Why Mass Storage Is So Important for Renewables

Seems to me that solar thermal can be a more cost effective renewable source from two standpoints.
First the initial outlay is less and the issue of storage can be solved by any number of "off the shelf" present day technologies. It's not all about solar electric people!

Second Birth
A.A.

Renewables in synergy,
Replace our present energy,
Of fossil fuels and nuclear power,
Which presently is turning sour,
Polluting air and atmosphere,
Ground water all which we hold dear,
Warming and evaporation,
Storms affecting transportation,
Drought with deserts to expand,
What will become of living man?
Nuclear wastes to harm our Earth,
Renewables we need for second birth.

adrianakau@aol.com

"The VRB-ESS is particularly beneficial.. through its ability to "inventory" electricity, allowing for the optimal match of supply and demand....and is characterized by having the lowest ecological impact of all energy storage technologies."

"Scheer argues that the reason why many still think renewable energy cannot replace fossil and nuclear power is because those working in these industries have made efforts to propagate the notion. Furthermore, a largely unsuspecting public seldom differentiates between a vested interest and an independent expert. Scientists and industrialists, dependent on nuclear and fossil fuel industries for their livelihoods, shun evidence that suggests a total shift to renewable energy is possible."

I think that Dr. Scheer is completely right in his conclusions.

adrianakau@aol.com

Page 2 (Note on above post):
(Note: As more wind assets are connected to a large grid across wide geography, the variability of production reduces, which improves the economics. But this is exactly what many preachers of distributed generations stand against.)

I understood his points, but this interview was very light on valuable information. Importantly, he discussed 'storage' as an issue for renewables only when current production would exceed current demand. In reality, if generating assets are integrated into a grid, then dispatchable non-renewable production (e.g. natural gas peaking plant) will reduce in response to the supply-demand imbalance - solar, wind, etc will continue to deliver. This reveals the fact that emphasizing 'storage' issues w.r.t. renewables is the wrong approach. In fact, electricity in general suffers from the difficulty of storage and thus the need for near instantaneous production-demand adjustments. Taking wind power as an example, the issue isn't 'storage', but capacity / capital duplication. Because wind power isn't dispatchable, we must construct additional 'back-up' capacity to operate when the wind isn't blowing. This additional cost should be factored into the cost for wind generation.

Please note that the English website of Dr Hermann Scheer is http://www.hermannscheer.de/en

Best regards,
Joerg Muehlenhoff, EUROSOLAR

I agree that what detractors call 'the baseload problem' is really an energy storage problem.

I wonder,though, why the magnesium hydride technology being worked on as a potential vehicle fuel by
http://www.safehydrogen.com/
could not also be used for energy storage?

Releasing H2 and running it through a gas turbine should allow for very rapid conversion of stored energy to electricity?

One good use for a VRB unit even in the absence of alternative energy is to 'buy low, use high'. The spot price of electricity may vary throughout a day and a consumer of large amounts of power could charge the flow battery at a cheap time and use it up during peak demand. Dual purpose as a backup power system.

A note to James: depends on how you 'make' your hydrogen. If you're getting it from water you have to factor in your energy of electrolysis...which isn't cheap. However, the future is all about hybrid systems and if it's a stand alone wind system it may have to dump its power if the VRB is charged, the wind is howling, and demand is low. Perhaps a good time to dump the energy into Hydrogen instead of a resistor bank or the like.(if the cost of the system permits)

The podcast mischaracterize the need for storage, and should be revised. The claim of the reporter that storage is a "pressing issue" is simply not consistent with wind integration today. The wind industry includes this amongst the myths about wind (see http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/050629_Myths_vs_Facts_Fact_Sheet.pdf).

In May 2006 all 3 national utility membership organizations (EEI, NRECA, APPA) stated, "The addition of a wind plant to a power system does not require the addition of
any backup..." see http://www.uwig.org/UWIGWindIntegration052006.pdf.

The electric grid is designed to meet many changes in energy production because no power plant is 100% reliable. The grid operator matches electricity generation to electricity use, and wind energy's variability is just one more variable in the mix.
Islands, short on resources, and facing higher energy prices, will value storage sooner than the rest of the U.S.

Ian,

I agree with your comments on using Hydrogen as a storage medium. We are constantly told Hydrogen isn't a fuel it's just a storage medium. Maybe I'm oversimplifying this, but by milking off a small % of the wind or solar energy to charge up a "hydrogen battery - effectively" this could then be used to fill in supply gaps, seems to make sense.

On a smaller scale I don't see why this couldn't work for homes too i.e. solar + electrolysis -> stored hydrogen + PEM = home generation. Regards.

If renewables - intermittent renewables - are to become the dominant suppliers of electricity, rather than supplimenting that from coal and nuclear then it's a matter of a grid wide enough and versatile enough to get the power from where supply is high to where demand is high, day and night, strong winds and calm. A Global Grid. Or it's a matter of storage. Vanadium redox has enormous potential. I'd like to see smaller scale batteries in prodution for the stand-alone, remote area domestic, farm and small village users.

I'm sick and tired of the lies put forth by wind proponents, although I myself am a strong proponent. Every time a new wind farm is constructed, we get the bogus claims that 100 1.5 MW generators will "produce 150MW, enough to power X number of homes," where X is based on the capacity of the farm not its actual or typical output. This country rightnow has approc 10,000 MW of wind capacity, but only produces around 3000 MW, or about 1/4 of 1 percent of our electricity. In another 4 years, we may reach 1 percent.
by which time our demand will have increased more than 1 percent. Oh, yes, big progress!! Wind power is mostly wind, and very little power at the present.

Wind power has its problems, and claiming that they all arise from utility companies is pretty silly. It's a simple fact that wind is a variable source of energy and our society demands constant energy. Wind proponents will have to solve the problem, not simply stick their heads in the sand and claim that the variability is no problem. And arguments that no source is 100% doesn't make wind look any better. I can easily live with 99% uptime. I can't tolerate 30% uptime.

What is it with these guys from wind energy trade organisations (comment by Mike Jacobs)? What is their love affair with the word "myth"? Why do they get so emotional over any suggestion that wind energy can be very inconvenient to integrate and impossible to integrate above a certain penetration - without storage?

In West Denmark, where I live and which has more wind power per capita than anywhere else in the World, we are lucky to have inter-connectors that have, roughly, the same capacity as our wind capacity. Whenever the wind blows strongly, we are exporting net electricity. A REAL myth created by wind enthusiasts is that "West Denmark supplies 25% of its electricity from wind". WRONG! Wind energy while generating the equivalent of 25% of our demand is mostly exported to Norway, Sweden and Germany which effectively act as electricity stores for Danish wind.

Opponents of wind use the storage argument in unreal ways, like saying that to live with windpower we will have electricity 30% of the time. The U.S. adds more wind than nuclear or carbon-captured coal last year, this year, or next year. The utility industry, the power system operators, and states that live with wind agree that using wind for 10% of the electric supply is manageable without storage. See real information, not rhetoric, at
http://www.state.mn.us/portal/mn/jsp/content.do?subchannel=-536881511&id=-536881350&agency=Commerce

http://www.nyserda.org/publications/wind_integration_report.pdf

Transmission lines linking windy areas to other places are necessary for wind- the power grid is a network, and the utility operators know how to use it to integrate wind, without storage. Same is true for nuclear, or urban centers lacking sufficient power plants.

Myth (n.) A fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology.