Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

shinytop

Martyn1981 said:

shinytop said:

Martyn1981 said:

Carbon Commentary newsletter time.

See correction at the end, if like me you were confused by last weeks calcs on gravity storage.

I thought item 9 was very important with his calcs suggesting an 81% increase in annual leccy demand with transport and space heating moved to leccy. That sounds fine, better than I thought actually. But the impact on peak demand will need management as he suggests. My first thought was V2G / V2H during peak periods, perhaps 4pm to 8pm? And if smart chargers are to be limited during these periods, then perhaps heatpumps could carry some load reduction requirements too?

Interesting.  The author has probably come to the right conclusion about ASHP peaks (that they are lower than ff heating) using the wrong assumptions.  An ASHP doesn't have to have the same peak usage pattern as gas CH; it's better not to run it like a gas boiler but keep it running most of the time. There's no point in cranking it up to heat your cold house at 6pm when you're due home from work because it'll be bedtime before it warms up.  I'm exaggerating but you get the point.   My ASHP is off and uses no energy 12-5am and has a single peak when it starts up at 5am.  Other than that usage depends on the outside temperature.  Even people who turn theirs down during the day should not do it by much.  

A battery that could run them for 3-4 hours could smooth out in-day demand for heat pumps. Or your V2G enabled EV.    

Thanks for that, I was wondering the same. In my head I had the 'hot country' peak where A/C gets cranked up as folk head home, but was thinking that for cold homes it would be too late. I only have the small air to air units assisting, so couldn't speak for 'proper jobs' like yourself, but did think that peak periods could be avoided or demand reduced. Am I right in thinking that for underfloor heating it takes days to warm up / cool down, so avoiding an evening peak and or responding to TOU tariffs is wholly possible and sensible?

BTW, many thanks to you and RR for all the heatpump advice as for 10yrs+ any threads would get jumped on by one poster telling us all how they don't work. Though I must admit, I struggle to follow a lot of what you two guys discuss. 

No problem. That's the problem with heat pumps, the industry is still quite immature in the UK and users often have to know more that they'd like to to get them to work properly.  And a lot of installers are plumbers/fitters, not heating engineers.   

UFH does take longer to warm up/cool down as it tends to be designed to run at lower temps than radiators and the water pipes heat up the concrete 'slab', which radiates heat into the room.  With rads, it's more direct with the hot pipes/radiators heating the room directly.  It's not recommended to have more than a 2-3 degree setback with ufh.

Martyn1981

shinytop said:

Martyn1981 said:

shinytop said:

The Guardian usually features in this thread quite a lot but I think this might have been missed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/10/france-to-build-up-to-14-new-nuclear-reactors-by-2050-says-macron?fbclid=IwAR3k7qdfQWo7t7uYEj10YhS-I4x99XEYUIvIa51yNWaJ4CEUrPwPbQXMfFA

They're building some wind and PV too, so a balanced approach. 

I apologise for this long and winding (windy) response, but I just wanted to make clear that whilst I think the arguments for nuclear these days are simply ideological, the counter arguments are reasonable, based on facts and evidence, and have developed over a decade as the technology and economics of RE and storage have evolved.

I'll respond because it was my (slightly) tongue in cheek comment you responded to.  Thanks and some very interesting points.

I still have never seen explained what 'storage' is, what it costs and when it will appear.  Lots of trials, schemes and ideas though. Until I do I'm not convinced that the UK's wind-based strategy RE will work.  I certainly don't have an ideological attachment to nuclear; I just think we need a reliable energy source.

FWIW I think a worldwide grid based on PV is a viable solution. We'd need co-operation and some allies in sunny places but we've had that with oil for the last 100 plus years.    

Sorry, thought I'd replied, probably deleted it by mistake instead of posting.

For storage if you are brave, have a read through this thread, we've been chatting about storage since the start, and on other threads before that. But as QrizB points out, it depends on what you want.

But before we look at storage, we also have to consider, when do you want it? For me, I would have said yesterday, sounds logical, but I'd be completely wrong. Since most RE has free fuel, then the cost of additional generation is minimal, whereas an excess of FF gen, would carry fuel costs, and nuclear doesn't really save anything running lower (if it can ramp down) so best to find some use for it, or sell it cheap to the neighbours (like France does).

So step one is overcapacity. That sounds like a waste to me, but if you think about it on a micro scale, such as an off-grid home, you wouldn't install expensive batts to catch every last drop, you'd start of with excess gen, let's say too much PV for the summer, but enough for the winter, [this probably isn't a good example for the UK, but hopefully the theory makes sense.] Of course if batts were dirt cheap, then you'd take a different approach.

So all of the models, reports, articles, studies etc I've read, and hopefully provided links to over the years, always seem to start off with overcapacity as the best economical model.

After that, as the excess starts to get larger, and more regular/reliable, you start to roll out intraday storage, the simplest seeming to be batteries.

