Is Storage Necessary For Renewable Energy?

mdsolar writes Physicist and energy expert Amory Lovins, chief scientist at The Rocky Mountain Institute, recently released a video in which he claims that renewable energy can meet all of our energy needs without the need for a fossil fuel or nuclear baseload generation. There's nothing unusual about that — many people have made that claim — but he also suggests that this can be done without a lot of grid-level storage. Instead, Lovins describes a "choreography" between supply and demand, using predictive computer models models to anticipate production and consumption, and intelligent routing to deliver power where it's needed. This "energy dance," combined with advances in energy efficiency, will allow us to meet all of our energy needs without sacrificing reliability.

Comments

Expert??

[Mr D from 63]

This guy is clearly no energy expert. He should have consulted an electrical engineer familiar with grid behavior and transmission & distribution engineering before creating this over-simplified explanation. He completely ignores the importance of local load differences, and seems to assume there is a loss-less, instantaneous transfer of energy across the national grid, both transmission and distribution channels, with no limitations.

He also doesn't get that even at a local level things like AC compressors are already averaged out and that delaying the timing of starts really makes almost no difference at the neighborhood level, much less a town level.

Its nice to completely ignore realities like overall cost. Its nice to not realize that industrial areas have a significantly different profile than urban areas, and that rural areas are vastly different. Its nice to call yourself and energy expert and get submitted to slashdot by those that believe you just because they want to, or because you fall in line with their agenda.

Credible experts are people who understand what they know, and what they don't know.

Re:Expert??

[Culture20]

He's a physicist. He was just imagining the electrical grid as a perfect sphere on an infinite frictionless plane.

Re:Expert??

[kefalonia]

bah. Engineering is about being able to tell somebody that, say, a bridge can be built in X days, bearing Y load of such and such type, endure for Z years at a cost $$$ AND be able to explain that we actually don't have analytical equations for all the physics that relate to it. Engineering is about taking responsibility in delivering the collected knowledge about technical systems of the past, for addressing current and future needs. As an engineer, it is nowhere written that you grasp the whole physics about a technical system, although you are still held accountable for its performance - as a minimum, to explain observed behavior.

Re:Expert??

[angel'o'sphere]

Unfortunately Amory Lovins is right and you are wrong. I did not know that a guy who worked 40 years in the energy field and is a Physicist, does ot count as an expert.

However as long as we are not even able to produce so much energy via renewables it does not matter if we reorganize the grid for it or introduce storage or both ...

... that delaying the timing of starts really makes almost no difference at the neighborhood level, much less a town level.

It makes an immense difference if it is used to balance the grid. If I as a grid operator can activate an AC that would jump on in 5 mins anyway *right now* I can put my excess power to us, without the need to power down a conventional plant or without the need to store the excess power.

Credible experts are people who understand what they know, and what they don't know.
That is also true for a /. poster :D you seem not to know what you don't know.

Re:Expert??

[Trogre]

Gravitational potential energy cannot be used as an energy source.

Several hundred million people who use hydroelectric dams as their primary power source disagree.

Re:Expert??

[swillden]

The misogyny arises from the implied assumption that the woman is just the object of men's desire, that she has no will of her own or ability to act, except to comply with the wishes of whichever man reaches her. The story doesn't actually say any of that, but it is pretty strongly implied. There's also the implication that the physicist and engineer are male, but that's the lesser issue.

It's interesting to note that merely reversing the gender roles in the story causes the perceived problem to disappear, but doesn't address the real issue. This is because it's not the story itself that implies the misogyny, but the cultural subtext, and since that subtext assumes that men are actors and initiators that the man has decided to go along with the game. You can truly eliminate the problem by modifying the story to make the woman the organizer of the little game, which puts all three on equal footing. She's acting by setting the scenario up, the men are acting by deciding whether or not they wish to participate and if so, how.

The difference is subtle, but such subtle, unconscious biases in many different areas can and do often combine into significant -- though often completely unintentional -- bias against women.

As an aside, when we speak of the "objectification" of women, the original use of that word in that context means not object as in "thing", but object as in "direct object", from grammatical structure. The objectified person is one who is always acted upon rather than acting upon others. This story clearly indicates both meanings of the word: The woman in the story is an object of desire, in this case sexual. That's actually perfectly fine. Men and women both can be objects of sexual desire, and as long as the desire doesn't translate into unwelcome advances or into other negative effects, everyone appreciates being thought desirable. But the woman is also and object upon which the physicist or engineer will get to enact their will, and her will isn't relevant. That is the way in which objectification is negative.

Revising the story to make the woman the initiator of the game, while not removing the ability of the physicist and engineer to choose, makes all of the participants actors and none of them pure objects.

Lovins is a crank

[Mike Greaves]

Never worked as an academic physicist, never even completed a degree apparently.
Never worked in the power industry.
Never manufactured EE Equipment.

Nevertheless knows how to power the world?

Cheap grid storage

[Firethorn]

Keep saving those AA's. Your gonna need them.

Heh, I laughed at this because one of my ideas is to use old but still viable EV batteries as grid storage devices, and the Model S, with the biggest batteries, uses the Lithium-Ion equivalent of a AA.

If you figure that the battery is retired from the car at 70% capacity and kept as a grid device until it's around 40% capacity this would give you massive storage capacity if only 10% of people drive a Tesla type car.

Of course, this would be a 30 year solution - 5-10 years for the batteries to degrade to the point they're no longer useful in a car, plus 20 years for EVs to actually penetrate the market enough to provide enough batteries.