrogen to customers. Last week, Ukraine said it would search for investment in a new pipeline into the EU. It said that its capacity to make hydrogen would be about 5 billion cubic metres a year. This is about one tenth of what will be transported by Nord Stream 2 (and hydrogen has a lower energy value than natural gas at equivalent pressure) but would provide about a third of today’s German need for ‘grey’ hydrogen.
 
6, Heavy truck electrification. The debate over whether heavy trucks can be fully electrified, or will need to rely on hydrogen fuel cells, continues. A respected think-tank has modelled how far 40 tonne electric trucks can travel with a 1 tonne battery pack, both now and in the future. It shows that the truck will have a range of 500 km, assuming one 45 minute charging stop. This distance will cover 95% of all heavy vehicle trips within the EU. The effect of heavy battery weight on the maximum load that can be carried will become insignificant as the EV chassis becomes lighter and batteries more efficient. The analysis in this document provides very useful numbers for further discussion of this question, including estimates of battery weight and efficiency. If correct, it demonstrates that batteries can economically power all but the heaviest long-distance vehicles.
 
7, Solar growth rates. Solar provided about 3.1% of world electricity last year from about 780 GW of capacity. With the growth of installed PV expected by the industry, 2025 would see almost 8% of current global electricity demand met by solar. But growing at this rate, it will take another 10 years for incremental solar capacity to cover the predicted 2.1% annual increase in global electricity demand. (Of course new wind turbines will be also adding to electricity supply). Facing the headwinds of rising silicon prices and the pandemic, some markets have nevertheless grown at unprecedented rates in 2021. France, for example, installed as much in the first half of 2021 as the whole of 2020. (Thanks to Marc Muré).

8, More on heavy vehicle electrification. The Swiss brewery group Feldschlösschen put 20 heavy Renault trucks into service, claiming it is the largest such fleet in the world. Partly powered by on-site solar power, the trucks have a range of about 200 km a day. I thought it was interesting that the company’s push into electric transport seems to have been strongly encouraged by customer demand for low-carbon transport. But there is no claim that it saves money yet. The use of electric vehicles is only one part of Feldschlösschen’s decarbonisation strategy; some of the heat used in its operations now comes from burning the alcohol taken out of its alcohol-free beer.
 
9, Cement.  For at least a decade after its invention/discovery, nobody quite knew what to do with graphene, the ultra-thin carbon structure. The material is light, extremely strong and long-lasting. So it makes obvious sense to use it to strengthen concrete, responsible for about 8% of world emissions. Very gradually, graphene is creeping into early use in construction. HS2, the vastly expensive new railway that will run from London over 200 km north to Birmingham, will experiment with using graphene-enhanced concrete in some parts of the project. The choice will mean that interior reinforcement by steel (‘rebar’) may not be needed. And the weight of concrete required will fall. According to HS2, these two consequences of graphene use combined with 3D printing of the concrete using robots, will cut carbon by up to 50%. This will help, but capturing CO2 at the plants that make the cement for the concrete will also be necessary. Heidelberg Cement said in June that it would upgrade its Slite plant in Sweden to create the world’s first carbon neutral cement factory. Details were very sparse. (Thanks to Michael King). 
 
10, Electrolysers. A fascinating chart on the amount of announced electrolyser capacity by 2030. Spain (71 GW) appears to have seven times as much planned as the next European country, the Netherlands, and then comes Greece on 5 GW. (Thanks to Raymond Betz). Many other states have few large installations yet committed.  

Martyn1981

More news and progress on hydrogen production. I hope these ideas work and we start to develop more ways to utilise additional RE when it is in excess. We've pushed about half the FF generation off the grid in the last 10 or so years, so 'just' the other half to go now!  

Grimsby to host UK green hydrogen pilot

Grimsby, on the UK’s east coast, has been chosen as the location for an innovative electrolyser project for renewable hydrogen production.

The Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU) funded OYSTER project will develop and demonstrate an electrolyser system designed to be integrated with offshore wind turbines.

The project will also investigate the potential of using pipelines to transport green hydrogen.

Reaching the EU Hydrogen Strategy target of 40GW of electrolysers by 2030 is expected to require both onshore and offshore electrolysers.