The operative system for a decarbonised, decentralised, digitised energy system | Hacker News Reader

The operative system for a decarbonised, decentralised, digitised energy system

nicolabortignon.com

42 pointssnickmy26 comments

With you on decarbonised, can at least get behind digitised, but why decentralized? Two significant functions of the electrical utility business are clear natural monopolies, transmission and distribution. Markets and competition on the generation side have proven to be very difficult to manage, e.g. in California with Enron and the recent Texas ice storms.

It seems like a situation where there is a clear central authority, and one that in many places historically has been government-owned and at least in theory democratically accountable to the people. So why not let the utility company manage storage, transfers between different houses, etc.? What's the upside of a bunch of connected microgrids?

That’s what we said about phone companies. They were the canonical example of natural monopolies and packet switching + VOIP dropped the costs down to nearly zero. We videoconference across continents instead of $3 a minute audio that ties up the lines.

Energy generation and cell signals should be decentralized. We have 5 transformers in the USA that — if they go down — the entire grid goes too. An EMP or Carrington Event can take out long running power lines. A Chinese “stuxnet” can sabotage nuclear reactors etc.

See video for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY

Well electricity takes the lowest resistance path (read shortest).

I have solar panels and my neighbor uses electricity to heat their home. So my solar panels heat their house, but the DSO gets to charge the neighbor as much as if the electricity would come from across the country for transmission. If we'd move the meter a bit further we could share. Plus the energy company I sell to and they buy from charges something as well.

If we could cut out two middlemen the I would earn the same but their bill would be about 25-50% smaller. Which incidentally you could invest in on-prem batteries and I would use their battery energy to heat my home during the night. Little microgrid community. Scale that up to a neighborhood and the effects start to add up quite nicely.

But I do agree with you that integrated grids that span large areas are essential for grid stability and increase the odds of clean energy is being produced at all times needed.

At the end of the day, the capacity of the grid has to be such that you can deal with the worst case situation. So the grid has to handle the case where it is cold and your solar panels are off line.

This means that your neighbor would still have to pay for the grid even if they would directly get electricity from you.

You might save 25% on your bill, but put the meter any farther up the line and wait for a natural disaster to hit, for example. Get a quote to have you and your neighbor's pole, transformer, etc. fixed up and then figure out what you saved. Heck, you can probably just wait to replace you and your neighbor's transformer and see.

Keep putting your meter further up the line, to get the economies of scale needed so your microgrid can have lineworkers, engineers, meter readers (for all your own meters, you have to portion costs out to the individuals in the grid)... congratulations, you just made a new utility company.

Imho, there are couple of important underlying reasons why we see a centralized grid as a well functioning one.

It is a mature system. Having been operating in the space for over 100 years, it is true that the current grid systems are extremely well operated. Yes, even the Western NA and the ERCON (Texas one). They have a very complex system of ancillary services in places, order value of generation based on conditions, etc, etc.

It is also true that having a multi time zones footprint (and multiple geographies) allows for interesting properties. For instance, Denmark energy produced through offshore wind turbines is sent to Norway (equivalent to LA - SEATTLE distance) to be transformed into hydro storage.

So why do we need decentralisation? First of all, there are places where a central grid don’t exists. You can think about Africa, but also some rural areas of US. Having the traditional grid reaching those places is simply not economical feasible. Secondly, while a country level grid is operated effectively, is not always efficient. There are plenty of energy transformation (from DC to AC, but also different voltage conversion, etc). And then there is the OMH low, and energy loss through resistance of the material used to transmit it. To be honest, is not that microgrids don’t have loss, but there are definitely less conversions, and shorter distances to travel Thirdly is resiliency and robustness. If we push for smaller decentralised grids, we are pushing for an extra level of redundancy in the operations, for instance by increasing adoption of residential/neighborhood storage solutions. If one of those microgrids goes down, there are no chain reactions, or tip-over effects, which today are quite common in a centrally operated grid. Lastly, it’s about innovations. Central grid systems have made us ‘lazy’. Energy prices have been going up, but slowly enough that we haven’t been really bothered by them (boiling-the-frog effect). In markets where the traditional grid was not as present/robust, innovation has moved way faster. For example, is no surprise that the majority of residential storage solutions companies are based in Australia, where they are experimenting with multiple chemical compounds (zinc, bromine, titanate, etc) as well as different architectures (ie. Hydrogen)

> First of all, there are places where a central grid don’t exists. You can think about Africa, but also some rural areas of US.

