The booming business of knitting together the world’s electricity grids
economist.com
economist.com
Norway has a ton of natural places for pumped hydro installations. In most of the world, installing dams involves displacing thousands or even millions of people and doing vast environmental damage. But due to Norway’s unique geography, this is typically not the case there. Norway has an absurd number of natural, deep, steep-walled valleys and fjords.
Also if Germany sends excess wind/solar electricity to Norway, and the hydro lake is emptied slower because of that, then the hydro acts exactly the same as battery storage — no pumping required. However some lakes have a minimum rate of outflow: when rivers need a minimum flow for sports, ecological, or downstream dam capacity reasons. Also during dry periods when lake capacity drops, the ability to be used as a battery also drops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28898426
(You can say that some of them, like fission, rely on heavy metals produced sort-of in a star. But still that wasn't from our sun.)
Because central government has a history of riding roughshod over the wishes of the local people. Not everyone is keen to see the place they call home or a place they enjoy holidaying in drowned under hundreds of metres of water.
Pretty much all the easily (both physically and politically) developed hydropower in Norway has already been at least partially developed.
Nonetheless there is a lot of potential for new and improved hydro stations and the work is ongoing.
Here are some figures about further expansion: https://www.nve.no/energi/energisystem/vannkraft/potensiell-...
The latter offers better resiliency and lower transmission / distribution losses.
A well-insulated building and its hot-water tank are both (thermal) energy storage systems, that are more durable (and more affordable) than electrochemical batteries. A building can be pre-cooled or pre-heated when on-site solar is plentiful, to the end of the occupant's comfort range. This means a smaller on-site battery bank is needed to achieve year-around grid independence (for a conditioned / comfortable building).
It seems that we're just getting started with on-site flexible-load control, and building energy automation generally. The higher electric rates in some markets make it financially viable for end users today.
Without need of electricity there absolutely zero issues with heat or cold.
Doesn't matter. I don't know these people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI
The author also made a good point that despite wind and solar being intermittent, they are actually fairly predictable a or less day in advance (thanks to weather forecasts).
I like what he did at 6:49:
> So that I can take advantage of these low rates at night, I use a roughly 16kWh battery that I just happen to have lying around. I charge it up over night starting at 10pm on the dot, and it's done charging usually by 3 or 4 in the morning. I keep it topped off until around 7, and then I start using it during the day. And it doesn't need to be charged again until the evening. Now the reason I just happen to have that battery lying around, is because that battery... is my house.
https://mis.ercot.com/public/dashboards
Interestingly, you can see that wind and solar are anticorrelated there: wind tends to die down during the day, and spring back up at night.
We’re remote first and hiring. https://www.voltus.co
It seems like a reboot of EnerNoc and has much of the same team. EnerNoc was burning ~50 million/y on 400 million revenues before it was purchased at a discount by Enel. [0]
[0]https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/enel-to-buy-ene...
> if you can scale and reach profitability
I don't know what I can actually reveal, but scaling is our focus right now.
[1] https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/Order-745.p...
In power markets, it's really hard scaling around each market/state's idiosyncracies almost like it's not a technology problem and more regulatory/financing. Hope you guys figure it out.
Agree, I think for so long the whole renewable build out has ignored storage costs which will really come to bite electrochemical battery dependent systems in the ass (because banks like UBS have long projected that costs will be harder and harder to bring down and ACS has long talked about the difficult to deal with chemistries with all the different batteries out there [and with the inherit degradation of the system over time]).
I think in the long run (well, unless our political challenges with nuclear get solved), on the utility level (potentially even behind the meter for specific high energy applications that have space to construct/"mine" their own solar field), molten salt storage will take the lead (esp as salt mixtures/chemistries get cheaper, have higher thermal operating ranges, storage and transportation gets better).
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D...
I think the sand direction is deff an improvement over the 300 delta_C systems now with (NaNO3, KNO3, NaNO2) at the 900 delta_C in used in the pdf, but idk if it will win out in the long run with the need for direct contact vs some kind of sCO2 system with higher delta_C mixtures (for example a theoretical mixture CaCl2 + MgCl2 with 1500 delta_C, or even engineered metamaterials[0, i've only seen some specific examples of electromagnetic metameterials when i was in school about a decade ago, this post was about a year after i left] in a mixture to have even higher delta_c).
There's only so much one can do when one limits the materials used for heat capacity to naturally occurring ones (i imagine that compounds in the future could be engineered to be at least a order of magnatude higher in delta_c from natural mixtures).
A very interesting possibility, I think, is to replace the sand with some other mineral and make the solid part open cycle. That is, instead of retrieving and recycling cooled sand, a new stream of pulverized minerals would be used. This could be useful if heat treating those minerals does something desirable. A particular case would be heat treatment of serpentinite to make magnesium oxide and silica, which would then be used for CO2 capture/sequestration.
This isn't a thermal option, but the iron-air chemistry has promise too. It's basically rusting and de-rusting iron. Much more environmentally benign than lithium ion, and likely way less expensive. AFAIK, this company is the frontrunner: https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
If so, the metal-air systems have a major advantage on the discharging side of things by avoiding the need of a fuel cell and being able to harvest electrons directly via galvanic current.
The galvanic discharge rate is extremely slow and not really suitable as part of a rechargeable battery system. Any practical metal-air will have some way of discharging faster. The problem is that we have basically solved this for hydrogen-air but not for anything else.
This video also suggests that this sort of renewable project will have an average cost of 48 GBP/MWh versus 92.50 GBP/MWh for new nuclear.
No, they don't. [1] https://www.nsw.com/en/cable/submarine-power-cable/ has plenty of capacity. They have been in the local, regional and sometimes national news for having to sit on their product, because for environmental reasons some (otherwise fully operational) offshore wind parks couldn't get connected. Maybe some other factory in the same region also. Expected boom, and then busted by regulation. Meanwhile investigations because of cartel allegiations in that sector, but not them. Anyways, out of work, profit, changed owner two times.
