Revisiting: "The U.S. Grid Isn’t Ready For A Major Shift To Renewables" from March 2021 by Irina Slav at OILPRICE

Tom Nolan · May 11, 2022

The U.S. Grid Isn’t Ready For A Major Shift To Renewables

By Irina Slav - Mar 03, 2021, 4:00 PM CST

The blame game for the massive power outages in Texas last month continues. The dominant argument is that renewables had an ignorable part to play in the crisis, with natural gas and coal the indirect culprits due to their reduced availability resulting from infrastructure freezing and diverting supplies for heating purposes.

Yet what the real problem actually lies in, not just in Texas but everywhere where energy demand is growing, is grid reliability and resiliency.

"When it comes to the U.S. electrical grid, it is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses," Westhaven Power, a California utility, told Oilprice.

This is one massive system, and the sources that feed it electricity have become increasingly diversified. And while the shortage of natural gas was a big reason for the power outages in Texas, it was certainly not a shortage of gas that caused the blackouts in California last summer during a heatwave. Grid reliability has come to the fore because the decarbonization of electricity generation is not all fun, games, and zero-emission power.

The U.S. grid, as it is now, cannot support the massive shift to low-carbon power generation, Westhaven Power says. Operators need better control of regional grids to be able to anticipate dangerous situations like the ones in Texas and California, but obtaining it would become trickier with more intermittent wind and solar feeding the grid, the utility explains.

"What events in Texas and California demonstrate is the shortcomings of having highly-centralised power systems and the true value of resilience and flexibility in our energy grids, a value that is going to become even more vital as we continue to transition to renewable energy," says Dr. Toby Gill, the chief executive of UK-based climate tech startup Intelligent Power Generation.

Related Video: Institutional Investors Hold $1.03 Trillion In Coal

So what is there to do to reduce the risk of such occurrences in the future as the world—and the United States—moves inexorably towards a more renewables-heavy energy mix and, more importantly, as electricity demand booms.

The simplest and most straightforward answer is investments in strengthening the grid. Bloomberg's Rachel Morison writes that global investments in grid infrastructure could rise to $28.7 trillion by 2050 assuming a triple increase in renewable power generation capacity and a 60-percent boom in electricity demand. These assumptions are quite safe: the drive to lower humankind's carbon footprint is, in fact, a drive to electrify everything that can be electrified, so demand will increase as a consequence of that. How smart the "Electrify all" call is, however, is a different question.

"The risks for power consumers are rising as the typical home electrifies an increasing share of its energy consumption," Sanjeet Sanghera, a BloombergNEF analyst, told Bloomberg's Morison. "You are putting all your eggs in one basket."

While it is one of the wiser rules in life that you should not put all your eggs in one basket, the dominant narrative among politicians seems to be that we have no other basket left but the electrification of everything. This means that we need to brace for the costs. Europe alone will need to spend $4.9 trillion on its grids, Morison notes, adding that as much as 45 percent of this investment will be used to strengthen the already existing infrastructure.

In addition to strengthening the centralized grid, there is also a solution in boosting the share of distributed power systems, according to experts. This would alleviate the consumption load on the grid, potentially reducing the risk of overloads and outages. It might also reduce—slightly—the size of investments that need to be made in new transmission infrastructure to connect new solar and wind installations to the grid.

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"When our energy systems are pushed to their limits, through extreme weather changes as in both of these cases, and power generation sources are taken offline, the impact is felt at much greater scale," IPG's Gill told Oilprice. "If however, we have more segmented/distribution power sources, we lower our reliability on fewer large power sources, therefore reducing the number of towns and people affected when one or more of these go offline."

"Reliability and resilience – even in the face of extreme events – is achieved through diversity, redundancy, and modularization. Co-locating energy supply with demand through microgrids and other DERs [distributed energy resources] is an important step in preventing widespread crises like this in the future," according to Mark Feasel, Smart Grid president, Schneider Electric North America.

"In both cases [Texas and California], the strain could have been reduced with distributed resources, such as batteries and solar, as well as demand response tools, like smart thermostats with utility control," says K.C. Boyce, vice president of human insights firm Escalent's energy division. "However, Texas has limited distributed resources and demand response, and while California has lots of distributed resources, it doesn't have a good way of coordinating those resources, nor does it really have demand response tools to call on."

So, it seems that decentralizing the grid could go quite a long way towards reducing risks and ensuring a stable power supply. Of course, it will also cost money. But with the right incentives, this kind of investment might be more palpable for consumers than higher electricity bills because utilities are centrally strengthening the grid. In any case, one thing is clear, and it is that grids, as they are at the moment, will not be able to cope successfully with the changes in the energy mix.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-US-Grid-Isnt-Ready-For-A-Major-Shift-To-Renewables.html

Tom Nolan · May 11, 2022

Just in case you missed this important OILPRICE.COM article...

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Is-This-The-Most-Disruptive-Event-Ever-For-US-Solar.html

Is This The Most Disruptive Event Ever For U.S. Solar?

By Rystad Energy - May 10, 2022, 4:00 PM CDT

DOC investigation into panel imports from southeast Asia could put planned US solar capacity installations at risk.
The investigation comes as domestic US solar companies are concerned about the rise of Chinese manufacturers.
Imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia accounted for 85% of all solar panel capacity brought into the US in 2021.

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As much as 17.5 gigawatts (GWac) of planned US solar capacity installations in 2022 are in doubt after the Department of Commerce (DOC) opened an investigation into panel imports from southeast Asia, Rystad Energy research shows. The US was expected to install 27 GWac of solar energy capacity in the utility, residential, and commercial and industrial (C&I) markets this year, but with rising commodity prices and this new threat of tariffs on vital imports, 64% of those additions are now in jeopardy.

The recent launch of an Antidumping and Countervailing (ADCV) investigation by the DOC has US suppliers worried about potential penalties on panel imports, which would likely be backdated.

In response, Chinese panel manufacturers are halting shipments to the US until the results of the investigation and any retroactive action by the DOC is revealed. A preliminary judgment is scheduled for August, with a final decision due by January 2023.

The investigation comes as domestic US solar companies are concerned about the rise of Chinese manufacturers using cheap raw materials and shifting cell and panel assembly to southeast Asia to circumvent an existing ban on Chinese imports. With imports frozen while the investigation is pending, annual capacity additions could plummet from 22.6 GWac in 2021 to 10.07 GWac this year, the lowest annual total since 2019.

The DOC is investigating imports from four Southeast Asian countries that play a pivotal role in the US market – Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Imports from these countries accounted for 85% of all solar panel capacity brought into the US in 2021, totaling 21.8 GWac. In January and February of 2022, their total share of imports was 99%.

Related: What Thomas Edison Can Teach Us About Our Electricity Crisis

“In an attempt to limit cheap Chinese solar panels entering the market from Southeast Asia, and with one eye on the goal of shoring up a domestic supply chain, the US has seriously dented its solar capacity forecast for 2022 and beyond. This could be the most disruptive event ever to face the US solar industry,” says Marcelo Ortega, renewables analyst with Rystad Energy.

How the freeze happened

On 25 March 2022, the US DOC decided to investigate a petition by domestic PV manufacturer Auxin Solar concerning composite silicon (cSi) solar PV panels sourced from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Auxin claimed that Chinese panel manufacturers circumvent ADCV rules by offshoring cell and panel assembly processes to the four countries while still using cheap Chinese raw materials.

In a 2012 investigation into Chinese manufacturers, ADCV tariffs were eventually applied at different rates to different suppliers. The most common rate was 30.66%, but some rates fell as low as 24%, while other suppliers were slapped with a 250% tariff. If the DOC decides a tariff extension is warranted, equipment imported after the investigation announcement would be permitted, but tariffs could be backdated on imports as far back as November last year.

Between November 2021 and February 2022, US buyers imported $1.46 billion of solar panels from the four southeast Asian countries under investigation, meaning Chinese suppliers could be collectively liable for anywhere between $365 million and $3.6 billion in additional tariffs. Chinese panel manufacturers are unwilling to risk such prohibitively high fines, and many have opted to entirely halt panel exports to the US.

