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Why Our Antiquated Power Grid Needs Battery Storage
Lucas123 writes: Last year, renewable energy sources accounted for half of new installed electric-generation capacity (natural gas units made up most of the remainder). As more photovoltaic panels are installed on rooftops around the nation, an antiquated power grid is being overburdened by a bidirectional load its was never engineered to handle. The Hawaiian Electric Company, for example, said it's struggling with electricity "backflow" that could destabilize its system. Batteries for distributed renewable power has the potential to mitigate the load on the national grid by allowing a redistribution of power during peak hours. Because of this, Tesla, which is expected to announce batteries for homes and utilities on Thursday, and others are targeting a market estimated to be worth $1.2B by 2019. Along with taking up some of the load during peak load, battery capacity can be used when power isn't being generated by renewable systems, such as at night and during inclement weather. That also reduces grid demand.
There are other -- probably cheaper -- solutions for local storage than batteries.
A couple of off-the-cuff examples: lifting a very large weight with your excess electricity, then running a generator with it during peak loads or periods. (Did I say VERY large weight?)
Another would be pumped hydro storage. Build a -- yet again very large -- tank at a height. During excess generation periods, use the electricity to pump water into the tank. During peak periods, use the water to turn a generator and reclaim the electricity.
All such systems have inefficiencies, even batteries. But pumped storage and other such solutions are used on a very large scale today... and should be quite workable for the small scale as well. Another advantage of pumped storage is that you now have a nice, big, full water tank with gravity feed in case of zombie apocalypse or whatever.
I should have added:
For a small-scale pumped-storage system, you should also have a catch tank downstream from your generating turbine. No sense letting all that water go to waste. You just pump it back up high when you have excess generating capacity.
Do you even understand what a Peltier does? It sucks at power generation, absolutely sucks, even if it's possible.
Because primarily it's not a generator - that's just an inefficient side-effect - it's a heat pump. And what you're suggesting is to heat the hot end of a Peltier, thereby doing what? Generating a pittance of electricity. You'll also need to cool the cold end of else it's just a block of metal. It's the temperature difference that matters. And there's no such thing as a free lunch in energy terms.
However, batteries do suck. But carving out valleys to be dams and reservoirs also sucks.
The efficiencies - again - of a small in-house reservoir are so poor as to be worthless. How much power do you think you're going to get by pumping even mains-pressure water through a pipe? I'll tell you... you can power an FM radio, because there's an actual commercial product that does this on your shower hose, and I'm not aware of ANYTHING more powerful that uses the same generation method. And anything you've pumped to the loft and dropped down won't be that pressured. And what do you do with the water once it's dropped? You wasted it, that's what. Because pumping it between tanks forever is going to require more maintenance than a loft tank, and those have gone out of fashion for all kinds of reasons, not least that a lot of them can't be classed as drinking water.
The efficiencies we're talking about here are pittances. By comparison, a decent, expensive, high-tech battery is actually quite a commercial piece of hardware, if they can pull it off. If batteries were so inefficient, you wouldn't use one in your car. 12V 400Ah of power is not to be sniffed at and can least you YEARS and YEARS with an ancient lead-acid technology (I've never had to change - or maintain - a car battery in my life yet). That's why all the home wind- and solar-generation plants use such things, they're one of the best things we've got on that scale. The next step up is flooding some poor bugger's village to make a new reservoir and destroying the natural habitats.
There are many ways to 'store' electricity. Batteries are just one.
I rather like this one, a thermal storage solution. Putting air into and out of bladders under deep water is a very simple method, as is moving water up and down hills. Then there are flywheels and fixed volume compressed air storage. (The air bladders above are fixed pressure compressed air storage.) There other thermal storage possibilities, but getting good round trip efficiency is tricky.
There are non-traditional battery techniques too: flow batteries (liquid electrolytes in tanks, adding storage capacity is as easy as adding tanks full of electrolyte) and molten metal batteries (take the idea of aluminium smelting and make it reversible).
All the non-battery alternatives I can think of work at industrial scale, so if you're looking for a household/small business solution, I think that at least for now batteries are it.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Not sure I understood you - did you mean that $13K is roughly equivalent to your conventional electricity bills over the lifespan of a Tesla battery?
