Which previous administration? Bush with biofuels blunders? First trump with his tax cuts for the rich and not doing anything real for proper challenge to W&S crowd? All administrations in the US/EU seem to be detached from the realities of physics to a smaller or larger degree(don't get me started on Germany...).
This is exactly what is needed. Put the burden and the cost of reliable power, voltage and frequency on the generation source - at that sources physical location! BEFORE it touches the grid. Otherwise everyone else pays by having to install equipment behind the meter to protect their own machines and devices from micro-interruptions, or major interruptions.
Indeed it is. There is no one way, or one person. We all have blind spots, that’s why peer review is so important as a part of the Scientific Method. This approach of putting it out there and letting other pick it apart will show over time who has integrity or not, and where their blind spots or biases are. And the second part of the scientific method is that of “repeatable results” and sharing the raw data.
When I was first learning to do energy studies as a green engineer, my mentors drilled into me the principle of listing your assumptions! All analyses must make some assumptions for the sake of scope and time, and if you imagine they can have any material impact, you list them. That is where the infamous Mr Jacobsen has failed us. As was revealed in the later peer review of his white paper.
Off topic, but it is my peeve with the studies out of UCLA, Stanford, and RMI on gas stoves regarding the effects of natural gas combustion, gas stove leaks, benzene in/from natural gas, and gas stove causing childhood asthma. If you read the studies, even to me, it is clear the results were decided first, and the tests tailored to achieve the data wanted. RMI had to supply AGA with a retraction on their childhood asthma claims because they had no evidence, but they continue to push the study. Apparently there was some trace amounts of benzene found in a sample of natural gas, so now all natural gas is rife with benzene, however no actual amounts or comparisons to national standards have ever been published. Interestingly the WHO came out with a study that debunked their claims.
The trouble is this type of irresponsible behavior destroys the public faith in the scientific method. If science is willing to lie here, were else are they willing to lie? Ok, rant over.
Good point, but that is exactly the scientific process in action. Science isn’t a monolith, it’s all people. And problem are inherently flawed, with bias and blind spots galore. That’s why we need to keep harping on the “scientific method” and let it be okay that knowledge changes and grows over time. It should be acceptable to admit you made a mistake, and also be publicly shameful for not acknowledging it when one is pointed out! The history of LNT is a great example of the momentum of group think. But it is getting harder to defend it all the time, as more and more people bare made aware of the initial flaws. If I recall correctly, those studies on asthma were done in the ‘79’and ‘80’s? So many of those would be in homes that were like my first apartment, with a gas stove and No Exhaust Hood! So all the particulate pollution of cooking stays in the house. I suspect the electric homes tended to be newer, and so had the code requirements for ventilation. Gas cooking goes back a century, so there is a lot of existing stock. A new study would hopefully correct for that difference.
I have to agree on the ability to adjust your views. It's a tough place, and admitting new evidence has changed your results is a bad spot. As a society we need to evolve to accept those changes without shooting the messenger.
There has never been a direct study on childhood asthma and gas stoves. It's more of a collection of studies that point to the emmisions of natural gas, and then link to childhood asthma. Here is what I found
"Studies documenting the health risks associated with gas stoves dates back decades. A 1992 meta-analysis – conducted by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and Duke University – found that nitrogen dioxide exposure that is comparable to that from a gas stove increases the odds of children developing a respiratory illness by about 20%.
A 2013 meta-analysis of 41 studies found that gas cooking increases the risk of asthma in children and that nitrogen dioxide exposure is linked with currently having a wheeze."
It’s one thing to say that the evidence warrants a direct study, it's another to state the results of said study.
Interesting, I would agree, that the meta -analyses are showing a “correlation “, which is good reason to conduct an in-depth direct study, but is shaky ground to create policy from. As we know, correlation is not necessarily causation. And I say that as someone who advocates for electric cooking. I find the benefits of reduced fire risk (1/3 of all fires are in the kitchen) due to no open flame and reduced hot surface (depending on the type of electric stove), and the elimination of explosion risk os reason enough to pick electric. I researched gas explosions when I was promoting commercial heat pumps and was so surprised that I pulled a new circuit to my kitchen and bribed my wife with a new Double oven range! She grew up cooking on gas and was tough to convince, but likes it now)
the problem with batteries is that they are energy customers when not discharging. i've never seen a fair, decent analysis of how to best fit batteries into power systems given that reality. good work has been done showing that batteries make more sense with nuclear (or natural gas). hoping that gets updated. file:///C:/MM%20Foss/CES-Hartley-DisplaceFossil-102617.pdf For ERCOT, "The analysis of the long-run systems implied that nuclear energy with storage provides the lowest
cost long-run alternative to fossil fuels. Wind ended up being much more expensive than nuclear
because it requires almost double the storage to make up for its intermittency, non-dispatchability,
and generally negative correlation with system load."