The probe is not limited to cSi PV panels but also includes PV cell imports.

This is significant for the US domestic panel manufacturing industry as its 5 GW of capacity is mainly panel assembly and relies heavily on cell imports from overseas. Last year, 46% of imported cells came from the countries under investigation. US manufacturers are also feeling the effects of the investigation. Although the threat of sanctions may incentivize suppliers to build US PV manufacturing facilities, it would take at least 18 months to build a domestic supply chain from polysilicon to assembled panel. If investment decisions are made after August 2022, when preliminary results are to be announced, this capacity would be operational in January 2024 at the earliest.

Antidumping probe adds more stress to US market

Even before the probe, the US PV industry began 2022 in a tough spot. More than 7 GWac of solar PV was delayed last year by more than six months due to high commodity prices, federal tax credit uncertainty and unfavorable policies. This included the US government’s December 2021 decision to ban imports containing goods from China’s northwest region of Xinjiang due to reported human rights abuses committed against the Uyghur people. With 40% of the world’s silicon production based in Xinjiang, this policy effectively halved the number of panels that can be imported to the US, disrupting the already ropy supply chain.

In theory, if panel manufacturers can prove they source silicon and components from outside of Xinjiang, their exports will be unaffected. However, before the ban, suppliers did not need to track the origin of their inputs, and any traceability system takes time to implement. In practice, the rules set out in the new bill are ambiguous and entail unknown risks for suppliers and financiers. Although the legislation enforces a ban on all Xinjiang goods, the US already has a partial ban on panels with silicon sourced from this region. In June 2021, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) banned imports of solar panels containing silicon produced by four Xinjiang-based silicon producers. This resulted in CBP detaining imports until the polysilicon source could be proven. Chinese panel suppliers claim between 40 megawatts (MW) to 100 MW of panel capacity has been detained, though the exact level remains unknown.

By Rystad Energy

More Top Reads from Oilprice.com:

Taken from...

markslawson · May 12, 2022

9 hours ago, Tom Nolan said:

Yet what the real problem actually lies in, not just in Texas but everywhere where energy demand is growing, is grid reliability and resiliency.

Quite right. We can argue back and forth about just what caused the outage and, of course, outages occurred long before renewables were a discussion point. But the problem remains that if the grid is really going to shift towards renewables - I regard this with horror, but the community seems to regard it as inevitable - then considerably more work needs to be done on the grid and, oh yes, many more gas plants and quick start-up generators (modular nuclear?) need to be installed. With storage solutions just not working and, in any case, cannot be built in the volumes required then this is the only way out in any time line of less than several decades..

Ron Wagner · May 12, 2022

What is stopping American industrialists from competing with solar component production and installation? Whatever happened to thin solar schemes? Solar paint? Solar windows?

We cannot rely on our enemies to provide our needs. If they are friendlies, that we can trust, that is OK. If we cannot get our own labor at a needed cost point we need to turn to Mexico and South America with which we have our strongest ties and who we need to support. China seems able to manipulate much of the Asian trade, but I have nothing against them either.

The same applies to wind turbines and every other product that is partially sourced from China. If China changes their leader and policies we still must only give them part of our purchases. We need stable vendors.

nsdp · May 12, 2022

4 hours ago, markslawson said:

Quite right. We can argue back and forth about just what caused the outage and, of course, outages occurred long before renewables were a discussion point. But the problem remains that if the grid is really going to shift towards renewables - I regard this with horror, but the community seems to regard it as inevitable - then considerably more work needs to bedone on the grid and, oh yes, many more gas plants and quick start-up generators (modular nuclear?) need to be installed.

In Texas the problem is two fold. 1st poor engineering/management at ERCOT and member companies. 2nd Stupid politicians who abrogated their duties even after the 2011 storm gave them notice Note SPP. did not lose customers in the thousands and 14000mwh off line with hey have much higher wind content as a percent (38% to 18% for ERCOT) to contend with. 1300mw dropped out for SPP ( 17000mw connected) went off line. ERCOT had 14,000m drop out and an additional 6000 mwh not running because of bad engineering for system reactive power.

Looking at past history on Christmas1983 Houston experienced low temperatures of 6F ( -14 C) only customers lost were due to falling trees an limbs. Lasted 77 Hours. No generation black out as 6600 mw had back up fuel on site. 650 mw is all of the generation that has not been torn down that had usable back up fuel supplies in 1983. . Another 1800 mw was coal that could not run because the coal piles in 2021 were frozen. Coldest in 2021 was 20 degrees F(- 7 C). Similar case Christmas 1989.

Lawson your ignorance is showing. SPP gets 38% of of supply from wind and they did not have trouble. ERCOT has 20% generated by wind, grid is 12 degrees latitude farther south(warmer weather), and was hit by the same storm. SPP shows that you are full of horse manure. You are a dumb as the managers of ERCOT and the commissioners a the PUCT.

As SPP demonstrated, your claim: "With storage solutions just not working and, in any case, cannotbe built in the volumes required then this is the only way out in any time line of less than several decades.." is a flat out lie. You have a better future in professional T-Ball.

Edited May 12, 2022 by nsdp

nsdp · May 12, 2022

14 hours ago, Tom Nolan said:

The U.S. Grid Isn’t Ready For A Major Shift To Renewables

By Irina Slav - Mar 03, 2021, 4:00 PM CST

Join Our Community

The blame game for the massive power outages in Texas last month continues. The dominant argument is that renewables had an ignorable part to play in the crisis, with natural gas and coal the indirect culprits due to their reduced availability resulting from infrastructure freezing and diverting supplies for heating purposes.

Yet what the real problem actually lies in, not just in Texas but everywhere where energy demand is growing, is grid reliability and resiliency.

"When it comes to the U.S. electrical grid, it is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses," Westhaven Power, a California utility, told Oilprice.

This is one massive system, and the sources that feed it electricity have become increasingly diversified. And while the shortage of natural gas was a big reason for the power outages in Texas, it was certainly not a shortage of gas that caused the blackouts in California last summer during a heatwave. Grid reliability has come to the fore because the decarbonization of electricity generation is not all fun, games, and zero-emission power.

The U.S. grid, as it is now, cannot support the massive shift to low-carbon power generation, Westhaven Power says. Operators need better control of regional grids to be able to anticipate dangerous situations like the ones in Texas and California, but obtaining it would become trickier with more intermittent wind and solar feeding the grid, the utility explains.

"What events in Texas and California demonstrate is the shortcomings of having highly-centralised power systems and the true value of resilience and flexibility in our energy grids, a value that is going to become even more vital as we continue to transition to renewable energy," says Dr. Toby Gill, the chief executive of UK-based climate tech startup Intelligent Power Generation.

Related Video: Institutional Investors Hold $1.03 Trillion In Coal

So what is there to do to reduce the risk of such occurrences in the future as the world—and the United States—moves inexorably towards a more renewables-heavy energy mix and, more importantly, as electricity demand booms.

The simplest and most straightforward answer is investments in strengthening the grid. Bloomberg's Rachel Morison writes that global investments in grid infrastructure could rise to $28.7 trillion by 2050 assuming a triple increase in renewable power generation capacity and a 60-percent boom in electricity demand. These assumptions are quite safe: the drive to lower humankind's carbon footprint is, in fact, a drive to electrify everything that can be electrified, so demand will increase as a consequence of that. How smart the "Electrify all" call is, however, is a different question.

"The risks for power consumers are rising as the typical home electrifies an increasing share of its energy consumption," Sanjeet Sanghera, a BloombergNEF analyst, told Bloomberg's Morison. "You are putting all your eggs in one basket."

While it is one of the wiser rules in life that you should not put all your eggs in one basket, the dominant narrative among politicians seems to be that we have no other basket left but the electrification of everything. This means that we need to brace for the costs. Europe alone will need to spend $4.9 trillion on its grids, Morison notes, adding that as much as 45 percent of this investment will be used to strengthen the already existing infrastructure.

In addition to strengthening the centralized grid, there is also a solution in boosting the share of distributed power systems, according to experts. This would alleviate the consumption load on the grid, potentially reducing the risk of overloads and outages. It might also reduce—slightly—the size of investments that need to be made in new transmission infrastructure to connect new solar and wind installations to the grid.