Whatever, it mostly just sits there, way underutilized. Deal with it! :-)
This is a most wonderfully HN-ish of comments.
Someone mentions a mammoth infrastructure project, that's doubtless involved many hundreds of person-years of effort to realise, and with the scale and money involved everything from the business case through to the final engineering proposals would have been reviewed, vetted, considered, analysed, checked, and audited dozens of times over.
The reactive response is - why didn't they do something totally different?
FWIW, absent any research, my responses to that question included scale (it's huge, but still a much shorter distance), they could skirt the coast, so they wouldn't have to contend with a famously deep trench in the middle of the Atlantic, they'd probably been at this for some years and the USA leadership <sic> has been famously against renewables for 4 of the last 5 years.
With a few minutes research, I now know xlinks is a British start-up - so they'd probably not be interested to just be a deal broker for renewables between Morocco and the USA. A straight-line (routing around Iberia) path according to google from Morroco to Cornwall is ~ 2350km - so if they're citing a 3800km path it looks like they're staying close to the coast (as I expected). Morroco to the USA is ~6,000km (as the sardine swims) so even a direct route path would be twice the everything.
I can't find definitive answers about power cables over ocean trenches, but it looks like the (predominantly comms) cables that go that way are tiny - several cm diameter at most - and relatively lightweight. I'd guess they're a tested tech in those environments, have lots of existing redundancy, and are (relatively) inexpensive to re-run if they break.
In contrast, these 4 x power transmission cables are 150kg / metre, and no one has any long-distance experience with them. They'll be extremely expensive and time-consuming to repair or replace, and a failure of one of them will cause protracted, huge disruptions.
Essence of the question is why move energy up when you can across..? Don't even have to go over ocean - can do continental too.
p.s. I agree I could phrased the question differently, but you didn't have to go against the rules with your response.
p.p.s. I did LCOE maths for this before, but since you're an asshole I'm not bother to look for it now.
Do you mean this one?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."
So the answer to the question 'why are they doing what they spent so much effort working out what was the best thing to do?' is self-evident, I would have thought. A combination of market need, feasibility of technology, timing, cost, etc.
Losing much more of the product (power), to go twice the distance, to a place with a comparable geography / climate arrangement (ie. cloudy / short day in the north, access to mostly clear / consistently long days to the south) might make commercial sense, but given no one's doing it, one has to assume that it does not.
> Marocco to US minimum is 4700km. So difference is comparable.
First, where are you getting 4700km from? Playing with google maps a bit here, and the closest I can get is 5100.
Second, Morocco to UK minimum distance (by sea) is 1900km - so those numbers can definitely be compared, but they're certainly not similar.
> p.p.s. I did LCOE maths for this before, but since you're an asshole I'm not bother to look for it now.
Well okay then.
Perhaps you should share it with xlinks. It's a $21.9 billion project, but they may be able to change the route now if it makes more sense to go to a different country.
To provide power to the US it would presumably be easier to take advantage of US deserts and lay cables over land rather than cross-Atlantic. This avoids security and engineering problems as well as reducing transmission loss.
Also batteries mitigate the timing delay problem. Also these are not exclusive projects can do both if there is demand.
This would appear to be a much easier, more robust approach, yes.
Press pieces on the project cite Morocco's minimum 10-hours of sunlight a day, and their latitude is similar to the most southern parts of the USA, and certainly (given we're talking international trade here) there are large areas of Mexico that could offer similar climate.
The future probably looks like microgrids, with MID/neutral-forming transformers [1] which generate their own 60 Hz pilot signal and allow multiple producers, batteries, and consumers to coexist on a common protocol even in the absence of the utility grid.
[1] https://enphase.com/sites/default/files/2021-06/Enpower-R1-Q...
The nice thing of interconnected grids is that you can route around the bad bits. There's no such thing as a global shortage of power generation. Blackouts happen when there are local shortages. Which in turn usually means problematic local suppliers and a lack of connectivity to external suppliers. The key challenge on e.g. the European grid is moving renewable over production to where the demand is. E.g. Southern Germany firing up more coal/gas when the north has ample wind production is because they lack the transport capacity (i.e. cables). Grid interconnectivity increases the profitability of renewable.
Microgrids and batteries are indeed popular in much of the developing world where grids are very unreliable and power generation lags way behind demand. India, the middle east, much of Africa, and probably South America, etc. Grids are much less reliable there and investing in private capacity is essential and something that people do as much as they can so they can keep the fridge on, their phones charged, the AC on, etc.
In developed markets, people do the same but more for cost than resilience reasons. Though I can imagine Texans might be considering both after this year.
But in the meantime you can get massive blackouts if the problem propagates, like in 2003. Has this been improved on since then?
The pragmatist in me (and the witness to the difficulty of getting anything built, and the greater difficulty of getting anything maintained) thinks grid investment is both unlikely to happen and even more unlikely to work well. In particular, transmission is low-value, high-risk, and expensive. It's low-value because distributed generation and storage are getting cheap. It's high-risk because high-power-density things are dangerous (check out all the Western fires started by electric utilities' transmission lines and switchcraft). It's expensive partially for good material and access reasons, but also for bad political reasons (NIMBYism and the fragmentation of responsibility for large land areas) and simply real estate rights cost. It's like trying to build California's high-speed rail but with less value-add, so it's going to be a horrible uphill slog of questionable merit.
So yes, I agree with you. More microgrids with more distributed generation and storage are inevitable. And I think that they're probably going to destabilize and likely kill the large-scale electric utility as we know it in ~50 years. I often wonder why more power companies haven't already become telcos to utilize their poles to distribute internet access.
I think the way grids develop does still depend on local factors. In the UK rural substations have quickly become constrained and have limited export capacity. Urban areas have more capacity and are seeing peaker and battery installation. But large arrays of solar and wind just need a big connection to get power from the middle of nowhere into big cities. Places where land for batteries or peakers will be super expensive and where solar and wind are impossible.
Also, if you are going to setup this kind of generation why bother selling to the public anyway. Find a ceramics factory or an steel works and run a private wire. You get a guaranteed customer who will agree prices years in advance.