I view batteries as the lazy man's pump storage. Especially the lithium-ion batteries due to their short life. However I think they're here to stay regardless. The nuclear angle is a new one I hadn't heard before. I did talk about batteries a bit more in my two part "Power Systems - It’s a Renewable Thing".
Meredith Angwin said it best in her great book. She was warned by industry insiders that if she devoted any time in the book to discussing the merits of batteries she would lose all credibility with them. As a nuclear engineer with 30 years of experience designing nuclear power plants please drop this nonsense. The number of batteries needed to store even one day’s worth of power from a 1500 Mw plant is beyond comprehension. Furthermore, all nuclear power plants have 18 months or two years worth of storage- it’s called the fuel.
No doubt, it is idiocy to think of batteries as long-term storage, but as diurnal storage you only need to store 3-6 hours of the difference between the plant's steady state output and the overnight load. Batteries are a pure capacity resource - and yes, their effective load-carrying capacity drops when you get any meaningful penetration - but there may be place for them in shaving needle peaks. This is especially true since they can be located near demand, which might (note, *might*) defer transmission, which is getting harder and harder to build.
I am of the opinion that calling a battery "capacity" is like calling a water jug a water well. Yes, like pumped storage they do allow for energy to be stored for later use, but, they generate zero capacity, they only move it.
Well kV, I won't argue that a battery (or pumped storage, depending on characteristics) is "good capacity" like a generator - but it is also cheap capacity. Sometimes we take a little water with our wine. This is especially true now that public policy favours capacity-poor resources, like wind and solar.
I tell our financial guys trying to understand how to value capacity to think of it like oxygen - if you have it, it's worth nothing and you don't even think about it; when you run out, it's worth everything. We have to invest to avoid those situations where we are short of it.
To continue your comparison to a water jug (which I like, by the way - so I am going to steal it), to a man dying of thirst in the desert, a (full) water jug has the immediate utility of a water well - to him, they are the same. The long term utility is probably much less (depending on his needs), but that doesn't mean that the (full) water jug has no value to him.
Thanks for the reply Dean, I love to chat about this stuff! This will be a long reply.
Your example of a man in the desert is absolutely correct, and I won't argue the point. California is showing that they can be used to slow the ramp rates on gas turbines which will reduce maintenance costs. I am convinced batteries are here to stay no matter what.
What I will argue is they do not add capacity when used in conjunction with renewable generation. Renewable capacity has to be diverted to charge batteries and usually ramps off before batteries ramp in. That is relocation of capacity, not added capacity. Like Jerry cans on the back of your Jeep, you absolutely need the energy, but it's not more power.
Now if you use them in conjunction with thermal generation, you can charge when demand is low, and use it in parallel with thermal generation when demand is high. That was the original concept of Helms, it would pump with Diablo power at night, and generate in parallel with Diablo during high demand.
Where the rub comes is when renewables don't generate or demand is too high to divert capacity to charge. This happened in PJM during Elliott . Demand stayed so high they were unable to divert generation to run the pumps on pumped storage. Then stored energy is pretty useless.
When you say cheap, I say where? In China it is pretty cheap. In Europe the price is competitive. But on a MWH basis, excluding fuel cost is slightly higher than simple cycle gas turbine capacity. Given that the batteries have a four hour operation limit, gas turbines win.
The biggest issue with batteries is ROI because of their very short life cycle. Although they advertise 25 years, practice is showing about 15 years of usable life. A gas turbine may last 30 to 50 years. 15 years isn't enough time to amortize the capitol cost.
Hi kv (damn - capitalizing the "V" is reflexive; I've done it twice now!). I love talking through this stuff, too, and I don't think we disagree. It's an important distinction (and one that I didn't make) between batteries to 'firm up' renewables, and batteries (or p/s) to meet load swings - thanks for pointing that out. Your example of Helms is exactly on-point for the second use-case (I was thinking of Dinorwig, but it's the same idea) - we transform "unused" (and therefore low value) overnight capacity into valuable daytime capacity, albeit with a 20% energy loss.
Firming renewables is a much tougher proposition - we don't have dependable unused capacity (like a thermal plant overnight), so we can't schedule our battery charging cycle, and the argument for batteries kind of falls down at that stage.
Interesting about battery life - I would appreciate any reference or citation, becaue that's a trap I would like to avoid!
technically nearly all power systems are consumers when idle, including fossil fuel plants, diesel gensets have block heaters, batteries have climate control, and even switchgear have anti-condensate heaters. It might be worth study and a metric to quantify.
Rooftop solar does not have the land use issues of large-scale solar projects but otherwise does rooftop solar have too many issues? I’m not thinking in terms of intermittency as much as the technical issues I’m clueless about (harmonics, voltage flicker, etc.)
The biggest issues I am aware of come in as voltage control and feeder protection. If there is too much infeed from rooftop solar, the protective relays may be unable to see a fault on the line, preventing a circuit trip.
Roseville CA had an issue when clouds would go over, solar would shut down and the voltage would sag, so distribution capacitors would come on. Then the cloud would move off, solar would come on, and they would have a significant overvoltage until the capacitors turned off.
Here is one issue for You. LCOE is frequently used as proof that solar and wind are cheap(in some convoluted way, forgetting important factors- kind of yes)- but even on the glancing analysis- one thing is visible and rarely commented. Residential solar(rooftop) is much more expensive than utility solar. Residential solar+residential storage is very expensive comparing to doing it at utility scale.
For emission reductions I always wonder if painting roofs with very reflective paint wouldn't be better (reflecting radiation instead of turning it efficiently into heat).
Yes, LCOE makes wind and solar look cheap if the additional cost of backup conventional (coal, NG, nuclear) power plants is not considered. Add the backup infrastructure needed for when wind and solar are not producing electricity and that changes the equation. I’m not sure, though, that rooftop solar is much more expensive than utility solar in the long run. Eventually when the break even point is reached for rooftop solar the costs for the home owner thereafter is negligible whereas the homeowner without rooftop solar would still be paying the utility for electricity. I agree however that adding a battery to a rooftop solar system would make the system much more expensive and perhaps negate its advantage over utility solar.
California has now added batteries in addition rooftop solar as a code requirement for new residential construction. Sunrun Solar that operates rooftop solar in California and Arizona ownes 45% of the battery capacity in the US.
The reason I’m a fan of rooftop Solar (for a portion of total power) is that it generates power at the point of use. The worst line losses, and transformer losses, degradation, etc. all occur during the few% of the time that loads are at peak. By offsetting the transmission & distribution by just 5-10% we save a disproportionate amount of generation and equipment life. Especially when a small battery is included to time shift to match the actual peak just after sunset. And the user has the additional benefit of limited emergency power without having to maintain a generator.
First thanks for adding to the conversation, it's appreciated. Regarding the backup power, it really depends on the climate you live in. If you are on CoCoastal California, it's not the end if you run out of battery before power is restored. But in the article air regions, or hot places like Houston, it can be dangerous to be without power. Now up here in the cold country many have backup heat opposed to backup power. But I have a home standby because I have a gas furnace for one, and a cpap for another. I would not trust solar here in Ohio.
I completely understand that, though I think it’s more nuanced. I personally have all 3. I am in Rural CA so can use firewood with only 8 W needed for the stove fan, and it will function without. I have a portable generator, but my other half was terrified to use it if I’m not at home , so the battery/PV was a relief, since it’s fully auto and can run the well. My experience with critical loads was that I could run 20 or so hours from full charge on 14kWh and still get ~6 kWh PV production on an overcast day, extending it. My Uncle in Ohio got one of the gas fired 22kW gensets to run the furnaces, but that’s overkill for maybe 1,200 W? And a CPAP is 10W maybe? Fuel costs are staggering if it has to run more than a couple days, so a small portable battery is still a good companion to a genset to minimize runtime. And after 3 years hos didn’t start (too cheap for the maintenance contract!) I was in the Generator business before I did Batteries, and I saw so many fail to start due to deferred maintenance. I think the average person is better suited to the minimal maintenance of the solid state approach, if they can afford it. For hot climates, a single room with a window AC or Minisplit is what I recommend, for a “comfort room” that can run on PV/Battery or a small genset.