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"When our energy systems are pushed to their limits, through extreme weather changes as in both of these cases, and power generation sources are taken offline, the impact is felt at much greater scale," IPG's Gill told Oilprice. "If however, we have more segmented/distribution power sources, we lower our reliability on fewer large power sources, therefore reducing the number of towns and people affected when one or more of these go offline."

"Reliability and resilience – even in the face of extreme events – is achieved through diversity, redundancy, and modularization. Co-locating energy supply with demand through microgrids and other DERs [distributed energy resources] is an important step in preventing widespread crises like this in the future," according to Mark Feasel, Smart Grid president, Schneider Electric North America.

"In both cases [Texas and California], the strain could have been reduced with distributed resources, such as batteries and solar, as well as demand response tools, like smart thermostats with utility control," says K.C. Boyce, vice president of human insights firm Escalent's energy division. "However, Texas has limited distributed resources and demand response, and while California has lots of distributed resources, it doesn't have a good way of coordinating those resources, nor does it really have demand response tools to call on."

So, it seems that decentralizing the grid could go quite a long way towards reducing risks and ensuring a stable power supply. Of course, it will also cost money. But with the right incentives, this kind of investment might be more palpable for consumers than higher electricity bills because utilities are centrally strengthening the grid. In any case, one thing is clear, and it is that grids, as they are at the moment, will not be able to cope successfully with the changes in the energy mix.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

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Oil Soars Despite Largest Ever Crude Build

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https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-US-Grid-Isnt-Ready-For-A-Major-Shift-To-Renewables.html

,The problems in CA, is the CPUC has restrictive capital replacement polices. CA utilities are still using 2400/4160 Wye distribution. That was obsolete 50 years ago. Power losses on those lines would pay for upgrades in 10 years by reducing I*2R losses.

Distributed grid systems have major problems. It is recovery from black start and system synchoniztion. We have a lot of taking heads who have never spent 30 seconds at the dispatchers desk or an hour as a yard man in a power plant. They are offering "expert advice " that would crash the grid before the guards could hand cuff them and remove them to a safe location (safe for the rest of us).

footeab@yahoo.com · May 12, 2022

8 hours ago, Ron Wagner said:

What is stopping American industrialists from competing with solar component production .....our purchases. We need stable vendors.

Slave labor, lack of environmental regulations, no castration of coal allowing not only cheapest energy for mass material production but cheapest assembly line build out, and finally cheapest component assembly.

Why one USES tariffs to impose morals.

Tom Nolan · May 12, 2022

Irina Slav on Energy - Substack - May 9th - https://irinaslav.substack.com/p/power-renewable-power?s=r

Power. Renewable power.

Britain is about to drown in renewable energy in a few short years thanks to ambitious plans by the government to bring the share of low-carbon energy generation to 95% of the total by 2030. A lot of this energy could end up unused unless the same people envisioning miles and miles of wind turbines and solar panels don’t start envisioning batteries as well. Welcome to Curtailmentworld.

“For more than half the time in 2030 the UK's renewable and nuclear backed energy system will be producing more energy from renewables and nuclear than it uses,” Chris Matson, partner at consultancy LCP, told The Times last week. “Simply wasting this generation would harm both consumers and investors so a whole system approach is essential to minimise the cost of delivering net zero.”

According to LCP, excess power generation could be taking place for 53% of the time in 2030 if the planned buildout of wind and solar capacity materialises. In other words, if future UK governments stick to the incumbents’ plans, in 2030, the country’s wind and solar farms will be producing energy that will be wasted more than half the time they actually produce energy, which, it’s always worth recalling, is a lot less than 24/7.

The few figures mentioned in The Times report paint a pretty horrible picture for all those who, like me, cannot abide wastefulness. According to LCP, curtailment was performed on wind farms on 75% of days in 2020. This translated into the waste of more than 3.6 terrawatts of electricity that year, which, according to the Daily Mail, could have powered a million households for a full year. The reason for the curtailment: grid constraints. Shocking, right?

By a completely random coincidence, U.S. utilities are sounding the alarm on possible blackouts as unusually high temperatures lead to a spike in demand in parts of the country but the generation capacity is insufficient to meet this demand. All this while in California alone, the rate of solar power curtailment spiked to almost 600,000 MWh as of last month, according to CAISO, from 200,000 MWh in May 2020.

“The risk of electricity shortages is rising throughout the U.S. as traditional power plants are being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage,” the Wall Street Journal wrote last week, noting warnings of rolling blackouts coming from not only California this year. Battery storage is being built, the report added, but nowhere near fast enough.

Let’s repeat that in simpler terms. Utilities in the U.S. are retiring coal- and gas-fired power plants more quickly than they are adding wind and solar generation capacity, which, combined with the inherent intermittency of wind and solar power generation, is creating a deepening gap between supply and demand. This gap, by the way, is going to become deeper as a federal government investigation into Chinese goods tariff evasion in the solar panel industry prompts developers to delay gigawatts in new capacity.

If you think the U.S. government is the only example of such brilliant obtuseness, think again. Wind and solar developers in Britain are currently facing delays of up to a full decade to connect their new farms to the grid, the Financial Times reported this weekend. Why, you might ask, or then again, you might not because the answer is pretty obvious: grid constraints.

Here’s a quote from the FT report: “National Grid [the top grid operator in the country] says it has historically had 40-50 applications for connections a year but that this has risen to about 400 as renewables suppliers have proliferated. This is in addition to significant volumes of applications coming via the six regional distributors.”

Going from 40-50 to 400 is certainly a substantial increase that, I imagine, no power utility could cope with in a hurry. What makes the situation even more fascinating is, of course, the cost of the upgrade that needs to be performed on Britain’s — or any other country’s — grid. Nobody really knows exactly how much this is going to cost in total although the FT report mentions a price tag of up to 12 million pounds per substation.

Such a price tag would make smaller renewable projects non-viable, the report went on to say, adding the renewable energy industry had warned — I loved this — that it would pretty literally pass any additional costs to their customers. Because of this cost pass-on, the industry is calling for shorter connection deadlines to avoid having end-customers pay higher bills for longer. Touching. And completely unrelated, I’m sure, to the latest trends in raw materials.

The grid problem seems to be a constant companion of the energy transition. Last year, I did a feature on the U.S grid for Oilprice [SEE TOP OF THREAD "Revisit"] and learned some amazing things such as the sheer size of this grid: “200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses,” per Westhaven Power, a utility from California.

In its current form, this grid simply cannot support the massive shift from fossil fuel, basedload-providing power plants to highly distributed, inconstant wind and solar installations. The Wall Street Journal again reported last month that U.S. power utilities were bracing up for investments of some $140 billion this year alone on grid upgrades and emission reduction. I’ve no idea why the two are being bunched together but there it is. Guess what this would do to people’s bills.

Let’s summarise, shall we? California is warning there will be power outages this summer while it literally throws away 600,000 MWh because they are produced at a time when there is no demand for them. Britain, thanks to gas and nuclear, is not yet threatened by outages but is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds in the form of curtailed wind and solar output, while utility bills are soaring. Grid operators on both sides of the Atlantic are struggling to reconcile a centralised grid with an increasingly decentralised generation capacity. This will be one expensive reconciliation.

Theoretically, as far as I can understand, upgrading the grid needs just materials and time. Practically, this means a lot of materials and a lot of time. The prices of these materials are in the stratosphere because we apparently live in the Supplychainocalypse but even if copper sold for 2 cents per tonne, the upgrade would still be a massive undertaking, which, I would expect, would also increase losses along the way. Electricity losses, that is.

Unless I’m gravely mistaken and utterly hopeless with electrons, the longer electricity travels from point A to point B, the higher the losses along the way. And I’m not gravely mistaken because I checked with the Energy Information Administration, which told me the U.S. loses as much as 5% of all electricity transmitted and distributed across the grid every year. And that’s the old, kind-of-centralised grid, that now has to grow a lot of new “tentacles” to accommodate all the renewable energy installations. It might be cheaper to just break it down into small regional mini-grids, I suspect.

The problem is, of course, not unique for Britain and the United States. All grids subjected to a fast buildout of distributed generation capacity suffer the same challenges. Wind power curtailment in China was a big topic a few years ago, when they were wasting massive amounts of wind power because of lack of grid capacity.

To solve that, China took to building so-called supergrids. Another fascinating experiment in the world of energy transition, experts warned that the supergrid could become vulnerable to cascade blackouts, i.e. blackouts spreading across much wider regions than they would in a more fragmentary grid.

The level of complexity that the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables involves is so high, I suspect most of us cannot comprehend all of it. I certainly can’t but I keep trying because I like 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. Sadly, it appears that the individuals in charge of the transitions don’t like jugsaw puzzles at all.

P.S. Meanwhile in Europe: European Gas Prices Rise as Lower Renewable Output Boosts Demand

footeab@yahoo.com · May 13, 2022

1 hour ago, Wombat One said:

Yes Princess, you are hopeless at electrons. And macroeconomics too! Not to mention science and technology and economics in general. Have you not heard of green Hydrogen? Or pumped hydro? Settle petal. Everything be just fine in the end.

Can you do math--> No. And can you open a map... You have to store said hydrogen and pumped hydro can only exist in a few rare places on earth as the quantity is literally measured in cubic kilometers and so is the hydrogen. All before one talks the hundreds of GW worth of power cables to these RARE destinations you have to have and the associated distribution backwards network which is NOT using the same distribution pattern as the other power systems making grid balancing near impossible without at minimum gigantic kinetic energy rotating powerfactor converters multi GW in scale.

Boat · May 13, 2022

On 5/11/2022 at 10:01 AM, Tom Nolan said:

The U.S. Grid Isn’t Ready For A Major Shift To Renewables

By Irina Slav - Mar 03, 2021, 4:00 PM CST

Join Our Community

The blame game for the massive power outages in Texas last month continues. The dominant argument is that renewables had an ignorable part to play in the crisis, with natural gas and coal the indirect culprits due to their reduced availability resulting from infrastructure freezing and diverting supplies for heating purposes.

Yet what the real problem actually lies in, not just in Texas but everywhere where energy demand is growing, is grid reliability and resiliency.

"When it comes to the U.S. electrical grid, it is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses," Westhaven Power, a California utility, told Oilprice.

This is one massive system, and the sources that feed it electricity have become increasingly diversified. And while the shortage of natural gas was a big reason for the power outages in Texas, it was certainly not a shortage of gas that caused the blackouts in California last summer during a heatwave. Grid reliability has come to the fore because the decarbonization of electricity generation is not all fun, games, and zero-emission power.

The U.S. grid, as it is now, cannot support the massive shift to low-carbon power generation, Westhaven Power says. Operators need better control of regional grids to be able to anticipate dangerous situations like the ones in Texas and California, but obtaining it would become trickier with more intermittent wind and solar feeding the grid, the utility explains.

"What events in Texas and California demonstrate is the shortcomings of having highly-centralised power systems and the true value of resilience and flexibility in our energy grids, a value that is going to become even more vital as we continue to transition to renewable energy," says Dr. Toby Gill, the chief executive of UK-based climate tech startup Intelligent Power Generation.

Related Video: Institutional Investors Hold $1.03 Trillion In Coal

So what is there to do to reduce the risk of such occurrences in the future as the world—and the United States—moves inexorably towards a more renewables-heavy energy mix and, more importantly, as electricity demand booms.

The simplest and most straightforward answer is investments in strengthening the grid. Bloomberg's Rachel Morison writes that global investments in grid infrastructure could rise to $28.7 trillion by 2050 assuming a triple increase in renewable power generation capacity and a 60-percent boom in electricity demand. These assumptions are quite safe: the drive to lower humankind's carbon footprint is, in fact, a drive to electrify everything that can be electrified, so demand will increase as a consequence of that. How smart the "Electrify all" call is, however, is a different question.

"The risks for power consumers are rising as the typical home electrifies an increasing share of its energy consumption," Sanjeet Sanghera, a BloombergNEF analyst, told Bloomberg's Morison. "You are putting all your eggs in one basket."

While it is one of the wiser rules in life that you should not put all your eggs in one basket, the dominant narrative among politicians seems to be that we have no other basket left but the electrification of everything. This means that we need to brace for the costs. Europe alone will need to spend $4.9 trillion on its grids, Morison notes, adding that as much as 45 percent of this investment will be used to strengthen the already existing infrastructure.

In addition to strengthening the centralized grid, there is also a solution in boosting the share of distributed power systems, according to experts. This would alleviate the consumption load on the grid, potentially reducing the risk of overloads and outages. It might also reduce—slightly—the size of investments that need to be made in new transmission infrastructure to connect new solar and wind installations to the grid.

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"When our energy systems are pushed to their limits, through extreme weather changes as in both of these cases, and power generation sources are taken offline, the impact is felt at much greater scale," IPG's Gill told Oilprice. "If however, we have more segmented/distribution power sources, we lower our reliability on fewer large power sources, therefore reducing the number of towns and people affected when one or more of these go offline."

"Reliability and resilience – even in the face of extreme events – is achieved through diversity, redundancy, and modularization. Co-locating energy supply with demand through microgrids and other DERs [distributed energy resources] is an important step in preventing widespread crises like this in the future," according to Mark Feasel, Smart Grid president, Schneider Electric North America.

"In both cases [Texas and California], the strain could have been reduced with distributed resources, such as batteries and solar, as well as demand response tools, like smart thermostats with utility control," says K.C. Boyce, vice president of human insights firm Escalent's energy division. "However, Texas has limited distributed resources and demand response, and while California has lots of distributed resources, it doesn't have a good way of coordinating those resources, nor does it really have demand response tools to call on."

So, it seems that decentralizing the grid could go quite a long way towards reducing risks and ensuring a stable power supply. Of course, it will also cost money. But with the right incentives, this kind of investment might be more palpable for consumers than higher electricity bills because utilities are centrally strengthening the grid. In any case, one thing is clear, and it is that grids, as they are at the moment, will not be able to cope successfully with the changes in the energy mix.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

Oil Prices Falter On Colossal Crude Inventory Build

Oil Soars Despite Largest Ever Crude Build

What To Expect From The Upcoming OPEC+ Meeting

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-US-Grid-Isnt-Ready-For-A-Major-Shift-To-Renewables.html

Plenty of sun and no winter in the Deep South. Electric cars come with a battery. What’s the problem? Solar is still to expensive for homes for most but utility solar with batteries is cheaper than coal. You got to love that. Utility solar along with wind is not distributed energy. Glad I could help with some understanding. Tech keeps getting better like 18 MW turbines 794’ long. This ain’t the same turbine coal hated 10 years ago. If you let professional engineers install and maintain these technologies and keep politicians out of maintenance. The electric age will do fine.

Ron Wagner · May 13, 2022

5 hours ago, Boat said:

Plenty of sun and no winter in the Deep South. Electric cars come with a battery. What’s the problem? Solar is still to expensive for homes for most but utility solar with batteries is cheaper than coal. You got to love that. Utility solar along with wind is not distributed energy. Glad I could help with some understanding. Tech keeps getting better like 18 MW turbines 794’ long. This ain’t the same turbine coal hated 10 years ago. If you let professional engineers install and maintain these technologies and keep politicians out of maintenance. The electric age will do fine.

The problems are that the existing fleet is going to be around for a long time and ICE vehicles are still the overwhelming choice for the average customer. Electric vehicles have to wait for demand to increase and their production ability to increase. The wealthy will remain the main buyers of EVs that are not hybrids unless range increases on the economy models. That will also increase their price. They are great for around the town but not for trips. That problem is not going away anytime soon. I almost bought a Maverick truck but the availability was nil. We decided to keep our 12 seater van for now. The Maverick is not even a plug in hybrid but gets great around town mileage. That technology can be used on any ICE vehicle being built, and should IMHO.

