More confirmation of the impossibility of an all-wind/solar/storage power system – Big boost from that?

From MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

March 21, 2022/ Francis Menton

Many recent posts on this blog have touched on the topic of the unfeasible of a complete wind/solar/storage power system. Today I will cover another study on this topic, this one by German authors Oliver Ruhnau and Staffan Qvist, titled “Storage requirements in a 100% renewable power system: Extreme events and year-to-year variability.” The Ruhnau/Qvist Study has no date other than “2021,” although it does appear to have launched later that year.

Although Ruhnau and Qvist do not explicitly state that, my conclusion from their paper is that it is a clearer demonstration of the utter impossibility – indeed, utter absurdity – of trying replace all electricity generation with fossil fuels in a modern economy in the short term with only wind, solar and storage.

The basis of this is that a large number of green activists, including the current President of the United States, regularly issue statements indicating that they believe it is possible to remove fossil fuels from the economy. modern economy by building sufficient wind capacity and solar power generation. Such claims rarely consider or mention the necessity of energy storage, the feasibility or cost of the like. However, any serious consideration of the potential for wind and solar disruption would inevitably lead to the conclusion that without dispersable redundancy (fossil fuels or nuclear) they are requires large amounts of stored energy to cover periods of disruption. Understanding the amount of storage required, its physical characteristics and cost, is absolutely essential to answering the question of whether an all-wind/solar/storage system is feasible. .

However, our governments are now going ahead with religious fervor with “pure zero” power generation plans that rely almost entirely on wind and solar, without any serious consideration. about the amount of storage required or the cost or feasibility of the project. Nor has there been any demonstration of a viable prototype system that can achieve net zero emissions with only wind, solar and storage, even for a small town or an island.

Previous posts at the Manhattan Contrarian on the subject have reviewed the detailed work of Roger Andrews and Ken Gregory. In This post is from November 2018, I reviewed Andrews’ work processing real-life wind and solar data from two cases in California and Germany. Andrews concluded that due to seasonal wind and solar generating patterns, California or Germany would need about 30 days of power reserve to back up the entire wind/solar generating system. Based on the current cost of lithium-ion batteries, Andrews calculates that building enough wind and solar power plus enough batteries will lead to multiplication electricity costs about a factor of 14 to 22. In This post is from January 2022, I looked at Gregory’s work on the actual wind/solar generation for the case of the entire United States. Gregory considered the amount of storage to be sufficient as the only backup that the United States has fully electrified for all sectors that are not currently electrified (e.g. transportation, home heating, industry, agriculture. ), thus essentially tripling the electricity demand from the current level. His conclusion was that batteries alone would cost about $400 trillion — about 20 times the total GDP of the United States.

Clearly, if Andrews or Gregory is anywhere near the right, transitioning a modern economy to full use of wind, solar and storage is not remotely feasible.

In this mix now there is Ruhnau and Qvist. The focus of R&Q is again on the storage capacity needed to back up the entire solar/wind generating system, after fossil fuels have been phased out as a backup. The R&Q study only deals with the case of Germany, and only deals with the supply of the country’s current electricity demand, not demand that could be tripled or more due to global electrification. economy for vehicles, heating, etc.

The bottom line is that the results of the R&Q study are roughly in agreement with those of Andrews and Gregory. In the case where Andrews and Gregory calculated that about 30 days of storage was needed to fully back up a wind/solar system, R&Q offered 24 days. However, to achieve the results in 24 days, R&Q required the over-construction of the wind/solar system, to the point of recording its “capacity” as triple Germany’s peak electricity demand and twice five times the average demand. The result is a system where large amounts of excess electricity on sunny/windy days must be eliminated or “cut down”. However, R&Q says its model is based on cost minimization, because it’s actually cheaper to build large excess capacity and remove electricity per terawatt hour than it is to add more storage.