🤣🤣Ruben that comment sounds just like one all the native Californians I know would make! I worked in California 35 years, most of them in Redding. FYI you might be interested in my original six part series starting with this piece; https://kilovar1959.substack.com/p/when-you-are-ready-for-that-generator?r=23kggy .Suffice it to say Ohio is not California. We get periods of near or below zero weather, sometimes with 30 to 40 mph winds. Dragging out a portable and trying to refuel it in that weather can literally get you killed. When I worked in Montana I had to work on an outdoor standby diesel when the ambient was an actual -37F, 5 minutes on, ten minutes inside. Until you have done it, you don't understand. Besides, natural gas here in Ohio costs far and away below the cost of natural gas in California, so fuel costs, meh.
I know Redding well, I have family up there, and one of my peaker plants was just to the South. No argument about the risk of a portable in that weather! I personally don’t like that all the waste heat that gets thrown away, but that’s another topic. I haven’t experienced that kind of weather (30F is cold for my CA tush! 🥶 ) but my Dad told me stories like that of working on his carburetor in Eastern Oregon at -30F! I recall my brother who is now in upper NY, asking why his Volvo was clattering so much after starting at -20F…. (I said “GET THEE A BLOCK HEATER!) But the question that comes to mind about your repair in Montana, is how did you get it started after that? I’ve had Diesels and know they don’t like cold weather starts!
PS, speaking of waste heat, a peaking turbine isn’t exactly innocent when it comes to waste heat. The heat columns coming out the stacks on the REU peaking units is ”impressive”.
It’s one of those stories! I was there to do a startup on the new generator for the Poplar Community Hospital in Poplar Montana. I was actually done and spent the night in a local motel. I stopped by to make a last check before heading out and found the coolant heater had stopped working overnight. This was one of the new Onan’s with the Komatsu engine. They mounted the coolant heater directly under the radiator in a spot almost impossible to reach. You really couldn’t work in heavy gloves, thus the breaks. It turned out the electrician had a poor connection where he connected power to the coolant heater and it melted the wire nut. I had to cut everything back to new fresh wire and make sure it was made up correctly. Once the block heater was running we gave it two hours to get enough heat to start., then ran the engine until it was warm. We were good from there. Even at two hours of heat, the engine ran pretty rough for the first three or four minutes.
I’m an old school, rotating inertia, generator droop electrical engineer, and I’ve always been skeptical of the ability of grid forming inverters to both respond fast enough for voltage and frequency stabilization, and to form a sine wave without harmonics. But recently, I’ve started to learn that some of the newest and innovative grid forming inverters are Approaching the stability provided by mechanical inertia. While they may never reach the level of a frame seven based CCGT, they are getting better.
Having said all that, I’m still frustrated by conversations about what kind of electricity generation people “feel is best”, and to paraphrase a famous T-shirt, Maxwell doesn’t care about your feelings. I take a utilitarian approach and look at the attributes of that electricity. On the super spiked Substack, Arjun Murti writes about the attributes of solar with one positive being it is a domestic energy resource that doesn’t require the primary energy source to be imported.
Thanks for the response! We all learn when we chat like adults. Yes grid forming inverters are getting there, but the fact a PID response loop is involved means there will always be a meaningful delay. The real issue is the amount of electronic inertia is limited by the batteries and the inverter power electronics. As you know a traditional rotating machine can give up many times it's rating for a moment, but power electronics cannot. What a grid forming inverter does have that is very important is the ability to mimic a droop governor That's where having the sychronous condenser with a flywheel comes in. It can deliver that momentary energy without damage or limitations, then the grid forming inverter droop characteristic has the microseconds needed to activate as the flywheel gives up energy.
Indeed, I think that is the key, to leverage the strength each has, to compensate where others fall short. With 2 peaker plants i was involved with, they were very proud they could be online and up to 100% in as little as 5 minutes in an emergency. A battery can be activated in mS after the command is received, or even automatically pick up load, when it is in standby, or charging. This buys time for slower, larger resources to come up to speed and take over.
It sounds like Murti completely ignores the fact that the collectors for this "domestic energy resource" are all manufactured in China and require rare minerals that we have decided not to mine domestically.
Doesn't matter if the fuel is domestic if all the equipment to use it is imported.