Jay McKinsey · May 13, 2022

26 minutes ago, Ron Wagner said:

Electric vehicles have to wait for demand to increase and their production ability to increase. The wealthy will remain the main buyers of EVs that are not hybrids unless range increases on the economy models. That will also increase their price. They are great for around the town but not for trips. That problem is not going away anytime soon. I almost bought a Maverick truck but the availability was nil. We decided to keep our 12 seater van for now. The Maverick is not even a plug in hybrid but gets great around town mileage. That technology can be used on any ICE vehicle being built, and should IMHO.

Meanwhile in reality EV demand is through the roof, it is only supply that is a problem.

Automakers cannot keep up with the EV demand. Audi announced that its Q1 2022 sales decreased by 16.8% overall, whereas all-electric vehicle sales in Audi’s lineup jumped by 66% as compared to a year ago. Hyundai doubled its all electric car sales in March 2022. Mercedes saw a 37% climb in EV sales, and even announced this week that it was essentially sold out of EVs, unable to keep up with market demand for the vehicles.

The trend has continued after Q1. Ford just announced that its EV sales grew 139 percent in April 2022, primarily riding the strong growth of its Mach-E SUV. Global sales also reflected similar growth patterns. Global battery electric vehicle sales more than doubled in Q1 2022.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/electric-vehicle-sales-remain-bright-spot-industry-outpace-demand

markslawson · May 14, 2022

On 5/12/2022 at 3:24 PM, nsdp said:

Lawson your ignorance is showing. SPP gets 38% of of supply from wind and they did not have trouble. ERCOT has 20% generated by wind, grid is 12 degrees latitude farther south(warmer weather), and was hit by the same storm. SPP shows that you are full of horse manure. You are a dumb as the managers of ERCOT and the commissioners a the PUCT.

nsdp - as with earlier posts you have mixed gratuitous, unjustified abuse with very poor reasoning. None of the points you make are in any way relevant to the points I made. I'm not talking about specific examples of a grid which happened to have a lot of wind at any one point manging to survive the crisis. Individual grids can draw power from many states. The original posts says that, in effect, the safety margin of American grids are IN GENERAL starting to wear very thin. There is no overall planning for the transition and not enough work, and investment, has been put in. Hardly anyone, except yourself, would argue that point. However, if you are going to be abusive then that's it from me on this point, as least where you are concerned. I would urge you to be civil in such debates. Leave it with you.

nsdp · May 14, 2022

4 hours ago, markslawson said:

nsdp - as with earlier posts you have mixed gratuitous, unjustified abuse with very poor reasoning. None of the points you make are in any way relevant to the points I made. I'm not talking about specific examples of a grid which happened to have a lot of wind at any one point manging to survive the crisis. Individual grids can draw power from many states. The original posts says that, in effect, the safety margin of American grids are IN GENERAL starting to wear very thin. There is no overall planning for the transition and not enough work, and investment, has been put in. Hardly anyone, except yourself, would argue that point. However, if you are going to be abusive then that's it from me on this point, as least where you are concerned. I would urge you to be civil in such debates. Leave it with you.

Mark , have you taken and passed the IEEE Power Generation and Transmission Protection course; I did in 1975. See Below. Do you carry an IBEW journey man's card as a system dispatcher and how many years experience do you have as a dispatcher? How many years experience do you have with subgrid planning like SWAT? How many times have you written an review of system failure for specific utility for the FERC like the one for EPE here? https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-report.pdf Have you sat on a peer review committee for a power supply needs filing with the FERC? https://www.wecc.org/Reliability/2014PSA_draft.pdf

Have you taken and passed the EIT yet? Are you a licensed professional in any electrical field yet?

I have been involved either from the engineering or compliance aspect for utilities for 51 years and have testified as an expert witness for the Dept. of Justice in the ENRON Trading criminal cases. Here are the requirements for testifying as an expert witness in Federal Court. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/97-1709.ZS.html

How many countries do you hold patents for power plant design in? I have them in 40 if you count each EU member state . Here is the link to China https://patents.google.com/patent/CN104937222B/en

You make mistakes that are common to nonprofessional licensed talking heads make; basically you don't have any scientific qualifications to be drawing the conclusions you do.

IEEE04082018.pdf

Edited May 14, 2022 by nsdp
left out link

nsdp · May 16, 2022

On 5/12/2022 at 5:24 AM, Tom Nolan said:

Irina Slav on Energy - Substack - May 9th - https://irinaslav.substack.com/p/power-renewable-power?s=r

Power. Renewable power.

Britain is about to drown in renewable energy in a few short years thanks to ambitious plans by the government to bring the share of low-carbon energy generation to 95% of the total by 2030. A lot of this energy could end up unused unless the same people envisioning miles and miles of wind turbines and solar panels don’t start envisioning batteries as well. Welcome to Curtailmentworld.

“For more than half the time in 2030 the UK's renewable and nuclear backed energy system will be producing more energy from renewables and nuclear than it uses,” Chris Matson, partner at consultancy LCP, told The Times last week. “Simply wasting this generation would harm both consumers and investors so a whole system approach is essential to minimise the cost of delivering net zero.”

According to LCP, excess power generation could be taking place for 53% of the time in 2030 if the planned buildout of wind and solar capacity materialises. In other words, if future UK governments stick to the incumbents’ plans, in 2030, the country’s wind and solar farms will be producing energy that will be wasted more than half the time they actually produce energy, which, it’s always worth recalling, is a lot less than 24/7.

The few figures mentioned in The Times report paint a pretty horrible picture for all those who, like me, cannot abide wastefulness. According to LCP, curtailment was performed on wind farms on 75% of days in 2020. This translated into the waste of more than 3.6 terrawatts of electricity that year, which, according to the Daily Mail, could have powered a million households for a full year. The reason for the curtailment: grid constraints. Shocking, right?

By a completely random coincidence, U.S. utilities are sounding the alarm on possible blackouts as unusually high temperatures lead to a spike in demand in parts of the country but the generation capacity is insufficient to meet this demand. All this while in California alone, the rate of solar power curtailment spiked to almost 600,000 MWh as of last month, according to CAISO, from 200,000 MWh in May 2020.

“The risk of electricity shortages is rising throughout the U.S. as traditional power plants are being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage,” the Wall Street Journal wrote last week, noting warnings of rolling blackouts coming from not only California this year. Battery storage is being built, the report added, but nowhere near fast enough.

Let’s repeat that in simpler terms. Utilities in the U.S. are retiring coal- and gas-fired power plants more quickly than they are adding wind and solar generation capacity, which, combined with the inherent intermittency of wind and solar power generation, is creating a deepening gap between supply and demand. This gap, by the way, is going to become deeper as a federal government investigation into Chinese goods tariff evasion in the solar panel industry prompts developers to delay gigawatts in new capacity.

If you think the U.S. government is the only example of such brilliant obtuseness, think again. Wind and solar developers in Britain are currently facing delays of up to a full decade to connect their new farms to the grid, the Financial Times reported this weekend. Why, you might ask, or then again, you might not because the answer is pretty obvious: grid constraints.

Here’s a quote from the FT report: “National Grid [the top grid operator in the country] says it has historically had 40-50 applications for connections a year but that this has risen to about 400 as renewables suppliers have proliferated. This is in addition to significant volumes of applications coming via the six regional distributors.”

Going from 40-50 to 400 is certainly a substantial increase that, I imagine, no power utility could cope with in a hurry. What makes the situation even more fascinating is, of course, the cost of the upgrade that needs to be performed on Britain’s — or any other country’s — grid. Nobody really knows exactly how much this is going to cost in total although the FT report mentions a price tag of up to 12 million pounds per substation.

Such a price tag would make smaller renewable projects non-viable, the report went on to say, adding the renewable energy industry had warned — I loved this — that it would pretty literally pass any additional costs to their customers. Because of this cost pass-on, the industry is calling for shorter connection deadlines to avoid having end-customers pay higher bills for longer. Touching. And completely unrelated, I’m sure, to the latest trends in raw materials.

The grid problem seems to be a constant companion of the energy transition. Last year, I did a feature on the U.S grid for Oilprice [SEE TOP OF THREAD "Revisit"] and learned some amazing things such as the sheer size of this grid: “200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses,” per Westhaven Power, a utility from California.