Yes, and in theory, the market can decide whether spatial arbitrage via long interconnections or temporal arbitrage (via batteries, shutting off industrial consumers, pre-running air-cons, etc) is better.
Perhaps a combination of approaches will prevail:
The different arbitrage opportunities mostly make money off the price spikes they can smooth.
Simplified: the first long range cable you install earns the most money, because it can pick off the highest spikes. The second cable will cost just as much as the first one to install, but will have to find its profits in a world with already slightly blunted price spikes.
Similarly for batteries. But eg batteries and long cables can pick off slightly different spikes, and the back-and-forth flow in cables doesn't have to average out to zero (like batteries do).
I think there is a business side to this wherein big cable co made some compelling economic argument and exclusivity arrangement with the power company.
Clearly, utilizing the pre-existing infrastructure and doing it all in-house would yield high-quality engineering outcomes.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
That includes physical and human capital as well.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity
Doing more with any given amount of capital is very much part of economic progress. (Of course, if you can grow your capital, that's maybe even better. But capital ain't free: what goes into capital production doesn't go into consumption. And what goes into capital production for purpose A, like infrastructure, doesn't go into capital production for purpose B.)
yes, I'm glad you agree. It's not about doing more with less. It's about doing more with what you have. Capitalism does not promote reduction of either the capital stock or human capital -- in fact, just the opposite!
We've seen prices becoming more volatile in later years as our domestic market has become more interconnected with that of continental Europe.
Normally, I'd be all in favour of being part of a larger, working market; however with European countries phasing out coal (makes sense) and nuclear (makes less sense), supply is being cut while demand soars; hardly a recipe for stable prices.
It would be nice to serve base power needs by nuclear power, then use hydro (which can be regulated up and down much faster than thermal power plants) to handle the peaks.
You can build a lot of wind and solar parks in that time and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries. All that decentralized, thus creating jobs all over the country.
Given China appears able to build quality reactors quickly, this would seem to be the result of European policy preferences with respect to nuclear.
We don't know how they'll perform as they age. If we calculated quality as you suggest, they would probably win.. but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.
That's a strange expectation to have. Ever heard of the bathtub curve ?
China excels at hiding important information from public view, so I would take their data, and data indirectly sourced from them, with a grain of salt. And oh, by the way, one could say the same about the nuclear industry and its captured regulatory bodies in general as well.
Which is half of their lifetime by American standards.
> In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production.
That means 75% of availability. Good luck finding any renewable source with such a figure ;).
BTW, the list of cancelled power plants (even ones under construction) in the US is pretty long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_nuclear_reac... and even the only reactors currently under construction where are risk of being abandoned. The budget is of course overrun and completion set back by six years, so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month. I
> Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month.
Welcome to the real world of industrial processes, these aren't cars. Maintenance are run on tight schedules[1], so there can easily be delays (this isn't specific to nuclear though, you'd find delays during maintenance for every kind of electric production site). Also, small problems happen all the time, and because of nuclear's super high safety requirements, when those small things happen, you stop the reactor and fix it.
BTW, around one third of those 1700 days came from small issues at Fessenheim that EDF decided not to fix and keep the reactor off because the plant was planned for closure by the end of the year. You're not gonna fix you car if you know it's gonna be seized soon right?
[1] mostly because like in every business, project manager are like “it's late: workers were lazy. It's dine before the deadline: we gave them too much time”.
In fact, I like to say that the only viable option to get 100% RE is to lower our energy consumption until hydro can cover the majority of our needs.
It’s also worth pointing out that while hydro is renewable, it isn’t clean. Dams are ecological nightmares.
Hydro will like be part of our energy profile indefinitely. But it will never be more than a small fraction. And in the long run that fraction will get smaller as global energy demand continues to grow.
IMO, most industrialized nations have already tapped hydro about as much as it can be tapped, given some constraints about wildlife habitat. But I'd be happy to be corrected -- what new hydro projects do you think we should be doing, and how much power do you think they'd provide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... and the more alarmist https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/impact-climate-change... say that the global economic impact of climate change will likely amount to about 10% of world GDP, and perhaps as much as 20%.
Those are huge, huge numbers! But to put them in perspective, it's less than the difference between living in, say, present day US vs present day UK. Big impact, but hardly planetarily existential.
And, yes, there's more to live than economics. But if life goes on normally enough that we can even not only still talk about GDP with any meaning, but even say that we are going to preserve 80% to 90% of GDP, things won't be too apocalyptic.
Keep in mind that this is 80% of a far larger pie than today, since normal economic growth will continue.
So maybe that's why governments don't act, relying on abstract GDP numbers. «A good chunk of the tropical era of the world is going to be uninhabitable[1]? Who cares, it's only gonna cost us 10% of GDP».
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/climate/climate-change-he...
> it's less than the difference between living in, say, present day US vs present day UK. Big impact, but hardly planetarily existential.
Like, the difference between living in Birmingham or living in the death valley?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/world/canada/bc-canada-he...
Well, no, the planet will not be destroyed. The issue is the lifestyle of the semi-hairless apes on the planet.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... and the more alarmist https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/impact-climate-change... say that the global economic impact of climate change will likely amount to about 10% of world GDP, and perhaps as much as 20%
No, its that it will grow to that share by 2050 (which is less than 30 years away) and keep growing.
> At a (somewhat generous) 3% baseline growth rate,
At a fairly generous 3% baseline growth rate, 2.35× current world GDP, for a projected population of 9.7 billion to todays 7.9 billion, so (pre-climate change impacts) a little under double the current GDP/capita.
Of course, the losses arent, expected to be evenly distributed among countries, regions, etc., so if you aren't a well-diversified capitalist (say you are working class) and in the wrong place or industry, you have a good chance at seeing dramatically* greater impacts.
> Of course, the losses arent, expected to be evenly distributed among countries, regions, etc., so if you aren't a well-diversified capitalist (say you are working class) and in the wrong place or industry, you have a good chance at seeing dramatically* greater impacts.
