For some time now we here on Energy Matters have been harping on about the prohibitive costs of long-term battery storage. Here, using two simplified examples, I quantify these costs. The results show that while batteries may be useful for fast-frequency response applications they increase the levelized costs of wind and solar electricity by a factor of ten or more when used for long-term – in particular seasonal – storage. Obviously a commercial-scale storage technology much cheaper than batteries is going to be needed before the world’s electricity sector can transition to intermittent renewables. The problem is that there isn’t one.
Assumptions:
Making detailed estimates of the future costs of intermittent renewables + battery storage for any specific country, state or local grid requires consideration of a large number of variables, plus a lot of crystal-ball gazing, and is altogether too complicated an exercise for a blog post. Accordingly I have made the following simplifying assumptions:
* The grid is an “electricity island” – i.e. no exports or imports.
* It starts out with 30% baseload generation and 70% load-following generation . Renewables generation, including hydro, is zero.
* Baseload and load-following generation is progressively replaced with intermittent wind and solar generation, with baseload and load-following generation decreasing in direct proportion to the percentage of wind + solar generation in the mix. This broadly analogs the approaches a number of countries have adopted or plan to adopt.
* Annual demand stays constant.
* Enough battery storage is added to match wind + solar generation to annual demand based on daily average data. Shorter-term variations in generation, which will tend to increase storage requirements, are not considered. Neither is the option of installing more wind + solar than is necessary to meet demand, which will have the opposite effect but at the expense of increased curtailment (see this post for more details).
* Transmission system upgrades are ignored.
Two cases are considered. Case 1 uses actual wind generation, solar generation and demand in Germany in 2016 and Case 2 actual wind generation, solar generation and demand in California in 2017. I used Germany and California partly because seasonal wind and solar generation in Germany tend to offset each other while they reinforce each other in California, and partly because I have grid data for both. It should be noted, however, that the results are not predictions of what might happen in Germany and California because local conditions are not taken into account.
On future costs I made the following assumptions:
* Capital cost for utility-sized wind plants = $1,500/kW, solar = $1,000/kW (based on various sources).
* Batteries: The best estimate I came across was in an article from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, according to which:
The global (battery) energy storage market will grow to a cumulative 942GW/2,857GWh by 2040, attracting $620 billion in investment over the next 22 years.
2,857 GWh costing $620 billion works out to $217/kWh. I have assumed $200/kWh, about half current utility-scale Li-ion battery costs.
Results:
Case 1 applies the assumptions listed above to wind generation, solar generation and demand in Germany in 2016 using daily average data from P-F Bach.
Figure 1 shows shows Germany’s actual wind and solar generation in 2016. Wind generation, which is highly erratic, peaks in the winter while solar generation, which is far smoother (at least when presented as daily averages) peaks in the summer:
Figure 1: Case 1 actual wind and solar generation, daily average data for Germany
Figure 2 compares combined wind + solar generation during 2016 with demand. Adding solar to wind tends to flatten out annual generation but does not make it an ideal match to demand:
Figure 2: Case 1 wind + solar generation vs. demand, daily average data
Figure 3 compares 2016 demand with combined wind + solar when wind + solar is factored up so that it generates 100% of total annual demand. Generation broadly follows demand during the year but the erratic wind generation creates periodic surpluses of up to 80,000 MW and deficits of up to 50,000 MW:
Figure 3: Case 1 combined wind + solar factored to 100% of demand vs. demand, daily average data
The first graphic on Figure 4 plots these surpluses and deficits. There is no well-marked seasonal pattern. The second plots the GWh of storage needed to match these surpluses and deficits to daily demand. Here we see a seasonal pattern, with surplus energy generated from wind in the winter and spring having to be stored in the summer for re-use in the coming winter, and with storage capacity reaching a maximum of slightly over 25,000 GWh (25 TWh) in May. Given the erratic nature of wind generation, however, this pattern might change if a different year were considered:
Figure 4: Case 1 daily surpluses, daily deficits and storage balance. Note that the Y-scale is in GWh
Case 2 applies my assumptions to wind generation, solar generation and demand in California in 2017 using daily average grid data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) supplied earlier by correspondent “Thinks Too Much”.
Figure 5 shows California’s actual wind and solar generation during 2017. Wind and solar generation both peak in the summer:
Figure 5: Case 2 wind + solar generation, daily average data
Figure 6 compares the sum of wind & solar against demand. Summing the two results in a pattern that broadly matches the summer peak in demand but not the “air-conditioning” peaks in June, July and August:
Figure 6: Case 2 wind + solar generation vs. demand, daily average data
Figure 7 compares 2016 demand with combined wind + solar when wind + solar is factored up to generate 100% of total annual demand. There are large surpluses in the spring and early summer months and large deficits in the winter months:
Figure 7: Case 2 combined wind + solar factored to 100% of demand vs. demand, daily average data
The first graphic on Figure 8 plots these surpluses and deficits and the second shows the GWh of storage needed to match them to daily demand. The large surpluses from mid-March through the end of June and the large deficits in November through February combine to generate a storage requirement for Case 2 that also approaches 25,000 GWh (25 TWh) even though demand is only about half of Case 1 demand:
Figure 8: Case 2 daily surpluses, daily deficits and storage balance. Note that the Y-scale is in GWh
Now to costs. I estimated the combined wind and solar levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) without storage from the NREL LCOE calculator using the following assumptions:
- Period 20 years
- Discount rate 3% (NREL default value)
- Capital cost $1,250/installed kW
- Capacity factor 25%
- Fixed O&M $25/kw-year (NREL default value)
Other variables were set to zero or ignored.
The combined wind + solar LCOE without storage was $50/MWh, broadly in line with Lazard’s 2018 estimates for utility-scale solar and wind.
I then estimated wind + solar LCOEs with battery storage capital costs included. This was a straightforward exercise because reducing baseload + load-following generation in direct proportion to the increase in wind + solar generation results in LCOEs that are the same regardless of the percentage of wind + solar in the generation mix. The NREL calculator showed:
- LCOE Case A: $699/MWh
- LCOE Case B: $1,096/MWh
These ruinously expensive LCOEs are entirely a result of the added costs of storage batteries, which in the 100% wind + solar scenarios approach $5 trillion in both Case A and Case B, compared to wind + solar capital costs of ~$300 billion in Case A and ~$160 billion in Case B.
Discussion:
Despite claims to the contrary battery storage is clearly not an option for a low-cost 100% renewable future. And lest I be thought a lone voice in the wilderness, a recent report by the Clean Air Task Force confirms that my estimates are in the ball park. And the CATF is of a distinctly green persuasion:
Every year people produce almost forty billion tons of carbon dioxide that is pumped into the atmosphere – that’s a hundred times faster than the Earth has ever seen. If we don’t take action, our planet will change far faster than we can adapt. This is the mother of all environmental problems and the Clean Air Task Force is on it.
I can’t find the CATF report on the web, but its results were reported by, among others, the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Technology Review:
Fluctuating solar and wind power require lots of energy storage, and lithium-ion batteries seem like the obvious choice—but they are far too expensive to play a major role.
The Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy policy think tank, recently found that reaching the 80 percent mark for renewables in California would mean massive amounts of surplus generation during the summer months, requiring 9.6 million megawatt-hours (9.6 TWh) of energy storage. Achieving 100 percent would require 36.3 million (36.3 TWh).
Building the level of renewable generation and storage necessary to reach the state’s goals would drive up costs exponentially, from $49 per megawatt-hour of generation at 50 percent to $1,612 at 100 percent. And that’s assuming lithium-ion batteries will cost roughly a third what they do now.
In summary, wind and solar may indeed undercut coal and nuclear on price when the costs of intermittency are ignored, and batteries may indeed be good for short-term grid stability applications. But please let’s not have anyone claim that solar + wind + batteries will usher in an era of cheap, clean, 100% renewable energy, because they won’t.
Roger Andrews, right on! I just point out that the grids I know about are around 70% baseload and 30% load following. That certainly won’t change the central conclusion.
An outstanding synopsis of the lunacy with which we are being confronted.
Is there an influential windbag in *any* government in the western world who is sufficiently numerate to grasp this? It seems not! Or maybe they’re all on the gravy train.
DevonshireDozer, democratic governments appear to be dominated by people with law degrees. They go into law because they are not very good at math and science, possibly due to low spatial visualization skills. If we could elect engineers, physicists, and (for other reasons) historians instead of lawyers, we would be much better off. Some geologists would be nice too, given the importance of non-renewable resources to our economy. I get tired of hearing economists pretend to know more about physical resources than geologists. It is clearly the latters’ area of expertise.
Roger,
Thank you for this analysis. However, I think the LCOE would be much higher than you say. The reason is that the analysis needs to be for a worst case scenario – like a 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 year event. A parallel is the design of dams to withstand the maximum probable flood.
Whereas the energy for fossil fuel and nuclear power plants is stored int the fuel – so it can be used as an when needed, as in the fuel in a car tank – this is not the case for weather-dependent renewables. Therefore, to ensure supply can always meet demand generation capacity has to greatly exceed average demand and or the battery storage capacity has to be sufficient to meet demand through a worst case event.
In this case the cost of batteries become enormous. They have to store sufficient energy to supply demand through the worst case event, but would use only a very small proportion of the storage on daily cycles, and worst case periods per month and per year. So the capital cost is enormous, and almost never used. Also the battery has to be kept near full capacity all the time in case the worst case event occurs. Further, the batteries have a short life and considerable energy loss per day, so they need to be charged even when not being used (see Table 1 here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S100200710800381X#tbl1 ).
An example of a worst case scenario is a long period of low renewable energy generation. For example, another dust storm, like the Eastern Australian dust storm that occurred 22–24 September 2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Australian_dust_storm#New_South_Wales_and_the_Australian_Capital_Territory , which covers most of the solar panels in eastern Australia, followed by time to clean them. And, while the panels are covered in dust (and dried mud), sustained periods of low wind power generation occur across the NEM, similar to the 10 days of very low wind power output in May 2010, and others since.
Peter: You are probably right. But it doesn’t make any difference whether the LCOE is $1,000 or $10,000/MWh. Either way the cost is prohibitive.
The Science Direct link you provided on battery characteristics is instructive. Thanks.
“the analysis needs to be for a worst case scenario – like a 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 year event.”
Worse, we cannot accurately determine what constitutes a 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 years effect. That is why we occasionally get these 1 in 100 year storms back to back. All such calculations assume a normal distribution, but weather events follow a power law, with the weakest rather than middling events being the most common (good), but the severe events being considerably more common that a normal distribution would suggest (bad)., Like stock market money managers trying to calculate VaR (Value at Risk), the probability of extreme events assumes a Gaussian distribution because, when the only tool you have is a hammer, even the screws get treated like nails.
Speaking of your earlier comment on innumeracy…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UJlbJxI_WY
I find this commercial irritating, since it is basically nonsensical, from a statistical standpoint:
1) A 1 in 500 year storm has a 1/500 chance of occurring each year. if one occurs, the odds on one occurring the next year are…1/500. 26 in 6 years is high, but not nearly as high as they are suggesting. To put it another way, if a 500-year storm occurs, that does NOT mean that people are safe for 499 years.
2) The country experiences multiple 500-year flood or storm events every single year. Given the number of weather parameters, and the number of measurement locations, statistically we should be breaking any number of 1/500 records each year (rainfall, wind, storms, heat. cold, flooding, etc.). In fact not breaking such records routinely, somewhere, in the U.S. would be the anomaly.
3) We don’t really have good data on 1/500 year events. We are estimating frequency, since we don’t have an actual record or frequency, which would take multiple 500 year intervals to truly establish.
4) Lastly storms don’t necessarily mean flooding. flooding is not a just a function of weather, but our own actions – impoundments, roads, drainages, where we build and what. Ergo estimates of flooding potential need to be constantly updated and are likely as not to be inaccurate in the moment. In such a perspective, the chances of flooding may increase or decrease irrespective of the size of the storms.
Excellent, and exactly what I was thinking.
Think of an energy system like a car. Your cost per trip is the cost of the car divided by the number of times you use it. In economic terms this is you utilization of capital – the money invested in the car is actively serving a purpose. Buying a car you never use is very wasteful, not just the cost of the car, but the money spent insuring, managing, parking, maintaining, etc. the car. Just like a car you never use, a battery you never use has a cost of ownership as well.
“…would use only a very small proportion of the storage on daily cycles, and worst case periods per month and per year. So the capital cost is enormous, and almost never used.”