In its current form, this grid simply cannot support the massive shift from fossil fuel, basedload-providing power plants to highly distributed, inconstant wind and solar installations. The Wall Street Journal again reported last month that U.S. power utilities were bracing up for investments of some $140 billion this year alone on grid upgrades and emission reduction. I’ve no idea why the two are being bunched together but there it is. Guess what this would do to people’s bills.

Let’s summarise, shall we? California is warning there will be power outages this summer while it literally throws away 600,000 MWh because they are produced at a time when there is no demand for them. Britain, thanks to gas and nuclear, is not yet threatened by outages but is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds in the form of curtailed wind and solar output, while utility bills are soaring. Grid operators on both sides of the Atlantic are struggling to reconcile a centralised grid with an increasingly decentralised generation capacity. This will be one expensive reconciliation.

Theoretically, as far as I can understand, upgrading the grid needs just materials and time. Practically, this means a lot of materials and a lot of time. The prices of these materials are in the stratosphere because we apparently live in the Supplychainocalypse but even if copper sold for 2 cents per tonne, the upgrade would still be a massive undertaking, which, I would expect, would also increase losses along the way. Electricity losses, that is.

Unless I’m gravely mistaken and utterly hopeless with electrons, the longer electricity travels from point A to point B, the higher the losses along the way. And I’m not gravely mistaken because I checked with the Energy Information Administration, which told me the U.S. loses as much as 5% of all electricity transmitted and distributed across the grid every year. And that’s the old, kind-of-centralised grid, that now has to grow a lot of new “tentacles” to accommodate all the renewable energy installations. It might be cheaper to just break it down into small regional mini-grids, I suspect.

The problem is, of course, not unique for Britain and the United States. All grids subjected to a fast buildout of distributed generation capacity suffer the same challenges. Wind power curtailment in China was a big topic a few years ago, when they were wasting massive amounts of wind power because of lack of grid capacity.

To solve that, China took to building so-called supergrids. Another fascinating experiment in the world of energy transition, experts warned that the supergrid could become vulnerable to cascade blackouts, i.e. blackouts spreading across much wider regions than they would in a more fragmentary grid.

The level of complexity that the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables involves is so high, I suspect most of us cannot comprehend all of it. I certainly can’t but I keep trying because I like 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. Sadly, it appears that the individuals in charge of the transitions don’t like jugsaw puzzles at all.

P.S. Meanwhile in Europe: European Gas Prices Rise as Lower Renewable Output Boosts Demand

Nolan, you are absolutely hopeless at electrons. First the I*2R losses are a function 0f the inverse of the voltage. In other words you have four times as much in power loss using a 34.5 kv distribution line as you would with a 75 year old 69 kv line and 100 times the loss as compared to a 345kv transmission line. The vast majority of losses start at the substation transmission to distribution transformers and then along the lines that go to your house and the transformer that supplies 120/240 volt to your house for your use if your house in Canada, the US or Northern Mexico. The other factor that reduces transmission losses is that it is a network feed instead of radial feed as about 99.9% of distribution systems are. Something called parallel path.

2.3 Simple Electric Transmission Models

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf483/node/513

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with Bullshit. Hope your mother put safety plugs in all of the outlets where you live so you won't electrocute yourself.

nsdp · May 16, 2022

On 5/13/2022 at 8:26 AM, footeab@yahoo.com said:

Can you do math--> No. And can you open a map... You have to store said hydrogen and pumped hydro can only exist in a few rare places on earth as the quantity is literally measured in cubic kilometers and so is the hydrogen. All before one talks the hundreds of GW worth of power cables to these RARE destinations you have to have and the associated distribution backwards network which is NOT using the same distribution pattern as the other power systems making grid balancing near impossible without at minimum gigantic kinetic energy rotating power factor converters multi GW in scale.

Get out your freshman geology text book so we can show you how ignorant you are. Also show us how qualified you are at grid design with your IEEE Power Generation and Transmission Protection certification.

You are really are trying to baffle people with Bullshit. Can you do this?

§ 292.306 Interconnection costs.

(a) Obligation to pay. Each qualifying facility shall be obligated to pay any interconnection costs which the State regulatory authority (with respect to any electric utility over which it has ratemaking authority) or nonregulated electric utility may assess against the qualifying facility on a nondiscriminatory basis with respect to other customers with similar load characteristics.

(b) Reimbursement of interconnection costs. Each State regulatory authority (with respect to any electric utility over which it has ratemaking authority) and nonregulated utility shall determine the manner for payments of interconnection costs, which may include reimbursement over a reasonable period of time.

footeab@yahoo.com · May 16, 2022

3 hours ago, nsdp said:

You are really are trying to baffle people with Bullshit. Can you do this?

Well, your post qualifies as grade AAA BS.

And Wow, one has to pay for grid connex permit fees and said stability studies on top of that.... No, say it ain't so! Baby Sherlock you are working overtime.

Your post describing the brilliance of how to move 3TW around(after all we are getting rid of NG/Oil/Coal in your universe massively ballooning electrical load from the ~600GW eastern USA grid + population increase + margin) from those rare gargantuan centralized hydrogen storage sites or pumped hydro sites, able to swallow literally 100's of cubic miles of water to end consumers is pure art. Truly magnificent rebuttal. Suggest a basic topography map for the later and even you can see no such places exist outside a few rare potential spots in the western USA requiring absolutely insane gargantuan dams and then one has the gigantic problem of water evaporation out west, and transmission to the East measured by the TW, not GW, but that is technically solvable. Good luck with the easement battles before we even talk stability.

While places like Michigan and Louisiana/Texas exist, everywhere in between and vast western topography is nearly devoid of such massive salt formations for hydrogen storage. In this brave new world of H2 hydrolysis to storage or circular storing the O2 to power when wind/Solar die, one needs massive absolutely massive quantities quickly measured in trillions of cubic feet for multiple days/weeks instead of current storage measured in months, when sun is not shining and wind is not blowing. Sure, technically every place that had NG can house H2, and the USA has a gigantic number of such places in the East, in reality pumping it in and extracting it very quickly upon demand are entirely different kettles of fish.

And all that before one admits H2 storage/joule requires 3X the volume as NG. People rightly whine about NG leaking well heads, valving and piping... We haven't seen anything like H2 leaking well heads etc if we retain a distributed network using large NG fields instead of the preferred rare salt domes.

notsonice · May 16, 2022

On 5/13/2022 at 7:26 AM, footeab@yahoo.com said:

Can you do math--> No. And can you open a map... You have to store said hydrogen and pumped hydro can only exist in a few rare places on earth as the quantity is literally measured in cubic kilometers and so is the hydrogen. All before one talks the hundreds of GW worth of power cables to these RARE destinations you have to have and the associated distribution backwards network which is NOT using the same distribution pattern as the other power systems making grid balancing near impossible without at minimum gigantic kinetic energy rotating powerfactor converters multi GW in scale.

few rare places on Earth?????

RARE?????????

more like common...so lets call pumped storage COMMON at least in the US..not even close to rare

Very common	More than 1 in 10	10% or higher
Common	1 in 10 – 1 in 100	10% – 1%
Uncommon	1 in 100 – 1 in 1000	0.1% to 1%
Rare	1 in 1000 – 1 in 10,000	0.01% to 0.1%
Very rare	Less than 1 in 10,000	Less than 0.01%

one of the biggest in the US??? on Lake Michigan....Gotta love all the sites that are in planning, 25,000 MW...no small amount

Biggest Peak electrical power demand in the US total was 790 GW in the summer 2006..

now do the math currently there is 23 GW of pumped storage in the US and in planning there is another 25GW...which is 48 GW or 6 percent of total peak peak peak power demand ....not bad

now add in battery storage and the amount that is currently under construction not including planning....then think about how much is in planning that will be built???? mind boggling......

Please keep thinking that storage of any kind is not possible on a large scale.......you are always wrong

Federal license approval of Ore. pumped storage project could boost renewables | S&P Global Market Intelligence

Edited May 16, 2022 by notsonice

nsdp · May 17, 2022

17 hours ago, footeab@yahoo.com said:

Well, your post qualifies as grade AAA BS.