Yes, averages hide a lot of variance.
Of course, this is another good reason in favour of allowing freer migration around the globe.
From the perspective of the people in places likely to see lesser adverse impacts, its a reason against freer inbound migration.
Of course, now we'd have to discuss who 'you' is. If you are talking about individual people, or about eg some statistical measure of the country or county as a whole.
See also https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/ which would suggest to eg just charge people to immigrate.
Totally renewable - and not just hydro, but also solar (which takes care of the water you let in)!
And yes, this has been proposed and is physically possible & it alreadyhappened for geological reasons in the past:
Also takes care of shipping. ;-) Although I guess you could build a near shore shipping channel, possibly filled with fresh water from rivers.
Well, then you still need to deal with the salt both as a onetime measure.
But throughout the year capacity varies.
And, of course, there's only so many sites that can support dams. So you have to ask 100% of _what_? And is that enough?
Not to mention the power transfer to pump water up & down being possibly a big multiple of what a regular hydro plant on that one spot would even need to transfer.
Of course, you could let’s say transport the energy produced by wind farms from Northern Germany to hydro projects built in South Germany, but that opens a new can of worms: loss of energy because of the transport itself, extra costs, actually building the energy transport infrastructure (a huge task in a NIMBY world).
Most of the existing HVDC interconnects are undersea.
You don’t need to deal with 10k different landowners each wanting their own special deal if you’re connecting Tunisia and Spain, vs North and South Germany.
If you’re covering significant distances that people live in, you can expect to spend a decade or sometimes more in court before being able to build - if ever.
Because of course there are the environmental reviews, the impact assessments, etc. and each of those will be hundreds to thousands of pages long, and you’ll likely have to fight over each page, also in court, with folks who don’t like that you’re going to dig up that random patch of flowers to install your power line or whatever.
And that is assuming you’re lucky enough to not have any endangered species in the way, in which case you might literally not be able to build at all if it is in an area you have no choice to go through.
So far no one is staking out patches of ocean floor, and generally even if they did, the topography is usually more forgiving there. So all you need is landing approval, which means one government and one compliant landowner on each side somewhere along each coast that is close enough to an existing grid that you can interconnect to it. Much more solvable. Still not easy or straightforward.
In California it took me 4 years and $18k worth of professional help to get approval to do completely standard fuel reduction work on a completely uninteresting plot of land that was super overgrown with brush and dead trees - with no one objecting to it - in the middle of a historic wildfire crisis in California that actually expedited the process.
I had to notify 10 something local native tribes (in case they maybe were somehow attached to the land, which they weren’t), had to do a detailed archeological survey, had to have a licensed biologist do a detailed walkthrough to look for endangered species (there were none).
Meanwhile the 3 largest fires in the states recorded history burned nearby, and they wouldn’t let me clear brush and remove dead trees from a clear fire hazard area and it’s a miracle the place didn’t burn to the ground.
The details will have to speak for themselves and this is not the forum, however I strongly encourage you to seek some kind of outsider, and avoid those for whom the reputational damage occurs..
I got my thing approved and done with (finally), zero interest in getting involved any more. Everyone else involved knows this is how it goes too.
If you think me going to some news agency is going to do anything but get me stomped on in some future year (and it ending up being a decade instead), you might want to take a look around first.
edit: all these records and more are also public records and should be trivially available via FOIA requests - which said PRcoughnews outlets would be pulling if they wanted to know what was really going on.
There are only 100k private timberland owners in CA (and mostly nutballs like myself that seem to like pain and suffering in the form of paperwork), so it’s an easy group to stomp on, relatively speaking.
You can remove small amounts of nuisance stuff in small areas, and burn in small piles during days you are approved to burn (which are limited). Maximum pile height of 3 ft, and 3x3 ft diameter if I remember from the last burn permit I pulled?
You can clear up to 1/3 of an acre, or emergency thin I think up to 3 acres if you comply with those rules, but the 3 acres they reserve the right to come in and fine you if you do something they don’t like, and you have to file a permit to do that too. Any trees about a certain diameter or of certain species, regardless of level of disease or danger they might require you to keep. A dead tree that might have an owl or protected animal in it? Ho boy.
It would take several lifetimes to even attempt that on 60+ acres of overgrown timber. I spent a week and barely did 1/4 of an acre working full time, and it still wasn’t adequately thinned.
In the end, it took a crew of 4 with purpose built heavy equipment (a masticator), working full time over 4 months to do it to state standard -once the paperwork finally cleared this summer.
Each one of which has some plausible reason for it to exist that nominally make sense, but starts of choke out a ton of reasonable behaviors pretty quickly.
See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.981...
Oil pipelines are bit different because there are tons of people and organizations outside of those directly impacted who are willing to join the fight.
Most utility corridors are in the middle of nowhere and already established (and people stay away because of this), so reusing an existing corridor is relatively easy - unless it widens into someone’s yard. Then it’s a matter of how much money that person has.
For connecting previously not connected areas with a new line, especially if it goes through somewhere folks are living? Be prepared for the actual work making whatever you are doing to be a tiny tiny percentage of the time and costs involved.
You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.
Unlike your examples, HVDC lines have no real negative impact on anyone but the immediately impacted property owners. If you're building HVDC transmission lines between countries, you can also very likely reuse existing utility corridors for much of it, and build through lower density areas for most of the rest. The actual number of property owners directly impacted won't be high enough to make an impact on elections.
Even in the US (which is very low density compared to most places), most people live in cities or denser suburban areas (80.7%). 97% of all land Area in the US however is Rural.
So you are right in that this is not a problem in most of the US (by land area), and this isn’t a problem in elections in those areas either - it won’t negatively impact enough individuals, and problem cases can often be routed around, because the pop density is low.
However, this IS also a problem for most of the US (by populations), as this directly impacts costs and infrastructure upgrades for the majority of the population in the US.
Europe is even denser, and some locations have just as bad if not worse regulatory environments, so it’s the same factors at play. Some countries in Europe excepted of course.