Exactly right – capital has a cost. If you tie up capital in machinery and equipment or batteries that are hardly ever used, or only used in extreme emergencies, that is capital that is unavailable for other, more profitable uses in our society.
I think that batteries might make sense, but only if they are completely discharged each day, even better, multiple times per day. Outside of that…I don’t see how this works.
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Rodger
The more practical greens have given up on arguing for a 100% renewable grid as you have demonstrated this can be easily proved to be impractical or impossible.
Current green thinking is that we could easily achieve a 40 – 60 % wind grid complemented with CCGT and reciprocating gas engines, and that in the future an 80% renewable grid can be achieved with a more flexibility using storage and DSR.
Furthermore greens are saying that intermittency costs are small only £10 per MWh
I can appreciate we can look at energy bills however greens muddy the waters and argue
that these costs are not causal and reflect high energy taxes not the high cost of renewables.
Does anyone know of any research on intermittency cost.
Will Energy maters have look at this appreciate it’s complex to prove but
it is annoying to hear greens win the argument with many governments organisations and journalists accept that we can add almost limitless amounts of intermittency on to the grid
free of charge.
“it is annoying to hear greens win the argument with many governments organisations and journalists”
Sorry, but there are no real arguments from any of those organisations, especially not with the kind of data that is provided by the likes of Euan, Roger and Paul Homewood.
If you don’t believe me have a read of National Infrastructure Comission recommendations on Green energy.
https://www.nic.org.uk/news/ministers-must-seize-the-golden-opportunity-to-switch-to-low-cost-energy/
Davey,
That report was discussed here:
http://euanmearns.com/the-national-infrastructure-commissions-plan-for-a-renewable-uk/
The UKERC did research on the cost of intermittency.
http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/publications/the-costs-and-impacts-of-intermittency-2016-update.html
And worthless it is too, because it only considers the costs of “short-term system balancing” and “reliably meeting peak demand”.
The argument is that if offshore wind costs fall to £55per MWh and intermittency costs are low then when should abandon new nuclear build. I’m sure you have read this many time in various articles.
What they fail to mention is that the Nuclear plants will still be producing after 60 years and those wonderful Off Shore Wind Turbines will require major Blade Maintenance after 5 years and total replacement after 20.
That is never factored in to the costs.
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A company called Coronation Energy has just put in a planning application for a battery back up system to be connected to a National Grid 132kv transmission line near where I live in the NE Scotland about 40 miles west of Aberdeen. According to the company this is one of three back up plants that they have identified to be built by them for the whole of Scotland . Unfortunately they have not provided much technical information in the planning application but it will consist of 10 battery containers ( approx 12 metres x 2.5 meters Small?)with associated inverters and transformers and switchgear. This site will be entered into the Capacity Market when complete. Does anybody know what capacity this size of battery facility would have ?
Tesla’s much vaunted battery system in Australia takes up about 1 hectare. 100MW/129MWh battery capacity
@ Rod – a recently approved planning application on the outskirts of Norwich is for a 49.9MW battery storage facility. Astonishingly – or perhaps we shouldn’t be in the least surprised – this quoted figure doesn’t explain if it’s the maximum output, or the amount of storage (MWhr?). But there are many documents available on the council site, and one shows 12 containers for the battery/inverters, and 3 more for ancillary equipment:
https://tinyurl.com/ycmudstl
All I can find is a comment that it could supply “6,000 homes for a day”. I think it means it is a one hour battery, although that implies a “home” consumes just over 3MWh per year, which is perhaps slightly on the low side. Still the consumption of a “home” seems to be highly variable and designed to obfuscate.
Typically about 2.4MWh per container.
Alex,
Double that to 5MWh per 40’/12m container based on Escondido:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/project-of-the-year-aes-escondido-energy-storage-project/511157/
Thanks to all who replied to my query. It seems that the National Grid are going for multiple (small ) battery back up systems dotted around the country . From your replies I suspect that the unit near me which is just under a hectare would be similar in capacity to the unit at Norwich.
I have did this calculation for the UK last year and wrote a paper on it. Here on SSRN.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3274611
The factor of ten on renewable energy generation cost was almost identical. The same numbers deliver a guideline £50B pa per TWh CAPEX cost for reserve capacity added to the grid to provide a renewable intermittency reserve. Which really should be paid to fossil that currently does the job for free.