It's not just about cost, either upfront or total costs over the lifespan of panels/batteries/whatever.
You could even step back from the issues about pollution, CO2, global climate change, and look at it this way:
Fossil fuels are a FINITE resource. Even coal will run out, and eventually oil and then coal will become very expensive to extract. Doesn't it make sense to take steps to transition to nuclear and renewable energy sources while conventional fossil fuels are cheap?
We should build nuclear stations with the very best and safest technology - they can handle the large-scale demands of industry, and be a backup for domestic baseloads. It's possible to supply great gobs of electrical energy via PV when the sun is shining - we have to manage that energy, sure, and it's going to cost more than we already pay, but with smart enough controllers, your domestic battery will supply you with a reduced but adequate supply during grid outages. Wouldn't it be great to have lights and refrigeration when the grid goes down? Put it another way: when the grid goes down, sometimes it's for long enough that the contents of your refrigerator and freezer have to be dumped. How much does that cost to replace, and how many times would it need to happen to make a $13K battery worth the cost? Doesn't have to match $13K in actual foodstuffs - what about the convenience factor?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
ARES system to put energy storage on the right track.
http://www.gizmag.com/ares-rai...
There you go. Old article but still relevant. Just need to build tracks in your backyard.
Fossil fuels are a FINITE resource
Not to be combative but I realize this will read that way
Everything is a FINITE resource. There is no such thing as an infinite resource, and there are not even indefinitely renewable resources with indefinitely maintainable extraction systems currently.
Lithium is a good example of just such a resource, where the current economic forms are quite finite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
On June 9, 2014, the Financialist publication, produced by the Credit Suisse company, stated that demand for lithium is growing at more than 12 percent a year; according to Credit Suisse, this rate exceeds projected availability by 25 percent. The publication compared the 2014 lithium situation with oil, whereby "higher oil prices spurred investment in expensive deepwater and oil sands production techniques"; that is, the price of lithium will continue to rise until more expensive production methods that can boost total output receive the attention of investors.[87]
BTW Lithium processing is particularly environmentally nasty, right up there with Aluminum smelting. (If going green is your thing)
Trouble is you need very large tanks of water, or to seperate them a long way. For instance a house might use 2 kWh overnight, that's about 7 MJ.
Round trip efficiency for pumped hydro system is around 88%, call it 100, and call g 10. So you need a tower or hill 350m high with 2 tons of water in it, or if you prefer, a swimming pool, 2*5*10m suspended 6 metres above your current pool. So, that's a fair bit of unlikely, just to power one house.
Most sensible big hydro locations have already been gobbled up, they made sense decades ago.
Hawaiian Electric is full of crap. It's an excuse to charge people thousands of dollars for an "interconnect study" before allowing them to install a grid-tie system, which is totally bogus. It's essentially them making it more difficult/expensive to install solar, and when you do jump through that hoop, they get to extort a big chunk of money from you.
Most sensible big hydro locations have already been gobbled up, they made sense decades ago.
The other issue , at least in the U.S. is that it has been near impossible to deal with the permitting process for large water projects. Look at California, if you need an example of just how much damage people are willing to do when it comes to stopping these projects.
To be fair, solar is pretty much effectively infinite.
When it runs out, we're gonna be dead anyway, unless we've managed to colonize other planets by then.
Well, yes, even the sun will run out one day - but I hope we as a species will have taken appropriate steps well before that happens.
Seriously, yes, even fissile material is finite, but it's a step in the right direction.
I use lead-acid batteries, 1320ah of them, and I'm off-grid, so I don't know very much about grid-tie systems and the issues they raise. I'm just saying it's possible to live with batteries, and there are even some advantages. They do need periodic replacement (every 8-9 years in my case), but much of it is recycleable, so it isn't just dumped in a landfill. I believe the price of lead in the last few years makes it much more attractive to recycle lead-acid batteries.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Just because someone doesn't jump on the first "solution" you see doesn't mean that they are not aware of the problem.
