Värtan Ropsten – The largest sea water heat pump facility worldwide (2017) [pdf]
friotherm.com
friotherm.com
There are huge engineering problems to be solved (not scientific ones as all tech is well understood). But massive improvements in how we regulate power and how resources are allocated are also needed.
In the last 20 years oil extraction was completely revolutionized by (mainly) mavericks and outsiders who believed in technological progress. Fortunes were made. Energy storage seems to offer a similar outlook, but working for humanity's ecological goals rather than against them.
(Not to have this debate but) when I see young tech-minded people who are enthused by cryptocurrency I want to shake them and point them towards the future of energy.
No. This will NOT happen and I have no idea what made you believe something as silly. Grids cost a lot of money, there is no "magic tech" around the corner to enable this. Demand flexibility is hard, not at all cheap and nobody knows what the practical potential even is.
So now the prices in the south are approaching those of the neighbouring countries, and everyone is up in arms about how electricity is suddenly expensive and politicians have been introducing subsidies. And politicians and grid operators alike are playing like they didn't know this was going to happen. Already one future export cable has been cancelled.
Of course, this means that Norwegian society has to make sure that the benefits flow from those who will make money exporting storage to those who are affected by higher prices. But as a high-trust, wealthy country, the only one to solve the resource curse, they should be capable of doing this. This is what I meant when I said that difficult problems of regulation and resource allocation go along with tech advances in this field.
The capex (and payback time) for such a system installed today will be greater than some people will care for, but our opex will be effectively zero, and the capex costs are falling rapidly such that we are just earlyish adopters. So there’s every reason to think that the “electricity and heating in Australia should be effectively free” in the future, because that future is already here; “it’s just not evenly distributed”.
If you are off-grid and adapt everything to using solar and battery then you can get "free operating cost" with enormous costs and loss of reliability.
However if you are grid-tied then the power company is going to regulate the power output of your solar panels in order to avoid the "duck curve" problem. Meaning that during times of peak potential output the panels are effectively going to be turned off.
Also don't try to get fancy with copex versus opex stuff. It's nonsense for anything other than company valuation and depreciation, especially when it comes to taxes. It's meaningless for home owners. Costs is costs. Money is fungible.
While laudable that you want to get energy independence, if that is your actual goal... the chances of you ever recouping your costs over just using the power grid is extremely small.
And those expenses are real. That is in terms of real resources... raw material, manufacturing, and labor. Unless you can get those costs inversed then chances are extremely likely that you are consuming far more actual resources and creating greater "carbon footprint" than if you just stuck with grid power.
That is... if everybody did what you did then there would be significantly higher ecological impact than the current status quo.
2. The duck curve will be a non-issue when storage availability and cost has evolved sufficiently. Private storage can also force utilities' hand here - it makes sense to pass pricing signals through to some consumers, and they will be able to quickly react by buying storage (sometimes at levels which won't make strict economic sense) and/or moving demand.
3. The suggestion that the (admittedly significant) redundancy in the use of resources from people having their own solar and batteries is comparable to the ecological impact of fossil fuels is far, far off the mark.
I don't think this is how it works. As the OP said, costs is costs. If a fossil fuel fired plant cost $X to build and run, you can't just hand-wave those costs away in the vein of competition. The costs will be passed on to the consumer.
Those privileged enough to have the option to build solar/battery can extract themselves from that market, but there will still be some left on the grid who will have to bear that cost. For example, renters and those too poor to afford the costs of solar will likely be stuck paying increased costs as the consumer base shrinks.
Well, it turns out that the costs are not at all enormous, and I don't understand why you think the reliability will be less. I've already had one major and several minor unplanned grid power outages since I moved here 6 months ago.
Are in-home batteries less reliable than the grid? I haven't heard that, and I don't know why they would be.
I think the payback time for the system I'm looking at (panels + batteries) will be ten years, but I'd much prefer to reduce my emissions than to save money through buying dirty (black coal) power from the grid. Of course there is the embodied energy and CO2 of the system and I haven't looked at that (yet). I'm still starting out.
That said, power prices are rising dramatically in Australia, and battery prices have been falling for years, so in 6-12 months time when I actually purchase the system, I think it's likely that the payback time will be significantly lower.
The point being that, at some point, the price will come down to the point where people will take out loans to buy these systems, because the loan repayments will be lower than the cost of buying power off the grid.
That's the opex/capex equation kicking in, of course, which I didn't think was trying to be fancy at all.
But there is no fundamental reason that future costs of energy in a place like Australia won't be comparable to the current costs of the grid only (if all generation were free). That is effectively free compared to today's prices.
This is why this field is fascinating to me - the potential benefits of progress which is theoretically quite easy (but maybe very hard in practice) is extremely valuable. Even if you don't think this end state is likely, it could still be very compelling to be involved in trying to get there.
> when I see young tech-minded people who are enthused by cryptocurrency I want to shake them and point them towards the future of energy
They are certainly one group working hard to make sure energy is never free.
Of course, this is fair. But there are fields where technology advances are so effective that meeting past needs is unmeasurably cheap.
For example, telephone calls are now too cheap to meter.
Oh? Isn't that what gas stoves use? And they exist in Stockholm, and is fairly common.
There are even new installs being done.