Peter Lang has done a similar study for Solar PV and pumped storage in sunnier and predominantly desert wasteland countries that are hard of electrical engineering reality, like Australia, and California, and only consider the sunshine and aircon side of the equation, and the subsidies that make solar PV sellers and users easy money at the expense of the mass of less well off. All about subsidies, nothing to do with engineering facts and real cost.
This level of cost is completely unavoidable and predictable because you cannot store diffuse electrical energy economically once it has ben created by liberating the dense and intense primary energy of its fuel’s molecular or nuclear binding energy. Science 101. Storing diffuse energy uses huge resources in the case of batteries, or pumped storage. PS Re creation of primary fuel is horribly innefficient if you reverse the process by putting the energy back in..
This assumed a 4 year battery replacement life and the need to supply one weeks energy in February’sh from batteries with no significant intermittent renewables, 6.4TWh at today’s demand. Also assuming current electrical energy prices, not the 2 or 3 times prices renewables are currently paid. So 90p/KWh on current bills for one week’s battery support for the UK grid. The paper is all fact based but is struggling to get accepted by the system’s journal editors, overtly because it contains economics as well as engineering, e.g it costs the options, which makes it unsuitable. Really? In a journal of generation, transmission and distribution, economics is not a criteria of interest? You can hear Faraday, Tesla and Edison all spinning at 50 or 60 Hz. Sorry, not “DC” Edison. This was the UK IET BTW.
The other conclusion was that the amount of wind power required to replace UK energy supply without fossil use could not be generated with wind, there is not enough land and coastal sea area available to generate enough energy to charge the expensive batteries, even if the country was covered with wind turbines at 1Km/MW spacing. “Do the arithematic”. The UK is too small to collect enough weak intermittent energy to meet it’s needs with renewables, at any price.
Also, the first 4 yearly round of battery replacements would pay for replacing ALL the UK’s generation with triple the capacity of nuclear plant at £5B per GW, 60 years worth of energy at 180GW capacity to meet the tripled needs of the end of fossil.
After the first 4 years we are saving the economy £300B per year by not replacing more batteries, more from avoiding overpriced renewable generation, and powering much more heating and transport with zero CO2 electricity, if that matters.
What about power to gas? I keep mentioning it in comments but it doesn’t gain any traction. Have you covered that as a storage solution elsewhere?
Even using a low CAPEX value for battery storage ($200/kWh) and a capital recovery factor of 10% it corresponds to 20,000$/MWh of levelized annual cost referred to one charging cycle. It lowers to 100$/MWh for 200 full capacity cycles per year. It becomes a reasonable value, but it is necessary to add the charging costs and considering the battery efficiency. Using renewables with 50$/MWh of LCOE (the closed system used in the examples) and an efficiency of 80% it gives a charging cost of 62.5/MWh. Under those conditions the LCOS is 162.5$/MWh, which can be consider a competitive value to replace a gas peaking plant (according to Lazard 2018 with a LCOE between 152 and 206$/MWh in US).
So, saying that a battery array can solve the long-term storage problem is not realistic (seasonal electricity transfer) and other solutions are under investigation (hydrogen, synthetic gas?). However, a pair PV (or wind) and battery is now an economic alternative for daily storage cycles, doing load profile shifting and avoiding investments in Open Cycle Gas Turbines.
Note: the renewables integration costs are higher in a system dominated by PV generation, which explain the higher relative storage needed for the Californian model.
Jose:
Whether renewables integration costs are higher when solar PV dominates depends on latitude and – assuming roughly equal wind and solar generation – whether seasonal variations in wind offset or supplement solar seasonal variations.
Integration costs per unit generation will be higher in California than in Germany because wind and solar in California both peak in the summer while in Germany wind peaks in the winter, thereby offsetting the summer solar peak.
In tropical latitudes 100% solar might make sense because of the low seasonal level of variation. In European latitudes, where seasonal solar generation varies by a factor of five or ten, it doesn’t.