The problem is we have no one proposing truly reasonable alternatives. Instead of patching what they call our "antiquated" power grid, perhaps we should actually rethink it. The renewable energy sources have a common problem because they cannot provide power when it is needed with suitable reliability. Allowing people to generate power using solar and wind, use it what they want and sell the rest to utilities sounds very good, but it does not reduce the peak capacity that the utilities must have, further it increases the swing between peak and minimum meaning the utilities must have capacity that can be brought online quickly and shutdown quickly, sometimes several times a day. These "green" energy sources are not nearly as green as they could be in a properly integrated power grid. Patching batteries into the grid just delays a properly engineered solution. Industrial power users are one of the keys to success since they have the greatest financial interest in the cost of power, and have the resources to capitalize the solutions. Having the smallest/smallish users capitalize the grid is stupid because they can't pay for it upfront and if made compulsory, they will pay while industry profits. A smart grid where your car and laptop charge at times of minimal demand/maximum availability is also likely to be needed. With a proper design we won't be wasting huge amounts of resources as we iterate towards a solution.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Solar will last as long as the sun. How long do you think we will have the resources to build solar panels ?
BTW that's another not particularly green thing when you consider all the pollution in China from the processes.
They should be build a pumped hydro storage system - like Dinorwig in Wales. These installations are so simple - I don't know why they're not more common.
How long do you think we will have the resources to build solar panels ?
Practically forever. The basic materials such as silicon are among the most abundant in the earth's surface. The rarer elements are only used in small amounts.
And it's perfectly possible to make solar panels without causing pollution, if you don't mind paying a little bit more.
And who would that be? Last I checked, coal, gas and oil let you shit your externalities all over other people's environment (and lungs, real estate and insurance costs), and nuclear is impossible due to political reasons.
Wind is more expensive than fossil fuels only as long as you force me to suck up the fumes from your smokestack and tailpipe and consequently die horribly from lung cancer for free. Not to mention the fact fossils will run out eventually, leaving to future generations sitting in the dark if the alternatives are not in place by then.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The Tesla's battery is also 53, 70 or 85 kWh whereas the average household uses around 1 kW (kWh/h) and certainly can get by with a few kWh of storage to handle its overproduction of solar during a day.
You didn't read the article, did you?
For $13,000, you get a 10kWh battery. The average home is using 900kWh in a month, or 30 per day.
This battery would provide, on average, about 8 hours of power.
In the end, it's just economics. Does solar + battery pay itself back in lowered electricity bills? If it does, nothing else matters.
It doesn't, and that is the problem.
It can be kinda, sorta masked with enough rebates and government tax dollars to LOOK like it does, but it really doesn't. It is just taking money out of the left pocket and putting it in the right and nothing has changed.
Scale it up to a million home and those tax incentives would have to go away.
Not true. Electricity can wear out. The time frame is much longer but it does happen.
Electricity has resistance. resistance adds heat. The sun adds heat. hot ,cold, hot, cold, that changes the temperance of the metals, making them brittle. Granted it takes a while. but over time electric cables wear out. Then you have the insulation materials which ear out faster, when those break you get shorts.
That isn't even talking about erosion and physical damage from being outside.
So yes solar panels can wear out. You might get 30-50 years out of one but it will happen.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Copper indium gallium selenium good luck with that.
Pointless argument without numbers. Are you claiming that a solar panel requires significant amounts of those materials ?
And pointing out that the Chinese are not producing in a sustainable and clean way does not contradict my statement that it can be done cleanly, if you're willing to pay a little bit more. Obviously, the Chinese haven't been very interested in paying a little bit more. This is changing, now that rich people are starting to suffer from pollution.
You seem to be conveniently assuming that once used, those elements can never be re-used via recycling. You are also assuming that our current method of creating solar panels is the only possible way, which is clearly nonsensical. To claim these clearly helps your argument, for sure, but it shows you are either ignorant, or being disingenuous. Neither is a particularly noble trait. You should ask yourself the same question you asked the OP, as it appears eerily fitting.