And Wow, one has to pay for grid connex permit fees and said stability studies on top of that.... No, say it ain't so! Baby Sherlock you are working overtime.

Your post describing the brilliance of how to move 3TW around(after all we are getting rid of NG/Oil/Coal in your universe massively ballooning electrical load from the ~600GW eastern USA grid + population increase + margin) from those rare gargantuan centralized hydrogen storage sites or pumped hydro sites, able to swallow literally 100's of cubic miles of water to end consumers is pure art. Truly magnificent rebuttal. Suggest a basic topography map for the later and even you can see no such places exist outside a few rare potential spots in the western USA requiring absolutely insane gargantuan dams and then one has the gigantic problem of water evaporation out west, and transmission to the East measured by the TW, not GW, but that is technically solvable. Good luck with the easement battles before we even talk stability.

While places like Michigan and Louisiana/Texas exist, everywhere in between and vast western topography is nearly devoid of such massive salt formations for hydrogen storage. In this brave new world of H2 hydrolysis to storage or circular storing the O2 to power when wind/Solar die, one needs massive absolutely massive quantities quickly measured in trillions of cubic feet for multiple days/weeks instead of current storage measured in months, when sun is not shining and wind is not blowing. Sure, technically every place that had NG can house H2, and the USA has a gigantic number of such places in the East, in reality pumping it in and extracting it very quickly upon demand are entirely different kettles of fish.

And all that before one admits H2 storage/joule requires 3X the volume as NG. People rightly whine about NG leaking well heads, valving and piping... We haven't seen anything like H2 leaking well heads etc if we retain a distributed network using large NG fields instead of the preferred rare salt domes.

You have never heard of the Permian Salts have you? Starts at Carlsbad NM and runs to just west of Wichita KS. Or maybe you have never heard of the bedded salts near Salt Lake City or Destin Dome in Florida.

Mr. Half Bright on the energy properties of hydrogen vs NG:

On a BTU/lb basis, Hydrogen has about 2.5 times the energy density of methane. So, if you burn one pound of hydrogen vs one pound of natural gas, you will get 2.5 times the energy. Sounds great, right?

But because hydrogen is so much lighter, or less dense, you need approximately 3 times the volume of hydrogen as compared to natural gas to get the same amount of energy. https://www.powereng.com/library/6-things-to-remember-about-hydrogen-vs-natural-gas

Since safety measurements in salt caverns pressures are measured in pounds /sq ft or sq in the lightness of hydrogen is a wash. For safety pressures you need 3 times the volume in your cavern to store the same energy in methane on a kg basis as H2. Never have done any pipeline safety work have you? Do you know MAOP means ? how do you apply it?

footeab@yahoo.com · May 17, 2022

On 5/16/2022 at 3:27 AM, notsonice said:

few rare places on Earth?????

RARE?????????

more like common...so lets call pumped storage COMMON at least in the US..not even close to rare

Very common More than 1 in 10 10% or higher
Common 1 in 10 – 1 in 100 10% – 1%
Uncommon 1 in 100 – 1 in 1000 0.1% to 1%
Rare 1 in 1000 – 1 in 10,000 0.01% to 0.1%
Very rare Less than 1 in 10,000 Less than 0.01%

one of the biggest in the US??? on Lake Michigan....Gotta love all the sites that are in planning, 25,000 MW...no small amount

Biggest Peak electrical power demand in the US total was 790 GW in the summer 2006..

now do the math currently there is 23 GW of pumped storage in the US and in planning there is another 25GW...which is 48 GW or 6 percent of total peak peak peak power demand ....not bad

now add in battery storage and the amount that is currently under construction not including planning....then think about how much is in planning that will be built???? mind boggling......

Please keep thinking that storage of any kind is not possible on a large scale.......you are always wrong

Apparently you do not know the difference between GW and GWh... and what is required is GWDays~handful of weeks for the entire grid if you switch to Solar/wind for that pesky thing called .... WINTER!!! A grid which has to expand by 500% to replace oil/coal/NG.

Lets see Eastern USA grid is ~600GW and if remove FF that will need to be ~3000GW and will have to operate during January with no sun and very little wind = 10 days minimum = 3000GW * 10D * 24H/D = ~70,000GWh of stored electricity. USA has ~500GWh of PHS most of which cannot be used as they are counting all the water behind dams, not proscribed PHS sites or dam level excess holding capacity to be used... https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/01/f82/us-hydropower-market-report-full-2021.pdf

Capacity just means building more hydro power plants on existing dams which is what they are doing. Cannot run as long of course... You might notice... existing "pumped hydro" are all old.

And somehow you managed to dodge the elephant in the room of main jyst of my post... salt domes for mass hydrogen/oxygen storage assuming we can get the fuel cells figured out. Kudos!

Jay McKinsey · May 17, 2022

1 hour ago, footeab@yahoo.com said:

And somehow you managed to dodge the elephant in the room of main jyst of my post... salt domes for mass hydrogen/oxygen storage assuming we can get the fuel cells figured out. Kudos!

You are just clueless. January is a very windy month in the US and we are going to burn hydrogen in the near term.

First major US hydrogen-burning power plant nears completion in Ohio

HIGHLIGHTS

485-MW Long Ridge plant will run on gas-hydrogen mix

Plant at former aluminum smelter site on Ohio River

Touted as a first-of-its-kind power plant in the United States, the Long Ridge Energy Generation Project, a 485-MW facility being equipped to run on a mix of natural gas and carbon-free hydrogen, is nearing completion at the site of a former aluminum smelter on the banks of the Ohio River.

"We are currently in the startup phase," Bo Wholey, president of Long Ridge Energy Terminal, an affiliate of Fortress Transportation and Infrastructure Investors, said in an Aug. 11 email. The power plant in Hannibal, Ohio, will be "fully operational" in early September, with hydrogen to be introduced in November, Wholey added.

The facility first will burn a fuel blend that includes 5% hydrogen in a General Electric Co. H-class gas turbine. The plant is intended to transition to 100% green hydrogen over the next decade by relying increasingly on renewable energy to power electrolysis machines that split water into its hydrogen and oxygen elements.

The project has access to industrial byproduct hydrogen for initial testing, according to Long Ridge, but the company is partnering with New Fortress Energy for the green hydrogen transition. It is also exploring underground salt formations for large-scale hydrogen storage.

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/081221-first-major-us-hydrogen-burning-power-plant-nears-completion-in-ohio

Edited May 17, 2022 by Jay McKinsey

notsonice · May 18, 2022

11 hours ago, footeab@yahoo.com said:

Apparently you do not know the difference between GW and GWh... and what is required is GWDays~handful of weeks for the entire grid if you switch to Solar/wind for that pesky thing called .... WINTER!!! A grid which has to expand by 500% to replace oil/coal/NG.

Lets see Eastern USA grid is ~600GW and if remove FF that will need to be ~3000GW and will have to operate during January with no sun and very little wind = 10 days minimum = 3000GW * 10D * 24H/D = ~70,000GWh of stored electricity. USA has ~500GWh of PHS most of which cannot be used as they are counting all the water behind dams, not proscribed PHS sites or dam level excess holding capacity to be used... https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/01/f82/us-hydropower-market-report-full-2021.pdf

Capacity just means building more hydro power plants on existing dams which is what they are doing. Cannot run as long of course... You might notice... existing "pumped hydro" are all old.

And somehow you managed to dodge the elephant in the room of main jyst of my post... salt domes for mass hydrogen/oxygen storage assuming we can get the fuel cells figured out. Kudos!

oh foot in the mouth...you were ranting about the lack of pumped storage spots calling them rare and you did not realize that for peak power needs there is 25 GW plus instant capacity available in the US alone....and these sites can run for how long each day....well over 550 GWH is the total capacity of all the sites. Do you know in winter is the best winds in the US???? every night at that.....Yet you are so slow to understand anything......and solar is at its best in the summer when the winds are lower...... see they work together and with pumped storage and this helps gets you through peak power every day.........