I believe that solar cells now being produced in the United States by Silfab as well as other companies. Probably a drop in the bucket compared to China though. Silfab also manufactures solar panels in North America but in the past the cells were sourced from outside North America.
The solar panels I bought from Silfab were priced competitively and manufactured in North America but the solar cells were probably made in China. We’ll see what happens to their prices when they start using cells made in the United States. I agree that the vast majority of solar panels come from China using energy from coal and this makes them less “green” than is claimed.
Adding more cogs to the machine is never a good idea - more opportunity for things to break and more opportunities for energy to be lost to inefficiencies of conversion. If we have to add all of these complexities to make renewables more like fossil fuels or nuclear, then perhaps we should just stick to those.
Thanks for the suggestion, very interesting- especially the part about synchronizing with the frequency of the grid- I’m always interested in more hard truths about “renewables”, albeit that I am biased against them. I was underwhelmed by my solar panels and started to look into them and have become keenly aware of just how bad an idea it is.
Like everything, they have their place. In California if you live in the hot Central Valley the ridiculous energy rates charged by the Investor Owned Utilities (IIOU) means you probably need solar or solar + battery just to afford to run your air conditioner, and trust me, you need it. So be selfish if it's a matter of self preservation.
" I don’t have anything personally against wind and solar. " -- makes no sense. Any engineer or scientist who doesn't know the First Law of Thermodynamics and uses "renewable" energy as if it were real, is a disgrace to the profession and is misleading ordinary folks who don't deserve that..
His comment is the logical conclusion from your very good point in the article. The deep frustration of people who are able to understand the flow of power and the basic math behind renewables makes us reject them as basically useless because to make them reliable, as you very well point out, makes them far to expensive to consider. I did the math for this 20 years ago in the Philippines when I was facing 24 cents / hour, unreliable grid power and wanted to see if solar was reasonable. The batteries to firm it were the killer expense and the payback period was the life of the panels. The ONE application that does make sense is using solar to power a DC water well pump into a small water tower. The tower is the battery and the system pays for itself in one or two years. Running a water pressure pump takes a LOT of electricity, so the small tower to pressurize an home or small facility is helpful. However, your initial capital cost is high for the tower.
Thanks for the interpretation. I am pretty good at understanding folks, but I often fail at "College Professor". Not that there is anything wrong with his comment! I just couldn't process it.
Agreed that we probably shouldn't rip out existing renewables. However, it might be a good idea to phase them out gradually over the next 20 years or so, as they start wearing out and needing replacements. As the landfills start filling up with wind turbine blades and worn out or obsolete solar panels, and as the cost of electricity continues to accelerate, and as federal and state governments realize subsidies no longer make sense, more and more people will see the light.
If renewables are subsidised anyway, it may be more efficient for system operators to provide additional grid inertia and some backup at scale, with renewable producers taxed in return.
The issue is you separate cost centers from the entity generating the cost. That is simply bad economics. Typically you want the profits and costs to occur together so they give you a true indication of the cost of production.
Thanks EC! hat’s kind of the reality follow my opinion isn’t it. I think there is a place, a niche market for it for those that want to to “buy green”. There is always a spot for expensive supplemental power to fill in the peak and valleys we now fill with fast start peakers. But if you're invest that kind of capitol in something that, even with batteries, has less than a 40% capacity factor, that power will be very expensive without subsidies to artificially support it. Whether that price would take them right out of a competitive energy market remains to be seen. They would certainly need to compete with the fast start plants to survive.
Do t you not know the resource consumption of generator types needed to generate a Watt? Suggest Section 10 of DoE's Quadrennial Review. FYI, it takes PV 16 times the raw material to generate a Watt relative to common nuclear. Wind is actually 'better', consuming over 10 times the raw material per Watt.
AI training & recognition processes make power per materiel consumption more critical now, especially as GHG emissions are self accelerating, especially methane. This site needs to do some homework on reality.
Dr Cannara we can talk about research, consumption, and lab theory until we are blue in the face. I won't even argue this with you. It's the "buts" that always kill a nice theory. But you see, we need to make that energy into constant consistent energy that flows to the end use customer 24/7/365 at a reasonable price. It might be better at energy conservation at the moment, but it's not consistent, and it's not controllable, and it's expensive. The interconnection needs to operate at on steady consistent frequency, you can't do that with a power source that just goes on vacation whenever it wants. If you think price doesn't matter, there is a single mother of three I want you to meet.
