Gas power generation is a necessary evil to balance out the variability of intermittent energy generation (i.e. wind and solar).
Hydropower isn't a feasible alternative because the easy resources have been developed.
The only alternative source of flexibility available today is demand side response.
Edit: I appreciate the down votes, as I've not explained in detail. It is a complex issue. My opinions are based on having a phd in the topic, 10+ years in control rooms, years of market operations and design, and years contributing to europe-wide risk assessment methodologies.
The easiest money I ever made was investing in natural gas infrastructure during the COVID insanity of everyone calling it dead due to renewables.
I really don’t understand the disconnect otherwise very intelligent people have on this subject. Every single person I’ve talked to in the actual industry seems to be aware of this fact and how dire things are getting. However it seems that everyone else believes that grid scale batteries are somehow going to save the day in the next decade or two.
Energy storage is energy storage. Natural gas is just a giant underground battery.
And that’s before you get to industrial uses of natural gas as a feedstock, while ignoring how much is still used for heating infrastructure and how long it would take to retrofit everything to heat pumps.
I often wonder what I’m missing, but I’m confident enough in this one to have put my money where my mouth is at least.
Maybe you're the person to answer this question then.
How can I find the price of battery storage, per kWh delivered to the customer, assuming a pure wind/solar/battery grid?
I can easily find the price per kWh of battery capacity but that's not the same thing. I'm looking for the effective levelized cost of electricity, over the lifetime of the battery, so I can compare against generation sources.
> It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
they dont help grid stability via inertia of spinning masses, but PLLs and the like exist, where you can control frequencies and phases without a spinning mass.
you dont need to burn gas to have a flywheel either
Batterie prices are falling constantly and grid sized battery production has not even started. The focus was and is mobile batteries.
So expect prices to drop further.
Also yes, batteries help very much with grid stability as they can give steady power on demand anywhere. Have lots of batteries everywhere == lots of on demand grid stabilizers.
Residential energy use is the least interesting thing to think about at a grid scale. The grid actually will get more brittle and/or expensive if everyone wealthy enough to get batteries and solar gets them.
What about the manufacturing and industrial uses? Or the need for natural gas to be a feedstock?
How many batteries does it take to power a giant hyperscaler datacenter for a few days during poor weather conditions? You can’t really rely on backup generators at that usage rate as the expense (and environmental impact) gets to be crazy. Or you end up just building natural gas turbines co-located with such facilities and we are back to where we began.
this is to say, that natural gas isnt the necessary evil to account for intermittent power sources.
its a necessary evil to fully capitalize on other investments. i dont care if the hyperscaler can run their GPUs overnight. perfectly happy for them to delay their training because theyre running in daytime.
the capital owners who bought the GPUs sure care, but why should i accept their pollution in order for them to run a bit faster?
> Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
My experience has been that the vast majority of people, even very technical people, don't really understand the energy mix required to sustain modern industrial technology. Their only experience is with their utility bill which shows them a pie-chart with a big area showing "green" so they can feel better about the state of things.
Electricity production accounts for the minority of energy usage, and residential a minority of the usage of electricity. People don't think about the energy required to send an Amazon package to their door or have fruits from South America stocking their grocery store year round, or even to create the industries that ultimately make up their paychecks each month.
The pandemic was the best view of what real energy usage changes would look like. Early pandemic was a rare moment when global energy usage dipped and that had nothing to do with the demand on the residential grid.
Many things are technically possible. Fewer things are economically practical. Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough? How much will that cost and how many years will it take? A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude. Have you actually done the math on this or are you just repeating platitudes?
> A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude.
The UK is forging ahead with large scale battery storage projects. I have not done the math, but I assume there is a sound economic case in order for these projects to receive this level of investment.
Edit: Here's some more data on revenue for battery storage in the UK [3]
> Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough?
why is this relevant? clearly europe can also buy from outside of europe.
the nice thing about batteries is you dont need a new battery for each watt, compared to needing gas.
the simplest thing is to keep buying russian gas, and also pay ukraine to attack russia. no need to change anything or do any new buildouts whether thats batteries or in US LNG export terminals+european import terminals. those also take time where the russian fuel is readily available. the russian invasion isnt gonna last forever, so a move to US gas is wasted investment when europe can move back to Russian gas eventually anyways
Yes, I have done the math. Thing is, if you ignore the climate, coal and co is still cheaper. That's why it is still used so much.
If you factor in climate costs, things are different.
