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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.'"
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.