Roger, in fact I am more familiar with European systems, but I have just referred the conclusions of the BP Technology Outlook (page 34 to 36 for US).
https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/en/corporate/pdf/technology/bp-technology-outlook-2018.pdf
http://euanmearns.com/solar-power-on-the-island-of-tau-a-preliminary-appraisal/
This month and especially this week is a classic example of the intermittency problems for both Wind & Solar in the UK.
Jose,
I read your analysis of what the costs are and it seems to all make sense, then.
I think about the CAISO hub price data. Or I stumble across this on the US EIA page:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/wholesale/
Download the xls file look at the data and look. They are only getting $30 or $40 MWH. wonder how any of these companies or plants make any money. I mean they must but I really don’t understand.
T2M
What about what they are doing to store energy, using excess energy to pull rail road cars up hill then when needed letting them be pulled down hill by gravity to reclaim the stored energy.
http://euanmearns.com/is-ares-the-solution-to-the-energy-storage-problem/
Energy storage and dispatchable back-up power “included”, more like.
Not “batteries” when both Germany and California have excellent possibilities to use pumped hydro energy storage.
Also no need for so much energy storage capacity when dispatchable back-up power is available to keep the lights on during periods of low availability of intermittent wind and solar generation.
Add about 40% of peak demand in dispatachable biomass power capacity to save on lots of energy storage.
An additional 60% of peak demand dispatchable power can be mothballed for worst case scenarios.
As In the case of California, careful siting of future wind farms to generate more power in winter would end California’s deficit of winter wind, see
“California needs winter-windy wind farms”
https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/images-index/us-west-wind-resource-winter/
Must dash ..
“when wind + solar is factored up so that it generates 100% of total annual demand”
“when wind + solar is factored up to generate 100% of total annual demand”
– Roger Andrews
—–
A reasonable first step but correct next step is to design in the appropriate scale of dispatchable renewable energy back-up power to match.
My “Wind, storage and back-up system designer”, “Grid Watch Demand Focus Table” at this link –
http://scottish.scienceontheweb.net/Wind%20power%20storage%20back-up%20calculator.htm#grid
– recommends, for example, a “Row E” configuration
* factoring wind (+solar, tidal etc.) up so that it generates 104% of total energy demand
* factoring dispatchable renewable energy back-up power (likely from biomass other bio-fuels, hydrogen sourced from power-to-gas and conventional hydroelectricity) up to 40% of peak power demand
[+ factoring up an additional 60% of peak power demand of dispatchable power (using legacy power stations burning any fuel type) for emergency, worst-case scenarios]
* factoring energy storage capacity (pumped hydro, batteries etc) up to 93% of one day’s average wind (+ solar, tidal etc) energy generation
Although my Row E system configuration uses a similar scale of intermittent renewables generation as Roger suggest (104% vs 100% of total energy demand) Row E employs much less energy storage and a huge amount more dispatchable power (which Roger has neglected altogether).
The are other row configurations in the tables – Row A, for example, doesn’t specify any routine dispatchable back up power at all because it shouldn’t be needed (though keeping 100% of peak demand legacy power capacity mothballed for emergencies and worst-case scenarios would be safest), because Row A specifies wind (+solar, tidal etc.) generating 269% of total demand energy – an overcapacity of 169% – and specified energy storage capacity equal to 89% of one day’s average intermittent renewables generation.
All these row configurations in my tables have been modelled to demonstrate that they work well to keep the lights on even in challenging times of low renewable power generation availability. See –
“Modelling of wind and pumped-storage power”
https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/scientific-computer-modelling-of-wind-pumped-storage-hydro/
Designing future renewable energy grids using my “Wind, storage and back-up system designer” way is much more cost effective than the prohibitive costs of all the energy storage which Roger suggests would be needed.
Scottish Scientist
Independent Scientific Adviser for Scotland
https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/
SS: You miss the point entirely. The post was about the costs added by batteries. Dispatchable sources don’t come into it.
I also note that in just about every comment you post you plug either your Strath Dearn or your “Modelling of wind and pumped-storage power” articles. It would be nice if you could write about something else.
Here is something that gets forgotten in battery talk – electricity doesn’t like to be stored because electrons repel one another. It is almost embarrassing to have to say it out loud, but there it is. It’s like trying to store mixed oil and vinegar. The longer you try to store it, the greater the loss of charge. Lead-acid batteries lose charge at a rate of about 2-8% per month. NiCd batteries lose 2-3%/month. Li ion losses 5% in 24h, then 1–2% per month.