I'm guessing those areas in the US are more wilderness than "rural." The US has been working on rural electrification for more than 80 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act. According to that article, 90% of farm homes were already electrified 62 years ago.

Centralization also produces economies of scale that decentralized systems will NEVER attain.

I wonder if it makes sense to separate the generation of power from the sale of power to consumers (and of course there is a separate transmission/distribution network as well).

The transmission/distribution network is natural monopoly so that needs to be regulated.

Generation of power can be free, to allow different techniques to optimize.

However, the companies that sell power to consumers should be regulated. There can be many of those companies but each company should be required to have a plan in how to provide power even in adverse conditions (and with significant penalties if they fail). Then those power companies can contract enough generation capacity to have redundancy and sell the excess capacity to industry.

For anyone wanting to read more about the need for and benefits of electrifying everything (the ones in the home being cars, clothes dryers, stove/oven, heating/cooling, water heaters, etc) check out https://rewiringamerica.org

They have a lot of technical details of how much carbon it would reduce, how many jobs it would create, how much it will cost, and how to do it on the time-scale necessary to stay below 2 degrees warming. It's really inspiring.

This relies on pie in the sky impossibilities.

They want rooftop solar. Where I live the roof points in the wrong direction and solar would not work. It's also shaded by other homes and trees.

In large cities with apartments rooftop solar won't even come close to providing enough energy for all the apartments.

I will stick with my environmentally friendly gas dryer and oven, and will avoid the bad for the environment electric version of those.

Maybe when the last carbon and natural gas power plant shuts down I'll consider switching, until then switching to electric would harm the environment.

Are you paid by oil companies? lol

I think the idea is to replace gas appliances as they break with electric. Why? Buying electric replacements is an investment towards decarbonization: when that last gas electric plant shuts down your electric appliance is powered by solar/wind/nuclear “automatically”.

It seems like a pretty reasonable stance to take to decarbonize given the 15 yearish lifespan of most appliances and the urgency of the problem.

That makes no sense. For the entire life of the electric appliance you are emitting double or perhaps triple the carbon dioxide of the equivalent natural gas appliance.

First switch the electric grid to not use natural gas and only then think about changing appliances.

Do you have a reference for that?

I think it is market specific depending on the makeup of your areas grid.

As far as cost in many markets a heat pump is more cost efficient today compared to electric AC and gas furnace.

https://www.breakthroughenergy.org/our-challenge/the-green-p...

Modern electric appliances are often more efficient than burning fossil fuels. For example, the electric motors in cars are just inherently a lot more efficient than gas motors, not to mention less mechanically complicated, quieter, etc. (One of the reasons that electric cars today already have the lowest lifetime cost of ownership.)

At Rewiring America they found that electrifying all American cars, heating/cooling, appliances, etc would save 40-50% over fossil fuel equivalents just because of the inherent efficiency of electric machinery. This makes the problem of decarbonization 40-50% easier.

Just a bunch of buzzwords. Is there any estimation what is the overhead to ensure reliable continuous electricity supply in microgrid? In some places even a week-worth amount of energy storage is required, that means oversized batteries or fossil fuel backup generator anyway. As compared to grid that has many sources in many places and can more easily use them effectively.

Good article. But I think there needs to be something like a sustainable fuel also because using batteries for long-term storage does not seem feasible.

So things like oil from algae, digesters for methane, ammonia, and ethanol are all interesting. Maybe even just buried pressurized hydrogen. Maybe potential kinetic even.

“Co2 emissions from electricity generation account for 45% of world energy-related emissions.”

We’ve been talking about climate change for 3 decades now.