Or some random place in Ohio for that matter.
The regulatory hell that cities and states wealthy enough to afford it impose on themselves is not representative of the entire country.
Europe is at least as regulation heavy as California.
HVDC is (I think) the only thing that can be used for underwater connections, so it’s used where the price makes sense. If the question is regulation we should also see all proposed and recent AC lines in Europe.
(Edited for clarity)
Yet essentially all planned or existing HVDC lines (at least ones notable enough for the map), are undersea cables.
Why would that be?
There are definitely undersea HVAC interconnects - https://www.nkt.com/products-solutions/high-voltage-cable-so...
They seem non-notable enough I had a hard time finding a good combined list anywhere.
I ran across plenty of references to HVAC being used for offshore wind turbines and the like too.
And they were the default standard (and still are for shorter runs and where the grid frequency matches). There are AC solutions for lack of grid frequency matching and the like.
I can’t find a list or easy map for major new on land grid connections - if you can find one, that would be great. Might be national security concerns or something?
I know of at least one such solution between Germany and Sweden trough the Baltic Sea.
edit: This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable
I found this neat paper on HVDC grounds and interconnects too [http://b-dig.iie.org.mx/BibDig2/P13-0399/files/PESGM2013-001...]
The point is that right of ways and permits are super hard on land, which is why most of these are run via the sea.
If it’s a 1000km single run, the math is definitely different, but there aren’t a lot of those. If there are transformers, taps, generators, or other live equipment in the middle, those also change the equation, and in a grid environment, there are a ton of those.
Yes, governments really need to pass laws to muzzle NIMBYs.
This would increase democracy - no longer would small minorities be able to veto government actions for the benefit of all.
Like Trump vetoing a wind farm because it could be seen from one of his golf courses in Scotland.
can that be done in all cases? Most dams I've seen IRL didn't seem to have an area downstream big enough to collect the water to be able to pump it back up.
Still not super cheap of course, so then the classic ‘what will this get us for the cost, and does it pencil out as profitable’ (generally a good proxy for worth the time and expense) starts to come into play.
Edit: According to the paper, it's economically viable when the output power price (post-pumping and running through the turbine again) can be > 2X the price of the hydropower, which with seasonal variation and spikey but 'free' sometimes power, could definitely help. Preferring something like solar over running a turbine could also help.
The challenge of course is that many times hydropower is nearly free and available in large quantities, as the dams are also used for flood control, so they either toss large quantities of water over the spillways (wasting it), or run it through a turbine - but they can't NOT move the water.
That's actually the positive thing about covid, is that we had a preview of how the climate crisis is going to be handled. That's going to be a mess, everyone will think they are an expert
The possible liability from a nuclear accident so large that it basically isn't insurable, because insurance agencies won't promise to pay a sum that large. A dam may be located in such a spot that the worst-case liability is insurable, ie. the electricity can be fairly and properly priced in our present model of society.
(Not necessarily. If the dam could flood Paris and the smaller cities further down the Seine, insurance agencies might refuse to insure that one fully, of course.)
The central bank can print money without bound. Some of the effects of money printing changes with confidence in the currency, but the core effects that it targets don't really change until people radically change behavior to reduce use of the currency as a medium or even measuring stick for routine transactions.
Anyway, this isn't relevant to my argument upstream — it just changes the reason why nuclear reactors aren't properly pricable in our market economy, from "can't be insured due to worst case" to "worst case can destroy the currency". (It also doesn't rule out other argumens, pro or contra.)
They are not ever strictly power plants, rather they provided the much needed buffer to store energy during fluctuating demand and/or supply.
Pumped storage is also completely compatible with both nuclear base load (store extra from base load that can't be easily throttled) and unpredictable renewables sources (store extra when needed, cover - reasonably short - periods of no supply from the source.
If you look at model solutions to a renewable/storage/nuclear grid, the solutions tend to flip from "mostly nuclear" to "mostly renewable" with little overlap, depending on cost assumptions.
What the grid really needs is transparency at the customer level of real time power costs.
So first buy goes to power plants (including virtual power plants) that can provide stable power generation given a specific window of time - whether that that's nuclear, hydro, or solar+wind+battery+hydrogen - so long as it's close to zero emissions and will pump out required power no matter the weather over specified time.
Let wind/solar fight over peak power, or consolidate into virtual power plants with storage operators (it should also incentivize buildout of storage, so win-win in my book)
The problem is you can't just expose the prices without appropriate infrastructure support on the consumer side.
(Editted to make clear I meant EU wide, not within Germany)
Likewise, nuclear darling France is looking to reduce nuclear from about 70% of their energy supply now to about 50%
The difficulty is that the renewables don't provide baseline power.
Ironically, this baseline is now sometimes coming from French nuclear power plants.
I respect Germany's concern about nuclear, but the Energiewende hasn't always been practical.
You can have a stable power grid with ample supply and 0% "baseline" generation no problem (other than the usual generic ones).
If you have specific concerns about renewables please be more specific. Yes, they have different issues and different benefits. They are surmountable.
You could have a stable reliable grid consisting solely of wind and solar but it would also require a lot of storage, which would be insanely expensive in order to achieve the level of reliability we take for granted today.
I am sure we will find the limit of penetration for wind and solar, and already people are willing to give up and accept blackouts like in California instead of brushing under the power lines and cutting down trees which might fall on them proactively, which is expensive, they just have a blackout on hot windy days.
Baseline power is slow to change. Not all always-available power is slow, thus not all is baseline. It is not even a desirable quality except for the associated low running costs.
To a large degree, storage is interchangeable with transport, so we would not necessarily need a lot of storage even if we wanted to disqualify sources other than wind and solar.
That being said, in long term, I think we will have a lot of storage and storage-equivalent in industrial chemical and technical processes once they switch to electricity, in consumer batteries (EVs), generally more flexible load, etc.
Baseline / baseload power sources not only is always available, but it is always generating as well, at a relatively constant output.
I would disagree that it is not a desirable quality.
Storage and transmission are interchangeable, both are expensive. I agree storage will win out since it is easier to build unless the transmission path is underwater.