It is like having a solid gold piggy bank with a hole in the bottom.
Roger, what happens if you expand pv+wind production beyond 100% of consumption? Will that bring down the storage balance curve, hence battery capacity needed and finally power prices?
Andres, that is true and will at first reduce the required battery size at an increase in the wind + solar cost, however, the limit is battery size may never go below that which will last through the worst case low wind + solar period. You would have to model the system to find that minimum, but this would still be a very high-cost system.
Does Al Gore KNOW??
Germany probably doesn’t need much storage at all, because there is enough hydro capacity in Norway for most of Europe. That is the point to Nordlink, a 1.4 GW DC line between Germany and Norway.
Also I wouldn’t bet on batteries staying at $200/KWh. Tesla’s already retail at $190. Prices have fallen by half since 2015, and there is no indication that they will stop falling in the near future.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the barrier between the electricity market and the liquid fuel market is disappearing. As millions of EVs are sold, they will provide a buffer to the electricity market. Those battery costs will be covered by car buyers, not by the utilities.
More to the point, renewables are killing the energy business whether we like it or not. You can’t sell fuel when there are market players that provide the same service without fuel. Even cheap gas won’t be able to take the heat. There’s no use crying over spilt milk, the question is how to deal with the problem moving forward.
Bernard:
There’s nowhere near enough hydro capacity in Norway for most of Europe.
Where did you get your $200/kWh battery storage number from? Everything I’ve seen, including Tesla’s price list, shows ~$500/kWh. The 129 MWh BSAB came in at $512/kWh.
Millions of EVs will consume a lot of electricity. Whether any significant fraction of it will be returned to the grid for “buffering” is questionable.
Renewables are killing the energy business. How to deal with the problem? Buy lots of candles.
1.4 GW sounds like a lot. Take a look at this:
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2018&month=12
Maybe not so much.
Perhaps you did not notice the recent price INCREASE on the Tesla Powerwall.
https://www.energysage.com/solar/solar-energy-storage/tesla-powerwall-home-battery/
“Prior to April 2018, the price of a Powerwall 2.0 battery (not including installation costs) was $5,500. It has since increased to $6,700.”
Looks like at the retail level, anyway, you are ill informed. To the tune of 22%.
It is telling how much storage was installed in California this year compared to last. Some sort of storage is mandated there.
T2M
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Our renewable energy advocates here suggest that simply “over-installing” solar or wind, so that the MINIMUM generated (on a daily, or weekly basis, or whatever small-term) matches the maximum demand (on the same daily/weekly etc time scale), with the excess simply ‘dumped’ (wasted) CAN require much less batteries/storage, and thus be significantly cheaper. Can you do some cost calculations of these ‘reduced’ or ‘minimum storage’ options? If panel or rotor costs come down as many greens dream, maybe installing excess generators can be cheaper than installing storage.
Chris Walcek — Are you content with no electricity at all on those nights when the wind fails?
Already done:
http://euanmearns.com/the-quest-for-100-renewables-can-curtailment-replace-storage/
http://euanmearns.com/the-quest-for-100-renewables-can-curtailment-replace-storage/
I too am worried about the magnitude of battery storage we would need to bring to bear to convert the good that is solar PV electricity to the good that we are accustomed to demanding from mostly fossil and nuclear generation. BAU includes huge annual military expenditures and indifference to human rights abuses to maintain access to petroleum products at any cost, and we risk trading out this phenomenon (the so-called Carter Doctrine) for a similar one to gain and maintain access to the materials we’d need to ensure a steady flow of batteries (remember, they age out – they don’t live forever). Reliance on batteries also places their manufacturers into a rent-seeking position which they can worsen via vendor lock-in.
This is why I’ve been advocating for electromechanical energy storage. My modeling of the entire state of Georgia powered solely by solar PV called for a half-billion-ton flywheel of solid rock as an alternative to a quarter-mile-on-a-side-in-three-dimensions storage battery apparatus. I don’t know for sure how feasible that flywheel would be but you sure wouldn’t have to enrich any vendors for every marginal bit of capacity you’d have to purchase and keep replacing if you used batteries.