Future power systems with today's weather | Hacker News Reader

Future power systems with today's weather

model.energy

71 pointsdeverton29 comments

Hydrogen might prove too nasty for long-term storage.

Methanol on the other hand can be produced from syngas, so hydrogen and CO:

https://netl.doe.gov/research/carbon-management/energy-syste...

It’s expensive to capture co2 though. And once you do that, it’s cheaper to sequester the co2 and burn nat gas.

Sequestration at scale isn't free and isn't proven technology. Carbon Capture and Storage is clearly a part of the picture for a carbon neutral economy, we are too late to do without it. But I don't think we have a full picture yet of the relative importance of sequestration vs syngas.

In summers there can be virtually unlimited sunlight near the poles. Think: Scandinavia.

So what's an easy-to-store way to stockpile it? Methanol? Ammonia? What else?

I'm thinking household-scale here. DIY.

Or import it as gas/liquids from other countries, which probably accounts for the majority of energy in the majority of countries today.

EVs and renewables will decrease the amount of imports needed for most countries, but a reduced amount might still be needed for some nations.

Only difference will be a less cartelized supply since there's a lot of countries that can set up solar and wind for export.

The intensity is low, though, and the weather can be rough on panels in the winter. If it's possible to stockpile the energy in fluid/gas form, it's better to produce it in Sahara and then ship it to wherever it's needed.

For household-scale I only have a proposition regarding storing/generating heat, namely compost.

A compost pile produces a surprisingly large amount of heat. If you run a hose through it you can have sufficiently hot water all winter.

You could maybe use it to produce biogas and burn it in a turbine, but that's anything but household-scale.

As for electricity you won't find anything better than batteries at the moment.

One part not considered is the grid connections - esp across time zones or geographies.

Some examples:

The SunCable link between Australia and Singapore https://www.suncable.energy/our-projects

The Viking Link from Demark to the UK https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/16/uk-and-denmark-...

That's very cool.

On the default mix over the full time period I see a price spike immediately after it starts in 2015 and then a few more then it settles down by 2020. Is that just an artefact of storage not being built up?

Looks like the demands gets lower over the years, so my guess is that the stress on storage and hydrogen gets lower, and thus the price lower too

> "There are multi-day periods with low wind and solar output."

That's the real problem. Days of storage are required if most power is coming from non-dispatchable sources. Batteries are not cost-effective for that, at least not at present. Electricity to hydrogen and back is maybe 30% efficient. Pumped storage is much more efficient but you need the right geography - two nearby lakes at very different elevations.

This keeps leading back to natural gas peaking plants.

Note that the simulation is only for Germany. If you add other countries to the grid, there will be less no solar-no wind days.

But also peaking gas plants are not that bad. We should dream about a zero emission scenary, but a 90% less emissions is not bad either, and we can always get better and better. This is, in fact, the current trend: each month is cleaner than the last.

> Note that the simulation is only for Germany. If you add other countries to the grid, there will be less no solar-no wind days.

But more transmission losses.

There is always some place on Earth where it's windy, where the sun shines, where it's summer. I have no idea if transporting such high loads on a global grid is feasible (let's say Australia's summer sun powering Europe in winter nights) but that probably works better in a peaceful world.

> let's say Australia's summer sun powering Europe in winter nights

https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/germany-s-660m-pitch-fo...

Not all energy is electricity, this is a deal for Australian sunlight --> Hydrogen | Ammonia --> Germany

https://arena.gov.au/blog/hydrogen-deal-unites-australian-in...

Averaging over subcontinent-sized areas still leaves a 4:1 wind variation in wind output over a day. You can look at the data for the PJM grid (most of the east coast) and the CAISO grid (most of the west coast), and see 4:1 ranges most days.

Tying the east and west coast together is technically feasible. China has a megavolt DC grid with links thousands of miles long. (China's cheap energy sources are in the northwest, while the big loads are in the southeast, so that makes sense.) But it doesn't seem to make sense for the US.

The US wind belt is roughly from the Texas panhandle north to Canada. That area does not, as yet, have enough links to either coast.

30% efficiency is fine if you only need it for like 5% of the overall energy consumption.

The price and efficiency of H2 storage is contained in the models.

Cool toy, but this is a basic simulation of energy markets. You can't talk about future power systems without addressing system inertia, unless you dont care about being realistic.

What inertia do you mean? Demand or supply? Sure, decomissioning anuclear plant takes decades but a coal plant can be shut down in about 48 hours I think and at that point produces no new emissions...

"Inertia" in the context of power systems refers to the kinetic energy stored by rotating generators (coal, gas, nuclear, hydropower).

If the system frequency (a real time measure of supply and demand) were to suddenly change (e.g. a power plant were to trip), these generators are still spinning, and dampen the rate of change of frequency. This allows time for the grid operator to take corrective actions.

Inverter connected plant such as wind and solar does not inherently provide inertia.

Inverters with battery can provide "virtual" inertia and can be grid forming too.

The real question is which tool or set of tools will be the cheapest to maintain grid stability.

Capacity expansion and production cost modeling are real and important modeling exercises. Immediately dismissing those efforts doesn't seem necessary - they can be done in parallel with work focused on things like inertia, e.g., see https://sites.google.com/view/unifi-consortium/home, https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20osti/73856.pdf.

I'm begging you, stop thinking hydrogen is viable or ever will be.

Viable for what?

Currently most fertilizer is made with hydrogen that's separated from methane and the CO2 vented.

It's about 2% of global emissions.

Ammonia and Methanol and other efuels for shipping and flight generally require hydrogen as a building block.

The Hydrogen Ladder diagram lays out the areas where Hydrogen is necessary and where better current alternative tech exists. It gets updated every so often as tech progresses but generally shouldn't see any major changes.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-ladder-version-50-mi...

Long-term storage and power generation. Of course it's essential as chemical feedstock but that's a necessity, not convenience. If it were (chemically) easy to use, say, the hydrogen in water molecules you bet it'd be used instead.

Well, long duration grid balancing gets a B on the ladder.

Short duration grid balancing gets an E as renewables/batteries compete.

And power generation with no storage component gets a G, the lowest score possible.

I mean, many many many people and companies are trying to get hydrogen to work. From airplanes to cars to long term energy storage. From random startups to Airbus and Toyota going through universities. There are good reasons for that, or there wouldn't be that many reputable organisations spending that much money on trying to make it work.

And I'm telling you they are all delusional and/or propped up by oil and gas companies.

I would normally agree with you out of hand, but using hydrogen for temporary grid storage isn't as obviously stupid as, say, using it to power cars. Sure, most proposed uses of hydrogen are blatant red herrings invented by the fossil fuel industry, but not all of them.

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