Demand response will continue to generally be emergency reserves, since it means that there is power not being generated and consumed that could have been.
Peak shifting is viable, as long as my car is charged in the morning I don’t care when it happened - although how long do cars take to charge at home? There isn’t that much flexibility in there. I also don’t want my battery cycles used to provide $1 of electricity.
Interesting times!
Wind power is rarely zero; certainly not everywhere. Solar of course is but at a rather predictable schedule, which is why it is often combined with battery and wind. If you can have extra energy generation, you can charge some batteries. The rest is just math related to how much energy generation and battery capacity you need.
The baseload[1] (also base load) on a grid is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week.
> The rest is just math related to how much energy generation and battery capacity you need.
I'm very pro-renewable, but aware of how difficult this is going to be. These are massive social and engineering tasks. For example, to look at the numbers in the UK, we're talking about construction of big new hydroelectric storage stations, or millions of batteries (potentially as EVs). [2]
The need for renewables to provide baseload power demand depends on big infrastructure development. Germany hasn't kept pace with this need, relying on French nuclear instead, which is why I said their Energiewende hasn't always been practical.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load [2] https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_189.shtml
I thought you were exaggerating until I read the sibling comments (thankfully on the bottom).
I'll leave it to them to figure out how serve the maximum demand with the minimum number.
The concept doesn't become irrelevant just because you're using renewables. Renewables still need to serve baseline power demand, through interconnection or storage.
They can't do this at the moment, and Germany is relying on countries with nuclear that provide this.
Please read the article you linked more carefully. It even has a nice graph with an informative title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Renewables_need_flexible_...
Germany may be importing energy, but more baseload generation is only one solution, and probably not even a particularly efficient one - you'd have a lot of leftover energy in peak times.
The baseload[1] (also base load) on a grid is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week.
If I were to clarify my original comment, it would be to add I was referring to the concept "baseload/baseline demand", not "baseload generators". It's true you don't need baseload generators to meet the baseload demand.
My point was, as in the graph, Germany hasn't provided flexible backup to their renewables. They've relied on baseload nuclear generators from France being the backup.
> .. you need to provide to meet demand ..
To put it bluntly, if you have enough to power baseload, you have nothing, except maybe pitchforks in your face.
WRT baseload demand, I don't see how it's relevant to pretty much anything. Baseload power - I don't see how one would use it as a backup, unless you're throwing energy away, or it's variable, hence not baseload.
I don't know what you are saying here.
> WRT baseload demand, I don't see how it's relevant to pretty much anything.
The concept is relevant as renewables cannot currently provide baseload power demand without infrastructure that hasn't been built yet, ie. storage and interconnects.
> Baseload power - I don't see how one would use it as a backup, unless you're throwing energy away, or it's variable, hence not baseload.
Throughout this thread, you have continued to ignore that I have explained baseload power demand and baseload power generators are not the same concept.
Baseload power generators, as the Wiki article mentioned, traditionally provided baseload power demand, but there's no reason why baseload power demand needs to be met by baseload generators. Variable generators can provide baseload power demand:
Historically, most or all of baseload demand was met with baseload power plants, whereas new capacity based around renewables often employs flexible generation instead.[1]
No.
You need to meet all of the demand or you get blackouts / curtailment / power goes out. The least and smallest of the demand over a week is baseload. If you can only provide that, then you will have blackouts all of the time. And pitchforks in your face.
> [Germany] relied on baseload nuclear generators from France being the backup.
Baseload generators are pretty much fixed output (otherwise they wouldn't be called baseload generators). In what clever way do you expect to use a fixed output generator as a backup for your variable output generator?
Baseline is the floor of the demand for power. It doesn't disappear just because you don't have plants that can operate on schedule, it just becomes very expensive to mitigate the intermittent supply in absence of fairy magic storage and 10-25x overbuild in generation.
Do then I understand correctly, that if we have baseline power, from static output nuclear or whatever, then we don't need blackouts, controlled demand, and you can cook anytime because there is enough power?
As you say, baseline is the floor of the demand that holds everything else above (except the weekly instant with minimum demand that it merely matches).
The problem with lacking power plants that can provide stable scheduled power is that you then can't meet even that minimum, or peaks that happen outside of power generation peaks (While solar has happy correlation with daytime power usage, apparently the high peaks at least in Poland aren't when the solar output is highest, and wind tends in many areas to peak during the night).
Ultimately, what you want is supply synchronized with demand - and either you make supply side capable of following demand, or you need to start telling people there's no energy for whatever they need it for.
The benefit of having static power generation from nuclear power plants or whatever else is that we could then concentrate the storage to help the peaks, which is much easier and less resource intensive than trying to totally smooth out lack of predictably dispatchable power.
Also, in case you end up with not enough storage to cover peaks with renewables, it's much easier to have controlled demand from big industrial power sinks provide the latitude to respond to peak demand rather than find out you don't have enough power for the base minimum pretty much all the time and have to institute rolling blackouts on unpredictable schedule.
Agree. We need to provide this, with allowances from inter-region transport, storage and acceptable demand shifting.
In fact, average generation must match average consumption (+losses) over storage timeframe. Peak demand dictates what generation (+ storage) is needed, at that time. Nondeferrable demand - unschedulable generation dictates how much schedulable generation (+ storage) you need.
Minimum demand dictates ... how much static generation can you use without throwing away energy or using storage, but you want to use storage, so you can use more, and you want to use solar/wind so you need to subtract that, and now we're getting quite disconnected baseline demand, so I really don't see the point of baseline power.
Solar and wind are unreliable power sources. That is OPs point - you can't compare nuclear and solar kw for kw because they are not the same. Nobody has near enough storage to allow solar to be treated as a 24/7 reliable power source.