Could you explain what you would use that we can produce in Europe and can generate electricity to fill the batteries with? The batteries cannot be produced in Europe and have very limited lifetime.
Europe has 100 days worth of natural gas storage facilities. All it needs to do is to get renewables + batteries + nuclear above ~70% or so to be able to withstand being cut off for a year. Getting to ~95% is relatively cheap and easy. 100% is hard and expensive, but they don't need 100%. If they get to 95%, that's multiple years worth of storage.
> An exercise to the reader, calculate the space and materials required to replace the average norwegian hydro reservoir with batteries.
Solution: I can't compute the space and materials, but can estimate the cost.
Norway has 1240 storage reservoirs with a total capacity of 87 TWh [1], which yields an average of 70 GWh/reservoir.
Last year, in China, a 16 GWh battery storage plant received an average bid price of $US66.3/KWh [2]. From this we can compute that a 70 GWh plant should cost $US4.65 billion.
A bit on the high side, but can battery prices fall by another order of magnitude? Then again, this is for replicating one reservoir. Replicating 1240 would be a 5 trillion dollar endeavor.
That's why I said 100% renewable was hard and expensive. A grid that gets 5-10% of its energy from natural gas, but can get 100% of it's power from nuclear + gas during a dankelflaute provides optimally cheap + secure power.
> The problem is dispatchability/flexibility, not storage. At a more complex level the issue is grid inertia and frequency response.
Nuclear is as dead as a great technology can be. A few more incremental improvements in solar and battery industry and nuclear won't be profitable even in theory, to say nothing of construction cost overruns.
Reactors are only good at providing baseload but that isn't how grids operate anymore. Renewables are too cheap, if a power plant can't drop output fast enough it is punished.
nuclear plants can cut power as quickly as any other power plant, you are just controlling steam. divert the steam from the turbine and you aren't generating power anymore.
Mostly because it's very expensive and slow to build, what with nuclear engineers not wanting their workplaces to be as dangerous as a construction site. Look up who invented the Maximum Credible Accident, it wasn't the environmentalists.
Agreed they are. But they want to move away from it, especially for air quality reasons. They've had a huge problem with air pollution. They are big into EVs. This means less reliance on foreign oil and cleaner air.
Completely wrong. Renewables plus battery storage and long-distance transmission lines can potentially solve the power generation problem, although we're decades away from being able to scale that up in a way that addresses base load requirements for heavy industry in an economical way. But beyond power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for the chemicals industry. Renewables won't solve that and the German chemical manufacturing industry is dying.
Many people only look at "electricity" generation when they think about renewables, but fail to recognize that that is only part of energy consumption (and a surprisingly small one at that). Globally electricity production only accounts for ~21% of energy usage, so even if we had an entirely green grid across the entire planet we still would have a long way to go as far as having sustainable energy usage.
The largest source of "renewable" energy (not just electricity) in the EU is biomass [0], which, in many cases is wood pellets shipped (using bunker fuel to power the ships of course) from North America to the EU.
Page 8 of this report [1] gives a pretty good visual of how this trend has increased over time.
Europe is basically reverting to using wood for it's primary heating fuel.
It's a prerequisite. But we actually need to make the policy decisions to stop using fossils, otherwise we'll just burn it all in addition to using renewables and look pretty bad in the history books for bringing about the climate apocalypse.
This is confidently incorrect.
Gas power generation is a necessary evil to balance out the variability of intermittent energy generation (i.e. wind and solar).
Hydropower isn't a feasible alternative because the easy resources have been developed.
The only alternative source of flexibility available today is demand side response.
Edit: I appreciate the down votes, as I've not explained in detail. It is a complex issue. My opinions are based on having a phd in the topic, 10+ years in control rooms, years of market operations and design, and years contributing to europe-wide risk assessment methodologies.
I emplore anyone who is actually interested in how energy mix actually impacts grid stability/reliability to look into the Eirgrid DS3 programme (https://www.eirgrid.ie/ds3-programme-delivering-secure-susta...).
The easiest money I ever made was investing in natural gas infrastructure during the COVID insanity of everyone calling it dead due to renewables.
I really don’t understand the disconnect otherwise very intelligent people have on this subject. Every single person I’ve talked to in the actual industry seems to be aware of this fact and how dire things are getting. However it seems that everyone else believes that grid scale batteries are somehow going to save the day in the next decade or two.
Energy storage is energy storage. Natural gas is just a giant underground battery.