Pumped storage has been around in the US a long long time and yet you seem to be clueless, as usual.

old pumped hydro........ ????? not one is being decommissioned....Do you realize Hydro sites do last a lot longer than coal of gas plants and the beauty of pumped storage they do not need to wear out light your tired old coal plants.....

fuels cells ???need oxygen storage???? you really have no clue .............on the oxygen side of a fuel cell you supply air....... try pulling your foot out of you mouth or is it the guy who upvotes you foot in your mouth????? the blind guy with his eyes wide open....

all your math is your typical voodoo BS at best...Keep babbling like an idiot ........Your partner, EWO , enjoys your company.

Edited May 18, 2022 by notsonice

notsonice · May 18, 2022

Boosting Hydropower: The Bedrock of a Clean Energy Grid

APRIL 25, 2022

Office of ENERGY EFFICIENCY & RENEWABLE ENERGY

Water Power Technologies Office

Boosting Hydropower: The Bedrock of a Clean Energy Grid

More than a century in, hydropower is only getting better. Turns out, old dogs can learn new tricks, and hydropower’s are arriving just in time. This flexible and reliable source of renewable power is an important part of the foundation needed to build a 100% clean energy future.

“This is not your grandfather’s hydropower,” said Tim Welch, hydropower program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO). “Today’s technologies can better protect the environment and even capitalize on the 97% of existing dams that don’t generate power, while pumped storage hydropower can store energy for when we need it.”

“It’s very exciting,” Welch continued, “to see this industry innovate and adapt to serve the nation’s transition to clean energy.”

Over the past couple years, researchers at national laboratories, companies, and academic institutions worked to advance environmentally sustainable hydropower and pumped storage technologies. In its recently published 2020–2021 Accomplishments Report, WPTO features a selection of promising hydropower advances.

Low-Impact Hydropower Could Make a Big Impact

Today, hydropower provides about 7% of the United States’ electricity and 37% of its renewable energy. Nearly every state uses it. This reliable and flexible source of clean energy can power the nation for years to come, but tomorrow’s hydropower will look different. New technologies (like fish-friendly turbines) and advanced manufacturing processes can support hydropower’s role on a clean energy grid while helping to protect vital ecosystems and to manufacture hydropower components more efficiently.

Further, while there are more than 90,000 dams in the United States, less than 3% produce power. In 2020–2021, WPTO funded projects to assess how to efficiently and cost-effectively add power to these existing resources, which could significantly increase the amount of clean energy from hydropower with minimal environmental impact.

People gather around large gray devices called ultracapacitors that are designed to store and deliver energy quickly.

In April 2021, Idaho National Laboratory and Idaho Falls Power performed first-of-a-kind tests to determine how the utility’s five small hydropower plants could provide electricity generation during regional grid disruptions. This required developing innovative hydropower controls and integrating energy storage technologies with the plants.

Photo courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory

Storing Water’s Power

Hydropower also offers flexibility to support and complement variable renewable energy sources, and pumped storage systems are one of the most scalable, cost-effective, and long-lived grid-scale storage assets now and likely in the future.

With that in mind, WPTO supported the creation of a guide and tool that can help developers and other stakeholders calculate the value of pumped storage hydropower and evaluate new or upgrade projects.

To understand how these resources can serve the future clean energy grid, WPTO also funded projects to analyze how hydropower and pumped storage facilities can:

Provide emergency power to local communities during outages.
Help bring more variable renewables onto the grid.
Build a more resilient power grid with hydropower serving as a flexible, dependable foundation.

Securing Modern Hydropower

As the hydropower industry finds new ways to support the clean energy grid, it is also critical to modernize and incorporate state-of-the-art capabilities into existing infrastructure. WPTO projects are helping to ensure modern hydropower remains secure and resilient and can continue to provide benefits to the grid.

For example, researchers elicited information from stakeholders to create digital models for hydropower systems. This will allow plant operators, equipment manufacturers, academics, and other stakeholders to optimize real-world plant operations, test potential operations, and use real-time data for fault diagnosis and systems health monitoring.

Better Knowledge To Better Protect the Environment

Hydropower plants are located in diverse environments, but significant knowledge gaps remain related to fish and wildlife biology, behavior, and specifically how species interact with hydropower facilities. That’s why WPTO funds work to improve environmental monitoring technologies and collect more accurate data to help developers identify and mitigate potential environmental impacts.

For example, WPTO funded the HydroPASSAGE project to provide information and tools to help engineers design systems that increase fish survival through turbines and other hydropower structures. Over the last year, the project team produced materials, such as best practices documents and instructional videos, and conducted customized workshops to engage with hydropower facility owners, turbine manufacturers, resource agencies, and other stakeholders.

Evaluating Hydropower’s Vast Value

Three young women experiment with electrical devices.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory collaborated with the National Energy Education Development Project to create a hydropower curriculum that helps primary, elementary, intermediate, and secondary students learn about the water cycle, kinetic energy transformations, and electricity.

Photo courtesy of the National Energy Education Development Project

While hydropower may be the country’s oldest form of electricity generation, publicly available and easily accessible data on the makeup, performance, costs, market participation, and regulatory best practices of the U.S. hydropower and pumped storage fleet has historically been limited. To help address this need, WPTO funded projects to enhance tools to help stakeholders better understand hydropower data, as well as to develop new tools to provide a systematic and transparent method for identifying the potential environmental impacts of a project.

At the same time, WPTO funded efforts to cultivate a modern hydropower workforce and inspire students and teachers through curricula and teacher trainings for science, technology, engineering, and math outreach. (Learn about the inaugural Hydropower Collegiate Competition launched earlier this month!)

Hydropower has a crucial role in helping the United States achieve a carbon-free electricity grid by 2035 and a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050. The projects featured in WPTO’s 2020–2021 Accomplishments Report, along with many more, are helping to advance hydropower and pumped storage systems to create a flexible, reliable grid.

Learn more about hydropower and explore additional hydropower accomplishments in the WPTO 2020–2021 Accomplishments Report. Stay up to date with the latest hydropower funding opportunities, events, and news by subscribing to the monthly Hydro Headlines and the bimonthly Water Wire newsletters.

Edited May 18, 2022 by notsonice

Eyes Wide Open · May 18, 2022

17 minutes ago, notsonice said:

all your math is your typical voodoo BS at best...Keep babbling like an idiot ........Your partner, EWO , enjoys your company.

Great point Gabby, now if you might sharpen your analytics a smidge and focus on improving the environment, this world may just stand a chance.

I will leave the heavy lifting for you. You seem well suited for the task..slinging tailings that is.

https://gnoicc.org/2021/03/30/the-sediment-we-need-is-behind-missouri-river-dams/

footeab@yahoo.com · May 18, 2022

On 5/16/2022 at 7:06 PM, nsdp said:

You have never heard of the Permian Salts have you? Starts at Carlsbad NM and runs to just west of Wichita KS. Or maybe you have never heard of the bedded salts near Salt Lake City or Destin Dome in Florida.

Mr. Half Bright on the energy properties of hydrogen vs NG:

On a BTU/lb basis, Hydrogen has about 2.5 times the energy density of methane. So, if you burn one pound of hydrogen vs one pound of natural gas, you will get 2.5 times the energy. Sounds great, right?

But because hydrogen is so much lighter, or less dense, you need approximately 3 times the volume of hydrogen as compared to natural gas to get the same amount of energy. https://www.powereng.com/library/6-things-to-remember-about-hydrogen-vs-natural-gas

Since safety measurements in salt caverns pressures are measured in pounds /sq ft or sq in the lightness of hydrogen is a wash. For safety pressures you need 3 times the volume in your cavern to store the same energy in methane on a kg basis as H2. Never have done any pipeline safety work have you? Do you know MAOP means ? how do you apply it?

Taken a senility test yet? You agree with my statements and then say I am wrong... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA

Nice dodge about the main points of which you have no rebuttal. Bravo. A true lawyer, try to nit pick a tiny technicality of which you just posted you agree, instead of address the 99%. Bravo.

This is why I have you blocked. Unfortunately I was too stupid to respond to your dithering. Adios

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