Europe's solar power surge hits prices, exposing storage needs
euractiv.com
euractiv.com
Seems like the system is working
The free market failed so spectacularly that we had to introduce legislation to regulate the insulin market. You know, so people don't die horrific deaths because they can't afford a medicine that costs essentially nothing to produce.
Christ, the entire Norwegian coastline is a battery in that case.
One problem is that the highest solar power output is around mid-day, but the highest power demand is in the evening. This is ideal for batteries to help with - and if you build a storage facility that buys electricity for £70 and sells it later for £100, you can make that profit 365 times a year.
The other problem is the country uses a lot of power for heating during the winter - but solar output is 5x higher during the summer months. This is much more difficult for batteries to help with, because even if you somehow manage to buy electricity for £20 in summer and sell it for £200 in winter, that's still a much smaller return than a battery you cycle daily.
I'm not sure what the solution to the latter problem is - nuclear might help, but we've really struggled to get it built at a sane price. Solar generation in other countries could help, but brexit shows an independence-minded go-it-alone streak that I suspect would make our politicians reluctant to spend billions on power plants in north africa. Wind is of course great, but is it enough?
Tariffs that reward charging electric bikes, cars and home backups at these times can also really help.
> The other problem is the country uses a lot of power for heating during the winter
Sadly I doubt the UK will ever be able to move away from winter gas. It's hardwired into many heating appliances and, as you say, it's challenging for batteries to shift the load.
So, how would tariffs targeting ebike charging even work? Telling people "put WiFi on your bike so we can tax you" is a poor strategy that guarantees noncompliance, its load isn't particularly different from other wall-plug appliances so if the tariffgot too high then people would just pretend they're using the microwave, and the total electrical cost of charging might be under 10 cents, so a 10% tariff would be less than 1 cent - so who would even care?
It doesn’t particularly matter whether consumers use it for charging a bike or powering a washing machine. The battery charging examples came to mind as the most “shiftable” consumption sources, but anything would do.
YMMV depending on local supply and demand patterns
Yes, basically.
Solar is going to be the dominant power source globally, because most human beings live closer to the equator than europe. In Europe wind is and will be a big part of the solution, particularly so in the north and near water.
Price is roughly equal with wind, maybe a little more expensive than onshore wind and a little less than offshore.
And the outgoing Conservative party has effectively banned onshore wind in England.
But eventually as deployment grows you'll hit seasonality constraints that solar doesn't hit closer to the equator. Wind correlates with demand better in this region.
Step 2: evaluate the combo of sources to get winter to zero.
Step 2 will likely involve insulation, potential energy storage (pumping water uphill to turn a turbine later), high thermal mass "heat batteries", solar that got us to 0 during the summer, wind, and water and maybe even nuclear.
This is wrong. Solar is zero emissions too, even if the economics are slightly less advantageous.
Both are intermittent sources, so building 100% of either increases risk and requires additional storage. Plus, some areas are more amenable to solar than wind.
Heat batteries - basically, a bunch of insulated sand/rocks that you heat up, and then later you use the heat directly for heating.
To be crystal clear: I am NOT talking about batteries that output electricity.
Heat batteries are literally dirt-cheap, and you can dump excess midday summer solar into them and they'll keep for months.
The only problem is that heat is hard to transport and heat batteries are necessarily large (due to the cube-square law) which makes it hard to build them hyper-local. For residential buildings that means you'll want district heating.
Heat batteries aren't a good choice for everything or everyone, but reducing grid load is a numbers game so they don't need to be - they just need to load-shift most heating, and everyone else can use heat pumps.
If we can just pipe steam or hot fluid into houses, we don't incur any sort of losses by converting the energy to electricity first.
This results in a lower net energy consumption because we're using heat that would have otherwise been rejected into the atmosphere to heat homes.
They are used to signal the producers to shut production down, actually - as in, the energy producer's dispatch team uses negative prices to signal to power plants to change production schedule.
In case of wind power, some power plants can actually make money on negative prices because modern wind turbines can be dynamically made into an energy sink.
Similarly negative prices are used as signal to storage providers.
Battery storage is still in it's infancy. A large fleet of electric cars would help - but it looks like all this is an afterthought.
Wind turbines however provide rotational energy that has to be turned into electricity. Modern turbines use somewhat complex alternators, often with multiply of 3 phases, which is normally used to provide delicately adjusted power output in sync with the grid. Fine adjustments of phase skew are usually used to control power provided to the grid and to keep generated power in phase with the grid.
However, such alternator can be driven in a way where the electricity provides braking power. You can think of it as similar to how many electric engines are both generators and sinks. It's however way more fine tuned than toy examples.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_fed_electric_machine#Do...
I wonder what percentage of turbines installed already have this technology versus the DC conversion. Or are pretty much all MW scale turbines using this?
As an aside, I find it funny so much of our power grid can have so many complicated parts but often boils down to boils down to "big thing spin fast!"
Because otherwise the millions of 2kW electric kettles result in turbines visibly slowing and grid failure :D
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235248472...
Title: "Using PV inverters for voltage support at night can lower grid costs"
Sure you can, just drive 'em at a higher reverse voltage and they'll emit IR light instead.
Thanks
So they don't have to shut down to 0 kW, since they are guaranteed to be paid significantly for generating even when there is no demand. Or they have to be paid more to shut down, which corresponds to a negative price at the other end.
This generally requires negative pricing for other suppliers and consumers to balance it out.
Pedantry: Solar panels are entirely passive and cannot be shut off. You can disconnect them from the grid, but they're still gonna sit there turning photons into electrons. Might as well capture that and incentivize storage.
Consumer-facing simplicity please. Don't make me think.
Give me a solution I can buy at the hardware store, that has 1, 2, or 3 standard panels (300W-400W) and that I can connect to 1, 2, or more old gasoline-car batteries (or UPS batteries). With measurement outputs over wifi that I can capture with Home Assistant. And with an AC output that I can connect to a TV to watch football, or to a blender to mix daiquiris. After I get some experience with power storage, I can scale it up and integrate to the grid.
I mean, it's pretty common with basically any permanent modifications you can make to your house if you think about it, is not like you can build a porch without a lot of experience or detailed instructions.
Solar pannels are like that, pretty doable but you need to do your homework
Much homework and education are always empowering.
They're capped at 800 W in Germany for fire safety reasons and because residential fuses are rated at 16 A. You can buy complete sets at hardware stores and even supermarkets like ALDI. They plug into a wall socket like any household appliance. You can use a WiFi connected smart socket to measure the output if the inverter doesn't come with an API. I've seen an 800 W "ready to use" one at a German discount supermarket for €300, although prices can reach €1500 and more for some of the fancier models. You do have to register them online but you don't have to inform your electrical company. If you're a tenant, your landlord has to approve of you installing one unless they have a legitimate reason to refuse you (generic "safety concerns" or complaints about them being ugly are not valid).
They're sold for camping, RVs, boats etc. No ability to feed power back into the grid though.
> https://theinverterstore.com/product/120-watt-solar-kit-1000...
If you want to attach to the grid, you add another piece of equipment (you don’t need to sell power to the grid, it will take years and years to pay the equipment off by selling power)