And that’s before you get to industrial uses of natural gas as a feedstock, while ignoring how much is still used for heating infrastructure and how long it would take to retrofit everything to heat pumps.
I often wonder what I’m missing, but I’m confident enough in this one to have put my money where my mouth is at least.
Maybe you're the person to answer this question then.
How can I find the price of battery storage, per kWh delivered to the customer, assuming a pure wind/solar/battery grid?
I can easily find the price per kWh of battery capacity but that's not the same thing. I'm looking for the effective levelized cost of electricity, over the lifetime of the battery, so I can compare against generation sources.
What about large quanzities of batteries everywhere around europe?
If prices continue to drop, there will be a powerwall alike in every second house in some years.
This is an insane suggestion if you had a concept for how expensive batteries are and the scale of flexibility issues on the european grid.
It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
> It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
they dont help grid stability via inertia of spinning masses, but PLLs and the like exist, where you can control frequencies and phases without a spinning mass.
you dont need to burn gas to have a flywheel either
Batterie prices are falling constantly and grid sized battery production has not even started. The focus was and is mobile batteries.
So expect prices to drop further.
Also yes, batteries help very much with grid stability as they can give steady power on demand anywhere. Have lots of batteries everywhere == lots of on demand grid stabilizers.
Could pumped-storage batteries help in that case?
Residential energy use is the least interesting thing to think about at a grid scale. The grid actually will get more brittle and/or expensive if everyone wealthy enough to get batteries and solar gets them.
What about the manufacturing and industrial uses? Or the need for natural gas to be a feedstock?
How many batteries does it take to power a giant hyperscaler datacenter for a few days during poor weather conditions? You can’t really rely on backup generators at that usage rate as the expense (and environmental impact) gets to be crazy. Or you end up just building natural gas turbines co-located with such facilities and we are back to where we began.
this is to say, that natural gas isnt the necessary evil to account for intermittent power sources.
its a necessary evil to fully capitalize on other investments. i dont care if the hyperscaler can run their GPUs overnight. perfectly happy for them to delay their training because theyre running in daytime.
the capital owners who bought the GPUs sure care, but why should i accept their pollution in order for them to run a bit faster?
You can't run a factory or data center off of batteries for long. Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
> Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
My experience has been that the vast majority of people, even very technical people, don't really understand the energy mix required to sustain modern industrial technology. Their only experience is with their utility bill which shows them a pie-chart with a big area showing "green" so they can feel better about the state of things.
Electricity production accounts for the minority of energy usage, and residential a minority of the usage of electricity. People don't think about the energy required to send an Amazon package to their door or have fruits from South America stocking their grocery store year round, or even to create the industries that ultimately make up their paychecks each month.
The pandemic was the best view of what real energy usage changes would look like. Early pandemic was a rare moment when global energy usage dipped and that had nothing to do with the demand on the residential grid.
If the batteries are big enough, also that is possible.
Many things are technically possible. Fewer things are economically practical. Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough? How much will that cost and how many years will it take? A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude. Have you actually done the math on this or are you just repeating platitudes?
> A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude.
The UK is forging ahead with large scale battery storage projects. I have not done the math, but I assume there is a sound economic case in order for these projects to receive this level of investment.
Edit: Here's some more data on revenue for battery storage in the UK [3]
[1] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/battery-storage/statera-u...
[2] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/battery-storage/fidra-ene...
[3] https://modoenergy.com/research/gb-research-roundup-january-...
> Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough?
why is this relevant? clearly europe can also buy from outside of europe.
the nice thing about batteries is you dont need a new battery for each watt, compared to needing gas.
the simplest thing is to keep buying russian gas, and also pay ukraine to attack russia. no need to change anything or do any new buildouts whether thats batteries or in US LNG export terminals+european import terminals. those also take time where the russian fuel is readily available. the russian invasion isnt gonna last forever, so a move to US gas is wasted investment when europe can move back to Russian gas eventually anyways
Yes, I have done the math. Thing is, if you ignore the climate, coal and co is still cheaper. That's why it is still used so much. If you factor in climate costs, things are different.
Could you explain what you would use that we can produce in Europe and can generate electricity to fill the batteries with? The batteries cannot be produced in Europe and have very limited lifetime.
Not sure if I understand you right, but you can build batteries without rare elements.