Yet another one of your pithy, throw-away sentences which shows you really aren't bothered in understanding this topic, but in venting your frustration at your perceived enemies. Cite your sources and you won't look so chronically out of touch with reality.
Save your breath - this is the guy who wrote the following (without sources or analysis) just a few posts down:
The whole problem with most "Green Power" solutions is they are little more than excuses to pick people's pockets.
If someone can say that with a straight face, they are not willing to learn, and seem to be proud of that fact.
Massachusetts did ot shut down Cape Wind. Cape Wind is delayed because rich people on Cape Cod launched endless lawsuits because it would affect their view from their private compunds (even thought it was to be 4.8 miles off th coast).
It was so bad that the judge even commented on it: "There comes a point at which the right to litigate can become a vexatious abuse of the democratic process."
This dried up Cape Wind's financing which lead to National Grid and NStar pulling their power purchase agreements.
Arguing off-shore wind on its technical merits or detractors that is useful; spreading misinformation is not.
A couple of off-the-cuff examples: lifting a very large weight with your excess electricity, then running a generator with it during peak loads or periods. (Did I say VERY large weight?)
The very large weight would have to be sourced quite locally otherwise the shipping / transport costs to install it onsite would be prohibitive. Maybe design the whole house so it could be hoisted up during the daytime and then sink back down at night ;) That would be cool.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
The math in your example was to build a battery for the entire US to carry it for 7 days, including all transportation costs (air, rail, automobile) as electricity. I think that it is very safe to say that this oversizes the battery requirements for even a North American grid by one, if not two orders of magnitude. 7 days without any baseload generation, 7 days over the entire US without any sunshine, wind, hydroelectric flow, is simply an unreasonable target.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Nuclear is expensive and needs a huge amount of public subsidy. Private industry doesn't seem to have found a way of doing it cost effectively. People also seem to have problems with it being a global solution to power needs, given all the jumping up and down about countries like Iran getting into nuclear power. Then there's handling of waste and water consumption, so it's hardly problem free.
Our local nuclear station has three enormous batteries that hold GWh of electricity for peak times. They are called Lakes Jocassee, Keowee, and Bad Creek.
During the night when the nuclear station generates excess power, water is pumped uphill through the succession of lakes. During the day, when peak demand hits, water flows downhill to generate extra power. It's efficient and relatively cheap to maintain over time.
The surfaces of Bad Creek (at the top) and Jocassee (in the middle) can fall tens of feet over the course of a few hours. Keowee (at the bottom) is maintained level as it is also the source of cooling water for the reactors.
It's a pretty cool system, and having the manmade lakes has generated billions in economic activity for the area in real estate, recreation, and tourism.
But pumped storage and other such solutions are used on a very large scale today... and should be quite workable for the small scale as well.
Have you even imagined what permitting such a thing is like? You could only do it in the country, and only where the lay of the land permits it. You can't just put a water storage tank above your house and ignore the consequences. And you're still ignoring that the battery packs have already been constructed. They're going to use used ones. That means the cost of construction of the battery pack is $0, that's considerably cheaper than adding a water tank. All they'll need is a combination inverter and charge controller, as opposed to (for example) a shitload of pipe (the cost of this alone will exceed that of the inverter) as well as a pump, motor, turbine, generator, and finally the charge controller/inverter.
You are ignoring the efficiency of using used battery packs. Stop it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem is we have no one proposing truly reasonable alternatives.
According to you.
Instead of patching what they call our "antiquated" power grid, perhaps we should actually rethink it.
But you won't do that, even a little bit.
The renewable energy sources have a common problem because they cannot provide power when it is needed with suitable reliability.
This is how I know you won't rethink it. Operating the means of production while power is highly available is the answer. We used to call this "making hay while the sun shines". Haven't heard that expression in about a decade though. Now we just want to make hay when we want hay, god damn it.
Allowing people to generate power using solar and wind, use it what they want and sell the rest to utilities sounds very good, but it does not reduce the peak capacity that the utilities must have,
Which is why we're talking about adding power storage, so that the power can be used when it is needed.
further it increases the swing between peak and minimum meaning the utilities must have capacity that can be brought online quickly and shutdown quickly, sometimes several times a day.