Wind still blows at night though. And if you install a bit more than you need, you can deal with temporarily reduced local capacity as well. And with the cost savings, 2x or 3x is entirely feasible (but probably overkill). And if you use interconnected grids like this article talks about, it's always going to be windy somewhere and you can add remote solar setups, hydro, batteries, etc. to the mix. Batteries alone remove most of the need for expensive gas peaker plants in a lot of places already. Interconnecting a diversity of solutions provides plenty of base load and resilience. Texas could have uses some when their baseload providing gas, coal, and nuclear failed them last winter.
The issue I have with "base load" is that it's a very fuzzy term that seems to be rarely specified in GW. As soon as you do that or specify the amount of time you need to bridge with that capacity, the relevant unit becomes GWH. Which of course is a common unit of storage and energy production. Plenty of ways to provide large quantities of that sustainably; and people already do in many ways. It's just a function of cost and engineering proper solutions. It's not even that expensive mostly. Especially compared to building nuclear power plants.
Do you have more information about this?
I've seen lots of claims about "X city/country is running on 100% renewables", but these are always talking about net numbers. i.e. they produce enough renewable energy to power themselves if they had the storage, but they don't. They still import fossil fuel electricity when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
First, this is still baseline power, it’s just coming from batteries. The imperative to always keep the power on remains, but there are several ways to do it from an engineering perspective.
Second, we’re not there yet. Until we have enough batteries to cover that, baseline will need to be provided by some other form of power generation. Currently this is natural gas (America) and coal (almost everywhere else). On the balance I think it would be best for us all if it was nuclear until we have enough grid level storage to make this discussion moot.
Third, if you interpreted my comment as anti-renewables then you misread me. Renewables are great, I have them on my house, but it’s important to acknowledge that always keeping the power on is a political reality. We need to engineer around that requirement for now, and hopefully one day that’ll be trivial for renewables.
Renewables and more specifically storage is not ready, so the part that is below base line is currently served by gas (and some coal/nuclear) and the part that is above is delivered by renewables without need for storage?
A problem with renewables is that they still need storage to work as peakers, because in many places renewable production doesn't happen in peak times.
I.e. calculate demand - renewables. Cover that. Don't see the point of baseline.
And no, betting on a good winter isn't a solution. If those batteries runs out and large swathes of the country blacks out for months during a cold winter many will die. That is not a good solution.
If you notice, you have mentioned baseload, baseload power generation, baseload demand or base-anything exactly 0 times, because it has near 0 relevance, which is the point of the entire discussion.
Correct.
> the part that is below base line is currently served by gas (and some coal/nuclear) and the part that is above is delivered by renewables without need for storage?
Pretty close, but a bit of an over simplification.
Exactly what percentage of the grid is renewables at any given moment depends on the installed ("nameplate") capacity of various generation sources, and their mix. Even today it's not uncommon for the vast majority of a grid's demand to be met by renewables for short periods of time. The issue is that we can't do it reliably enough yet.
Some sources of power are very slow to change their production (coal, nuclear), and therefore are designed to produce constantly[0]. If your grid has a lot of these, then your description above will be correct; your baseload plants will produce a constant level of power with renewables and imports handling demand spikes above that need.
On the flip side, if your grid has a lot of natural gas or hydro, then you can spin these up and down to cover the difference between what your consumers want and what your renewables are creating (plus or minus big industrial loads that can be shed on demand). Batteries fit into this category, and theoretically a grid with a ton of batteries wouldn't need anything other than sufficient renewables and batteries to meet demand.
Until such a time that we have enough batteries to make a fully renewable grid possible, your grid must have a mix of nuclear, coal, or natural gas[1] to keep the lights on.
For a direct illustration, consider California's mix right now. If you read carefully you'll notice that nuclear and coal power remains extremely flat in CA (16MW and 1140MW or so respectively), while natural gas and unspecified imports tend to move in inverse correlation to the amount of power generated by renewables. If the renewable production were bigger, it possibly would have eclipsed demand mid day and enabled the export or shutdown of that Coal power. On the flip side you also have to note that currently solar power is dropping off in CA right as demand is spiking. A true renewable grid would need enough batteries to provide 26,000 MW of capacity or so for for hours, plus enough renewables to cover demand + charging. It's doable, but it'll take time.
Also, right now CA is producing a mere 459MW worth of energy from its grid scale batteries, which is roughly 1/3rd of what CA's one nuclear power plant provides. They're planning on shutting this plant down, rather than building new ones.
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
0 - Confusingly these are called "baseload power plants".
1 - Or hydro, but that's really region dependent. The power coming from the utility company here is 42% Hydro, but that's because I live in a mountain state.
Yes, if we have a future battery technology that can save a days worth of City's power consumption - something like this is phantom able.
With out sophisticated high capacity battery storage 'baseline' is a requirement.
For long term or rare event storage, something like hydrogen will likely be cheaper. Efficiency is lower, but that's a good tradeoff to get lower per-kWh-capacity cost.
France is not trying to reduce the amount of energy produced by nuclear generation, e.g. by actively phasing it out.
Instead, France strives to produce more energy with solar and wind generation, increasing its ratio to 50%. This will shift the ratio of nuclear down to 50%.
Wind and solar are great, but of course some other generation and storage is require to have power on a calm cloudy week.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/d06500e2-7fd2-4753-a54b-bc16f1faa...
The insanity must at least be stopped at Germany's boarders.
If we're taking about nuclear: I don't see any chance of Germany halting its phase-out of current nuclear plants. New plants meanwhile don't seem sensible economically
Even if no one builds nukes with that plan, then at least all the green parties will be having more public internal battles over the issue.
See https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-str... for example for Macron staking his campaign on the nuclear subsidies.
In the end the question is how fast the market reacts. Plant shut downs are predictable events years into the future, and in the event of an impeding black out energy prices on the spot market are going to be insane. That seems like a great incentive to build anything you can get past Nimbys fast enough. And the biggest industrial consumers shut down anyways as electricity prices rise (bad for the economy, great for the grid).