Europe has 100 days worth of natural gas storage facilities. All it needs to do is to get renewables + batteries + nuclear above ~70% or so to be able to withstand being cut off for a year. Getting to ~95% is relatively cheap and easy. 100% is hard and expensive, but they don't need 100%. If they get to 95%, that's multiple years worth of storage.
Batteries don't provide meaningful flexibility on a continental scale. They're useful in localised frequency control or microgrid flexibility.
An exercise to the reader, calculate the space and materials required to replace the average norwegian hydro reservoir with batteries.
Nuclear tech doesn't provide required ramp rates at a useful price. I do agree however that more nuclear helps.
The problem is dispatchability/flexibility, not storage. At a more complex level the issue is grid inertia and frequency response.
> An exercise to the reader, calculate the space and materials required to replace the average norwegian hydro reservoir with batteries.
Solution: I can't compute the space and materials, but can estimate the cost.
Norway has 1240 storage reservoirs with a total capacity of 87 TWh [1], which yields an average of 70 GWh/reservoir.
Last year, in China, a 16 GWh battery storage plant received an average bid price of $US66.3/KWh [2]. From this we can compute that a 70 GWh plant should cost $US4.65 billion.
A bit on the high side, but can battery prices fall by another order of magnitude? Then again, this is for replicating one reservoir. Replicating 1240 would be a 5 trillion dollar endeavor.
[1] https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftpr...
[2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/mind-blowing-battery-cell-prices...
That's why I said 100% renewable was hard and expensive. A grid that gets 5-10% of its energy from natural gas, but can get 100% of it's power from nuclear + gas during a dankelflaute provides optimally cheap + secure power.
> The problem is dispatchability/flexibility, not storage. At a more complex level the issue is grid inertia and frequency response.
That's something batteries are extremely good at.
Germany is at 60% already! It’s close
No, it's not, because it uses so much natural gas for heating and in chemical plants. Also, it has to be the entire grid, not just one country.
Green energy like nuclear
Nuclear is as dead as a great technology can be. A few more incremental improvements in solar and battery industry and nuclear won't be profitable even in theory, to say nothing of construction cost overruns.
Reactors are only good at providing baseload but that isn't how grids operate anymore. Renewables are too cheap, if a power plant can't drop output fast enough it is punished.
nuclear plants can cut power as quickly as any other power plant, you are just controlling steam. divert the steam from the turbine and you aren't generating power anymore.
Politically hamstrung because a bunch of short sighted people have their panties in a bunch?
Mostly because it's very expensive and slow to build, what with nuclear engineers not wanting their workplaces to be as dangerous as a construction site. Look up who invented the Maximum Credible Accident, it wasn't the environmentalists.
The Chinese are going all in on electric to get away from oil and gas for geostrategic reasons.
Meanwhile team tRump are all in on oil and gas because non carbon is for libtards.
Please look at: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CN/72h/hourly
China is heavily reliant on coal.
The US Grid is presently less carbon intensive than the Chinese grid.
>China is heavily reliant on coal.
Agreed they are. But they want to move away from it, especially for air quality reasons. They've had a huge problem with air pollution. They are big into EVs. This means less reliance on foreign oil and cleaner air.
Presently.
Completely wrong. Renewables plus battery storage and long-distance transmission lines can potentially solve the power generation problem, although we're decades away from being able to scale that up in a way that addresses base load requirements for heavy industry in an economical way. But beyond power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for the chemicals industry. Renewables won't solve that and the German chemical manufacturing industry is dying.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Many people only look at "electricity" generation when they think about renewables, but fail to recognize that that is only part of energy consumption (and a surprisingly small one at that). Globally electricity production only accounts for ~21% of energy usage, so even if we had an entirely green grid across the entire planet we still would have a long way to go as far as having sustainable energy usage.
The largest source of "renewable" energy (not just electricity) in the EU is biomass [0], which, in many cases is wood pellets shipped (using bunker fuel to power the ships of course) from North America to the EU.
Page 8 of this report [1] gives a pretty good visual of how this trend has increased over time.
Europe is basically reverting to using wood for it's primary heating fuel.
0. https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/renewable-energy/bioenerg...
1. https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadRepo...
wood is carbon neutral, after the first chop, at least.
in canada and the US, a lot of that wood is going up in smoke without powering any industry already
A lot of natural gas is still needed for chemical feedstock in Europe, no matter how electricity is generated.
It's a prerequisite. But we actually need to make the policy decisions to stop using fossils, otherwise we'll just burn it all in addition to using renewables and look pretty bad in the history books for bringing about the climate apocalypse.