The starting point of the R&Q study was the critique of previous authors, who calculated the relatively low storage requirements by considering only the worst-case scenario of a supposed wind/surface “drought”. many days on windless and cloudy days. Several such studies cited by R&Q have suggested storage requirements of around 4-8 days are said to be sufficient to back up a complete wind/solar power system. (Even demanding levels of storage can make the cost unviable.). But R&Q used hourly wind and solar data available over the course of many years in Germany to show that relatively longer periods of quiet and dark can occur, making the storage requirement necessary to avoid power loss is much higher.

While our time series analysis supports previous findings that periods of continuous scarcity last no more than two weeks, we find that the maximum energy deficit occurs during a much longer period of nine weeks. This is because multiple periods of scarcity can closely follow each other. When considering storage loss and charging limits, the length of time for determining storage requirements is up to 12 weeks. Over this longer period of time, the cost-optimal storage capacity would be about three times larger than the energy deficit in the most scarce two weeks.

On pages 5-6 of the paper, R&Q lays out the generation (installation capacity) and storage requirements so they have a view of an optimized system.

First, there will be an over-built solar and wind base system:

On the supply side, nearly 300 GW of renewables have been installed: 92 GW of solar, 94 GW of onshore wind and 98 GW of offshore wind. . . . For onshore solar and wind power, this is almost double the installed capacity in 2020; for offshore wind, this means a more than tenfold increase.

For comparison, Germany’s current peak demand is in the 100 GW range and average demand is in the 60 GW range.

Then there will be a number 56 TWh storage capacity, which is equivalent as discussed to about 24 full days of electricity consumption for the whole of Germany at near-peak usage. To see how much that is, consider Tesla battery is in the range of 100 kWhand sold for about $13,500, or $135/KWh. So if you try to equip 56 TWh of storage with a Tesla-type battery, it will cost you about $56,000,000,000 x $135, or about $7.56 trillion – which is about twice that German GDP.

But R&Q thinks they have a better idea than batteries, specifically hydrogen, as a storage medium. In their model, almost all (54.8 TWh of 56 TWh) of storage comes from hydrogen. In the first case, this entails adding another major new cost factor to the system, namely the entire network of about 62 GW of hydrogen-powered CCGT power plants, which is almost enough to supplying the German grid at medium demand.

Add three times the construction cost of wind turbines and solar panels, 56 TWh of storage and a network of new hydrogen-powered power plants that span nearly the entire current German generation system and you have a set of Cost-effectiveness may ‘not be feasible in any reasonable world.

However, somehow, when R&Q came to a conclusion about the feasibility, they waved their hands and said there was no problem. While they concede that there is no utility-scale hydrogen storage, distribution, and combustion system anywhere in the world as a basis for calculating costs, they have somehow come up with a solution. 30 euros per MWH load for storage costs – less than the cost of a Tesla-style battery over a thousand. Is there any basis? The closest they come is this one:

Since underground hydrogen storage is currently limited to pilot systems in Germany only, Germany’s current 250 TWh natural gas storage, much of which is stored underground in salt caves, is possible. is a reference.

Unfortunately, I don’t think underground natural gas storage is a valid reference. Natural gas can be efficiently stored in things that are not airtight like salt caves because it does not ignite when exceeding 15% concentration in air. Sadly, not so for hydrogen. Hydrogen also rapidly corrodes and leaks from pipelines and containers, posing potential hazards. I don’t claim to know all of the technical challenges to creating a safe electrical system based on hydrogen, but they are clearly enormous. If it is safe and easy to deal with hydrogen in large quantities, many people will. There is a reason that no large hydrogen storage facilities or hydrogen pipelines exist.

The simple answer to all of this is that we must ask our politicians to demonstrate the feasibility of any alternative energy system before embarking on imaginary construction projects. these trillions of dollars. Show us an all-wind/solar/battery or wind/solar/hydrogen system that works at a reasonable cost for 5000 or 10,000 people for a few years, before asking the entire nation to Families with tens or hundreds of millions of people must be guinea pigs.

Read the full article here.