Making the power grid less responsive and more weather dependent is making civilization less adaptive to climate change with no guarantees of stopping climate change, so treating a phase out of coal without adequate replacement like it’s beneficial in the long term doesn’t make sense to me. Reducing coal makes sense, but not at the expense of a less adaptive more weather dependent power grid. Nuclear salt reactors seem like the obvious choice for a replacement from all angles, including CO2, access to fuel, energy output, independence from weather, etc. The only reason why they’re not replacing coal and renewables seems to be regulation and PR. I think the R&D for a lot of them are already done, and they’re much cheaper to maintain and produce/believe a lot of modern designs are quite simple. Most of the expense seems to be from regulatory burden and old laws about different reactors.
Nuclear seems like a great option because it avoids needing to resolve that cost benefit analysis. It reduces CO2 without causing energy grid problems. The newer reactors in particular seem like a pretty definitive win on all fronts. There are a bunch of promising sounding companies trying to get into that space and it sounds like the major roadblock for all of them is regulatory, not technicals or R&D expense at this point (seems like there are existing designs which have been prototyped/are ready to go, just can’t get built due to red tape; one US company moved to Indonesia out of frustration, design seems safe and low cost -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-500?wprov=sfti1)
This is currently a catastrophe for Scandinavian prices.
Wind accounted for 6.4% (9.9 TWh) of electric production in Norway in 2020. Total production in Norway in 2020 was 154.2 TWh.
https://norwaytoday.info/news/wind-power-production-in-norwa...
Differences in prices both between locations and over time can be turned into money. The first with cables, the second with batteries. In the process, the arbitrager smooths out the price differences.
Give it a bit of time, and you'll see more stable prices again. (Unless politics throws a spanner in the works, of course.)
> It would be nice to serve base power needs by nuclear power, then use hydro (which can be regulated up and down much faster than thermal power plants) to handle the peaks.
Oh, and don't forget the ability to regulate demand up and down. Plenty of industrial consumers already have contracts like that, and thanks to 'smart' devices, this technology can come to private consumers as well.
Eg assume your short term weather forecasts says that we have plenty of wind now, but there will be a lull in fifteen minutes. So you just tell all the fridges and hot water tanks to cool respectively heat now, so they have some stored thermal energy to get over the lull. Similarly for electric cars charging (you don't even have to take energy out of their batteries back into the grid, it's already useful to be able to suspend their charging for a while and resume later).
This is mostly not a problem of high technology, but a problem of coordination.
In principle, you also don't need your power company to directly talk to your fridge: whatever controls your home just needs a short term forecast of electricity prices in the next few hours, and can then decide autonomously and in harmony with your preferences.
But this network is not there because they are phasing out some power plants. Import from Norway is relatively small.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-s...
Things like "there's more potential available in the spring than in the fall (or winter).
> Those margins are doubly difficult to master given the temperamental pulse of a river whose volume increases by a factor of five every spring as snow melts in the Rockies. Within the river’s seasonal changes come manmade fluctuations: every morning its dams awaken the Columbia with surges of water to satisfy the Northwest’s demand for electricity, and every evening the dams tighten their gates to put the river back to sleep. And every other second, an automated system assesses the supply of electricity against demand and makes tiny adjustments to the volume of water moving through each dam’s turbines.
Things like drought will also change that capacity of generation. https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-21st-centurys-hoover-dam
Regarding base load - https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/667 - table 9.1 has the capacity factor.
> In the table above, the lower the capacity factor, the more susceptible the system to potential interruptions or drops in performance. We can see that solar and wind technologies, which are notoriously weather-dependent have the lowest CF numbers. At the same time, nuclear power and coal systems are most advantageous when operated continuously and at full load.
Nuclear has a capacity factor of 90.3. Hydro is 39.8. Concentrating solar is 33, wind is 20-40 range depending on geography and photovoltaic solar is 15-19.
More on that concept - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
Hydro is the best of the renewable non-fossil fuel base load sources, but it still is poor compared to nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation for base load.
New Zealand has a power shortfall about once every ten years when lake levels drop towards critical levels. In 1992 it was severe enough that nationwide cuts of 15 per cent were needed and the GDP dropped by 0.6%. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/how-we-learned-the-lessons-fro...
Hence, it makes sense to use hydro for handling peaks, not baseline supply.
http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...
There's a good watch on pumped hydro, and how it is kinda sucky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66YRCjkxIcg
Battery storage is the most likely thing, although there is also kinetic storage (flywheels) and some other ideas as well (ultracapacitors, for instance).
Transmission losses for 1000km are something like 2%-3%. So halfway around the globe isn't efficient, but 1000km might as well be considered "local" and transferring across the whole EU would be more efficient than local storage.
Pumped hydro is usually built when it will directly reduce overall grid costs. For example, the Ludington Pumped Storage plant in Michigan was built by utilities to make their generation more cost efficient overall, the energy efficiency of the storage system only needs to be good enough to accomplish that goal.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
Don't know; it just seems as though the greater the interdependency between geographically-separated modules in a system, the greater the chances that damage to one module can take down remote modules and perhaps even the entire system.
Example: Oceangoing vessels are generally designed with watertight compartments, so that damage and flooding in one compartment won't necessarily doom the whole ship — as happened to the Titanic, which sank in part because its transverse internal bulkheads didn't extend high enough to prevent seawater spillover from the iceberg-damaged sections to undamaged sections as the ship started to sink by the bow.[0]
Example: The Great Texas Blackout in February 2021 resulted in part from electrical power being knocked offline for some natural-gas compression facilities, which resulted in still-other electrical-generation facilities, powered by natural gas, failing for lack of fuel. [1]
[0] http://writing.engr.psu.edu/uer/bassett.html#:~:text=The%20r....
[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/Causes
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/business/columns/steve-lackm...
I suppose there can be a difference between interconnection and interdependence. Unnecessary interdependence creates the possibility of failure cascades, but interconnections can provide resilience without necessarily increasing the likelihood of problems.
Does the risk of damage go up, practically speaking, when comparing a country-wide guide to a continent-wide one? As in, is there any equipment that would survive the former but not the latter? Or mitigation techniques that work in the case of the former but not the latter?
They do depend on subsidies, however, as the idea is they would be mostly offline.