"There is no question this would inflate the cost of renewable installations, and without subsidies they might struggle to find their niche. "
That quote qualifies you as a "Master of Understatement". ;-)
Ed it is always amazing how the price of equipment falls in line when you expose it to the hot fire of a free market.
...which is why our previous DEI administration chose not to allow it to be exposed to that hot fire.
Which previous administration? Bush with biofuels blunders? First trump with his tax cuts for the rich and not doing anything real for proper challenge to W&S crowd? All administrations in the US/EU seem to be detached from the realities of physics to a smaller or larger degree(don't get me started on Germany...).
The immediately previous Administration, which I refer to as the DEI Administration.
I think it is pretty clear that if such niche exists at all, it is less than 1% of the power market.
Agree, but they are out there. The supplemental market is probably the place if any.
This is exactly what is needed. Put the burden and the cost of reliable power, voltage and frequency on the generation source - at that sources physical location! BEFORE it touches the grid. Otherwise everyone else pays by having to install equipment behind the meter to protect their own machines and devices from micro-interruptions, or major interruptions.
This is appropriate timing, with a metric to capture the cost of including those measures to make the power dispatchable as you called for.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zionlights/p/lfscoe-is-the-new-metric-in-town?r=1tn84l&utm_medium=ios
The question is is who do you trust to collect the data without bias, and report it out. That's a tall order in these divided times.
Indeed it is. There is no one way, or one person. We all have blind spots, that’s why peer review is so important as a part of the Scientific Method. This approach of putting it out there and letting other pick it apart will show over time who has integrity or not, and where their blind spots or biases are. And the second part of the scientific method is that of “repeatable results” and sharing the raw data.
When I was first learning to do energy studies as a green engineer, my mentors drilled into me the principle of listing your assumptions! All analyses must make some assumptions for the sake of scope and time, and if you imagine they can have any material impact, you list them. That is where the infamous Mr Jacobsen has failed us. As was revealed in the later peer review of his white paper.
Off topic, but it is my peeve with the studies out of UCLA, Stanford, and RMI on gas stoves regarding the effects of natural gas combustion, gas stove leaks, benzene in/from natural gas, and gas stove causing childhood asthma. If you read the studies, even to me, it is clear the results were decided first, and the tests tailored to achieve the data wanted. RMI had to supply AGA with a retraction on their childhood asthma claims because they had no evidence, but they continue to push the study. Apparently there was some trace amounts of benzene found in a sample of natural gas, so now all natural gas is rife with benzene, however no actual amounts or comparisons to national standards have ever been published. Interestingly the WHO came out with a study that debunked their claims.
The trouble is this type of irresponsible behavior destroys the public faith in the scientific method. If science is willing to lie here, were else are they willing to lie? Ok, rant over.
Good point, but that is exactly the scientific process in action. Science isn’t a monolith, it’s all people. And problem are inherently flawed, with bias and blind spots galore. That’s why we need to keep harping on the “scientific method” and let it be okay that knowledge changes and grows over time. It should be acceptable to admit you made a mistake, and also be publicly shameful for not acknowledging it when one is pointed out! The history of LNT is a great example of the momentum of group think. But it is getting harder to defend it all the time, as more and more people bare made aware of the initial flaws. If I recall correctly, those studies on asthma were done in the ‘79’and ‘80’s? So many of those would be in homes that were like my first apartment, with a gas stove and No Exhaust Hood! So all the particulate pollution of cooking stays in the house. I suspect the electric homes tended to be newer, and so had the code requirements for ventilation. Gas cooking goes back a century, so there is a lot of existing stock. A new study would hopefully correct for that difference.
I have to agree on the ability to adjust your views. It's a tough place, and admitting new evidence has changed your results is a bad spot. As a society we need to evolve to accept those changes without shooting the messenger.
There has never been a direct study on childhood asthma and gas stoves. It's more of a collection of studies that point to the emmisions of natural gas, and then link to childhood asthma. Here is what I found
"Studies documenting the health risks associated with gas stoves dates back decades. A 1992 meta-analysis – conducted by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and Duke University – found that nitrogen dioxide exposure that is comparable to that from a gas stove increases the odds of children developing a respiratory illness by about 20%.
A 2013 meta-analysis of 41 studies found that gas cooking increases the risk of asthma in children and that nitrogen dioxide exposure is linked with currently having a wheeze."