I wonder how much time we could have bought ourselves if we had immediately embraced nuclear power

Honestly quite a bit, but, unfortunately the response time of Nuclear power is not the fastest available. It takes hours to get the process going, or to shut it down, and unfortunately an energy grid needs to have a demand-supply net of 0 (usually plus/minus 1.5%) or the appliances connected might face some irreversible damage. This means that, while Nuclear could have been a great answer to a good chunk of the energy demand (sorry cannot estimate how much), we would have probably still needed a lot of the traditional fossil fuel source fo generation.

The other aspect to always keep in mind, when looking at a system as mature as the energy grid is COSTS. Most likely the economy of nuclear doesn't work out compared to the alternatives available. (that's why policies and incentives are needed to move away from fossile fuel)

When you try to dismiss nuclear, what alternative "clean energy" can you "turn on" when experiencing increased demand in energy? Can you turn on the sun or the wind?

There are two aspects to consider here:

1- what is the response time and the cost for alternative generation: Biomass is a valid 'on demand' alternative here. Geothermal + Tidal, while still intermittent are more predictable (like the Sun) hence it's easier to design ahead. Which is quite useful when it comes to deployment You can read more here: https://courses.edx.org/assets/courseware/v1/95ea4a6731bff7e...

2- what other demand-respond can be achieved/deployed (i.e.: storage and demand side response). For instance hydro is a very good solutions here, malten salt storage, and hydrogen are upcoming technologies. More on flexibility here: https://courses.edx.org/assets/courseware/v1/416cc82fc233d20...

In 2019, just about 10 % of the global electricity came from nuclear power. Hence replacing fossil sources by nuclear would entail large-scale construction of new nuclear reactors. However, we then run into the problem of peak Uranium (our reserves are thought to last for about 140 years at the current rate, but this would shorten to about 14 years if we increased nuclear by a factor of ten). (New kinds of reactors might alleviate this problem, but they are not actually available now. Of course, they might be if, as you suggest, we started on this course earlier.)

In any case, nuclear power is today not economically viable -- wind and solar are cheaper by a factor of 2 to 3 (computed over the full lifecycle, but excluding the indefinite storage costs of nuclear waste).

> It needs to supports, out of the box, cloud connected or wifi enabled (wireless lan connected) devices. When the physical layer of devices in the home don’t offer Wireless connectivity, hardware communication modules needs to be adopted to bridge the existing connectivity.

The protocol the OP wishes for exists already, it is called PJON: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON

Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative agriculture. (This is different from large-scale industrial ethanol production.)

You grow e.g. sugar beets, convert them to alcohol and some byproducts (that go back into the farm as feed and fertilizer), use the alcohol in generators and vehicles. You're operating within your solar budget, the atoms that make up the alcohol came from water and air so all your nutrients and trace minerals stay on the farm and the fuel is carbon-neutral (all the carbon released when you burn the fuel originally came from the air in the form of carbon dioxide, not from underground fossilized carbon), and it can be done with simple off-the-shelf tech that has been around for literally thousands of years. You don't have to scrap your ICE cars and trucks, you can modify them to work with alcohol as fuel (some cars it's a software mod!) and the exhaust is not poisonous.

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Here's a video of Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk The presentation is IMO very interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 )

We use too much power. And when I say "we" I mean mostly the USA but the rest of the world is ramping up rapidly. Unless there's a miracle (like clean fusion generators that kids can make in the garage out of chicken wire, tires, and ducktape) the only physically realistic way to de-carbonize fast enough to really matter is a drastic reduction in power use.

This is possible, and we can (I believe) maintain our quality of life, but we have to start now and work quickly.

The good news about that is that our systems are enormously wasteful so there is a lot of "low-hanging fruit" when it comes to reducing power usage through increasing efficiency.

The bad news is we are still going to have to make changes, pay for them, and yeah, make some sacrifices as well.

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In re: software to manage local grids efficiently, IMO that's not interesting. It's covered already. If you need fancy real-time dynamic "smart" manager software for your local micro-grids you're almost certainly doing it wrong.

Put something like Factorio in front of your grid as a UI and scenario planner and let the local kids run it. "Energy Club"

That is the hard truth that we are reluctant to accept.

Countries in the global north consume way too much energy, and countries in the global south consume way too little. This what Jason Hickel suggests in his book Less is More [0].

[0] https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more

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