[Technically, there are two steps before that:

firstly storage/batts to provide FFR (firm frequency response), but that's already happened/happening once batts reached the point where the market started to award them contracts because they are the best (code for cheaper, more economical), I also recall a flywheel deployment for the UK/Ireland interconnector, long time ago, I think it was only 20kWh, but massive power a MW or so.

and secondly peakers. These provide very fast additional supply as they can ramp up fast, so diesel generator farms, and OCGT (open cycle gas turbine), which isn't a million miles away from a jet engine with a drive shaft coming out the back (probably not a great analogy). Batt storage has also started to take over this role, again thanks to economics.]

So, back to intraday storage, this is probably the role that batts will largely fill, and we can see examples already starting to appear (shout out to CW's recent post about 0.8GW/1.6GWh batts in Scotland). We also shouldn't ignore demand side batts, be it an individual home batt that simply timeshifts solar, or schemes like Tesla's Autobidder where they operate a VPP (virtual power plant) by managing 100's or 1,000's of home batts. I think the state of Southern Australia was targeting 50,000 PWII's, ideally in low income homes, to help balance the grid.

V2G could be huge, perhaps 1,500GWh potential from just UK cars if they were all BEV's, and offered two way charging. [I smell a second post / part two on this.]

Also under intraday will be batt storage at RE generation sites. I'm probbaly going back 5yrs+, but posted somewhere articles/statements from the RE generation industry explaining how perfectly placed they are. They have RE sites with a leccy connection. If gen is too good, then they can pop it in storage, if supply is low, they can top it up from storage, and in the longer term future, even import excess when they (say PV) aren't generating much, but another form (say wind) is. The reason they gave for it being perfect, was that the sites will already have some spare land, so they can simply add storage, probably modular over time, with little to no disruption, when the economics make sense - cheap enough batts (obviously), good enough income (not as obvious), once the batts will get enough use to make them viable.

Crossing over with conventional batts, will then be flow batts and PHS, which cost more to deploy, but can offer a longer, perhaps lower, level of power v's total energy, and can cope with cycles and time with little degradtion, so their economics improve with scale and longevity. Flow batts exist, and they work, but costs are still high, but will reduce with increases in scale of production, just like Lithium batts have.

At this point I'll admit it's getting harder to work out where different technologies slot in, time wise, but we probably have the tested gravity based systems, but we need to see how they stack up (pun intended) economically. We also have LAES (liquid air energy storage), the main developer being the UK's Highview, a company I've been following passionately for perhaps 10yrs now with ever larger test sites, and who started grid scale storage about 3 or 4 yrs ago, and are now developing multiple sites, the ones in Spain total 2GWh.

There's compressed CO2 energy storage, I think CW gets another award for posting about this on here, perhaps a year ago? Then there's CAES (compressed air energy storage), which has vast scale if large cavities such as old salt mines can be used, but now we are falling into 50% efficiency areas. Then I suppose H2 production, which can be done with electrolysis, and again stored on scale, either on site for perhaps the existing fleet of CCGT (combined cycle gas generation) to use, we have about 25GW's of CCGT. Storage could also be vast like CAES.

I will have missed and forgotten many other possible solutions, but of course all of these 'solutions' depend not just on their costs and cycle efficiencies, but crucially as QrizB mentioned, how often they get to cycle, since the less they operate, the less they earn. The good news is though that longer term storage will be mopping up the dregs left over after intraday storage has filled its boots, so this excess gen will be cheap. And at the other end, expect intraday to meet daily fluctuations, so longer term storage will be selling into demand when supply is low and spot prices are rising, so they'll earn a larger arbitrage amount, for eample let's just say bought at £10/MWh and sold at £100/MWh, but after  cycle losses and infrequent cycles, we won't see this rolling out till (again) there's enough excess (both volume and regularity) to make it financially viable.

I really should shut up now, but another form of storage, kinda, is interconnectors. Why store excess when you can shift it to someone else who needs it, for instance my PV excess going to neighbours, Scottish RE excess going to England, French nuclear to many countries. It's reasonable to assume that Western Europe as a whole, will have less excess than the sum of excess for each country if interconnectors couldn't shift it around.


So just a quick recap - I used to think that storage was akin to a tree, "When's the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. When's the second best time? Today." But it seems it's more of a natural development that goes hand in hand with an economical amount of RE waste/spill/curtailment, as the waste becomes uneconomic, storage rolls out, and the two will perform this economic dance. Of course, higher wholesale leccy prices give storage a boost, so I assume many folk are trying to work out should they start deploying storage now, or will Mr Putin re-open the gas taps, and their investment won't (yet) be economically viable?

Sorry if all this makes little sense, and is just too jumbled and wandering, but you have multiple storage technologies, multiple forms of storage need (timewise), multiple economic and political factors, so it's all a bit of a mess. But crucially the acid test is the growth of RE as a percentage of UK leccy generation, and corresponding displacement of FF's, which has been great ...... so far.

michaels

Mart.  Agree with all that, just not sure that the specific economics relating to CfD mean that overbuild might push up average price per unit due to paying for the potential spill.  I think we are not quite at frequent appreciable spill yet (there is still some gas, biomass and switching imports to exports to displace even at low demand) bur we are getting close with the current wind pipeline let alone any contracted n the new auctions - if we did end up with 50% spill from say 3x nominal/max output overcapacity then the effective cost per unit of the used power will be 50% more than the CfD price.