See previous sentence.
These "green" energy sources are not nearly as green as they could be in a properly integrated power grid.
That's why we want to integrate power storage into the grid. See, I can use buzzwords, too!
Patching batteries into the grid just delays a properly engineered solution.
You will never have a "properly engineered solution" because progress. You can only have a system that works. Oddly, ours does, most of the time. However, it has some very nasty externalities. Right now we've got spent fuel sitting around on top of reactors just like at Fukushima, reactors which are in fact based on the same design as Fukushima. There is no evidence that we are responsible enough to deal with our nuclear waste, or the waste produced while coal is burned. If we ever reach that level of responsibility, then perhaps we can revisit this conversation.
Having the smallest/smallish users capitalize the grid is stupid because they can't pay for it upfront and if made compulsory, they will pay while industry profits.
Ah yes, the "if made compulsory" FUD. You really have put nothing of substance in this comment. When you have to resort to FUD, just accept you have lost.
A smart grid where your car and laptop charge at times of minimal demand/maximum availability is also likely to be needed.
Cars already do that, so why are you even bringing this up? Besides, anyone who knows anything about power distribution knows that this is the direction the power company is heading anyway. That's part of the "smart grid" initiative. However, it's going to be a long time before your laptop has to do anything, especially since their power budget tends to decrease over time. The industrial users' equipment is already sometimes throttled by the provider, especially HVAC where a delay of a few minutes won't hurt anything.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have looked at off grid in Texas, and unless a house is buried deep within the earth, or can take advantage of some natural feature (a nearby water turbine on a stream), keeping the place cooled in the summer is virtually impossible without mains power.
For everything else, a house can run from propane for heating, the gas dryer, water heater, and even the refrigerator. Electric for the smaller appliances can easily be handled by a set of panels, battery bank, inverter, and charge controller. However, HVAC needs will tie a residence to the grid.
I wonder if someone can scale the mechanism up for an RV fridge and make a propane based water chiller. This way, power needs would be a lot less (mainly to move air through a heat exchanger), as the propane would be the energy source for the refrigerator. Bonus points in using the Einstein cycle where that uses ammonia, butane, and water.
If HVAC needs can be moved from the grid, that will help immensely, especially in warmer states.
And it's cost is twice what a lead acid solution could be made for. I priced a peak shaving battery for a commercial building, and we were looking at a cost of $300/kWh for the battery, and a savings over the 1,000 cycles of ...$250/kWh(B).
The big challenge for utilities is the 5/6-7/8PM time frame when solar production drops to near zero and lighting consumption goes up. Batteries are a good solution for time shifting noon-3PM production to this window. This will be economical when peak pricing shifts from 12-6PM to 1-7PM. It has already shifted one hour from 5 years ago. Unfortunately, this will make PV a worse payback.
Batteries are heavy. Why not do both?
Don't forget that adding solar panels is a virtuous cycle with respect to HVAC. You're not only capturing energy, but you're also not dumping that solar load onto your roof and attic. Here in Albuquerque, some of my friends that have put panels up found that even before the panels went live, their electric bills dropped 20+% just due to the panels providing shade for a portion of the roof. Then they found that their solar panels were oversized since they hadn't expected that reduction, and exceeded house demand essentially from 8am to 6pm. Most of them are providing above 90% total load month to month, even in the winter (natural gas heating). Another panel or two and some energy storage and they'd be there.
I have personally found that if you mount normal panels (as opposed to the flexible panels that you tape/glue in place directly on the surface), you create some clearance under the panels that air circulates under, insulating the roof from the sun.
To me, solar is a "why not" item. Not just for saving on electric bills, but providing electricity in areas where it isn't worth the hassle to run code-compliant wiring to, especially if all one is needed is basic lighting or a place to charge cordless drill batteries. For RV-ing, solar goes without saying, because it keeps house batteries topped off and helps minimize engine or generator use. Even for a plain old house, one can use a set of panels, storage battery, and inverter as a UPS so one can move all the parasitic draw devices (set top boxes, consoles, USB chargers) to that circuit, where they get clean power... and are not on the electric bill.