QrizB

michaels said:

... if we did end up with 50% spill from say 3x nominal/max output overcapacity then the effective cost per unit of the used power will be 50% more than the CfD price.

If the CfD is £40/MWh that would put the effective price at £60/MWh, which is similar to the BEIS long-term forecast. (Their forecasts don't often match reality, but that's another matter.)

Martyn1981

So as I typed this I had a thought:

V2G could be huge, perhaps 1,500GWh potential from just UK cars if they were all BEV's, and offered two way charging. [I smell a second post / part two on this.]

I've mentioned Euan Mearns before, he was well known on the green, sustainable, renewable etc sites, as he's a big fan of nuclear and tended to try to explain why it's unavoidable. But he produced a great paper a while back, some I agree with, some I'd question, but crucially it 'proved' if you believe him, that the UK would need 500GWh of intraday leccy storage in the future to meet a 100% RE state. Thus, sort of showing that's it's largely not possible ...... oops!

But the timing was interesting as BEV's started to scale up, and the Bolt and TM3 came out, and BEV numbers started to scale rapidly. The article get's around this by suggesting that folk won't use V2G as it'll shorten the life of the batts by adding more cycles, but studies actually showed that the relatively light work of providing a few kW's to the grid, v's providing 100's of kW's when the GO pedal is floored, doesn't stress the batts, and in the case of the Leaf's being tested, seemed to improve their SOH.

And, longevity of BEV batts kept growing, with life expectancies starting to dwarf the mileage that most owners ever expect to do.

The article also suggests that folk won't want to share their power when there's a shortage, and will hoard it, but I can't balance that argument with intraday storage, since it's just a daily fluctuation being managed, so how would I (for example) even know, or care that there was a shortage at 9am, or 5.30pm? Isn't that exactly what you are signing up to?

So back to the top of the article and if 500GWh of intraday storage is possible (again shout out to CW and an example of a 1.6GWh storage rollout, so why not hundreds of such deployments, even if 'only' 50MW/200MWh?) through multiple solutions, then it gets really interesting suggesting that just wind and PV would meet 87% of demand and gas/bio-gas providing 13%.

Next, note the spill/export of 34%. If that was used to produce H2 for longer term storage, then even at a 40% efficiency rate it would provide the 13% gas generation.

So, if 500GWh of intraday storage is possible, and it looks doable to me, then Euan accidentally 'proved' that 100%(ish) RE is doable, which wasn't his intention, and thus probably 'proves' the RE + storage argument more than if a RE fan presented it.

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Mart.  Agree with all that, just not sure that the specific economics relating to CfD mean that overbuild might push up average price per unit due to paying for the potential spill.  I think we are not quite at frequent appreciable spill yet (there is still some gas, biomass and switching imports to exports to displace even at low demand) bur we are getting close with the current wind pipeline let alone any contracted n the new auctions - if we did end up with 50% spill from say 3x nominal/max output overcapacity then the effective cost per unit of the used power will be 50% more than the CfD price.

OK I'm missing something here, how does the CfD push up the average price? Shirley the CfD is independent, it pays the top up based on the average market spot price, so it's a secondary source of income, and wouldn't affect the spot price, would it?

Let's say a wind farm sells at £10/MWh but has a £50/MWh spot price, the market price is still £10, and falling if supply is growing and demand falling, the CfD top up of £40 wouldn't impact the wholesale price. Similarly if the wind farm sells at £100, the market rate, and then has to hand £50 back to the CfD scheme, it wouldn't impact the market rate.

At least that's what I'd have thought?


Regarding paying for ever more spill (my words not yours) wouldn't that encourage storage, since that wasted RE gen isn't offsetting demand at other times, which would let wholesale average prices rise (in context), raising the value of stored leccy. This is what I meant by the 'dance' since storage will rise as the economics improve, but too much excess would undermine storage, but at the same time, too much excess, with falling CfD's would undermine RE rollout, so they would probably grow in a symbiotic relationship as the market/economics dictate.

gefnew

A bit of a disaster in Wales.
Giant wind turbine collapse to be investigated - BBC News

Verdigris

Blimey! At least it wasn't the new one put up by Ripple Energy, which is in the same general area.

QrizB

gefnew said:

A bit of a disaster in Wales.
Giant wind turbine collapse to be investigated - BBC News

The report says Pant-y-Wal wind farm:

https://pennantwalters.co.uk/site/pant-y-wal/

https://openinframap.org/#12.9/51.60463/-3.51319
10 x 2.5MW turbines. (Well, 9 now!)

Swan_Valley

QrizB said:

gefnew said:

A bit of a disaster in Wales.
Giant wind turbine collapse to be investigated - BBC News

The report says Pant-y-Wal wind farm:

https://pennantwalters.co.uk/site/pant-y-wal/

https://openinframap.org/#12.9/51.60463/-3.51319
10 x 2.5MW turbines. (Well, 9 now!)

That's a different windfarm about 5 miles North of where Ripple have built there Turbine.