It’s one thing to say that the evidence warrants a direct study, it's another to state the results of said study.
This is a nice summary:
https://achemistinlangley.net/2023/01/12/are-gas-stoves-really-responsible-for-12-7-of-current-childhood-asthma-cases-in-the-us/
And I would suggest that anything from the Rocky Mountain Institute is suspect
Interesting, I would agree, that the meta -analyses are showing a “correlation “, which is good reason to conduct an in-depth direct study, but is shaky ground to create policy from. As we know, correlation is not necessarily causation. And I say that as someone who advocates for electric cooking. I find the benefits of reduced fire risk (1/3 of all fires are in the kitchen) due to no open flame and reduced hot surface (depending on the type of electric stove), and the elimination of explosion risk os reason enough to pick electric. I researched gas explosions when I was promoting commercial heat pumps and was so surprised that I pulled a new circuit to my kitchen and bribed my wife with a new Double oven range! She grew up cooking on gas and was tough to convince, but likes it now)
the problem with batteries is that they are energy customers when not discharging. i've never seen a fair, decent analysis of how to best fit batteries into power systems given that reality. good work has been done showing that batteries make more sense with nuclear (or natural gas). hoping that gets updated. file:///C:/MM%20Foss/CES-Hartley-DisplaceFossil-102617.pdf For ERCOT, "The analysis of the long-run systems implied that nuclear energy with storage provides the lowest
cost long-run alternative to fossil fuels. Wind ended up being much more expensive than nuclear
because it requires almost double the storage to make up for its intermittency, non-dispatchability,
and generally negative correlation with system load."
I view batteries as the lazy man's pump storage. Especially the lithium-ion batteries due to their short life. However I think they're here to stay regardless. The nuclear angle is a new one I hadn't heard before. I did talk about batteries a bit more in my two part "Power Systems - It’s a Renewable Thing".
Meredith Angwin said it best in her great book. She was warned by industry insiders that if she devoted any time in the book to discussing the merits of batteries she would lose all credibility with them. As a nuclear engineer with 30 years of experience designing nuclear power plants please drop this nonsense. The number of batteries needed to store even one day’s worth of power from a 1500 Mw plant is beyond comprehension. Furthermore, all nuclear power plants have 18 months or two years worth of storage- it’s called the fuel.
Yes, but...
No doubt, it is idiocy to think of batteries as long-term storage, but as diurnal storage you only need to store 3-6 hours of the difference between the plant's steady state output and the overnight load. Batteries are a pure capacity resource - and yes, their effective load-carrying capacity drops when you get any meaningful penetration - but there may be place for them in shaving needle peaks. This is especially true since they can be located near demand, which might (note, *might*) defer transmission, which is getting harder and harder to build.
I am of the opinion that calling a battery "capacity" is like calling a water jug a water well. Yes, like pumped storage they do allow for energy to be stored for later use, but, they generate zero capacity, they only move it.
Well kV, I won't argue that a battery (or pumped storage, depending on characteristics) is "good capacity" like a generator - but it is also cheap capacity. Sometimes we take a little water with our wine. This is especially true now that public policy favours capacity-poor resources, like wind and solar.
I tell our financial guys trying to understand how to value capacity to think of it like oxygen - if you have it, it's worth nothing and you don't even think about it; when you run out, it's worth everything. We have to invest to avoid those situations where we are short of it.
To continue your comparison to a water jug (which I like, by the way - so I am going to steal it), to a man dying of thirst in the desert, a (full) water jug has the immediate utility of a water well - to him, they are the same. The long term utility is probably much less (depending on his needs), but that doesn't mean that the (full) water jug has no value to him.
Thanks for the reply Dean, I love to chat about this stuff! This will be a long reply.
Your example of a man in the desert is absolutely correct, and I won't argue the point. California is showing that they can be used to slow the ramp rates on gas turbines which will reduce maintenance costs. I am convinced batteries are here to stay no matter what.
What I will argue is they do not add capacity when used in conjunction with renewable generation. Renewable capacity has to be diverted to charge batteries and usually ramps off before batteries ramp in. That is relocation of capacity, not added capacity. Like Jerry cans on the back of your Jeep, you absolutely need the energy, but it's not more power.
Now if you use them in conjunction with thermal generation, you can charge when demand is low, and use it in parallel with thermal generation when demand is high. That was the original concept of Helms, it would pump with Diablo power at night, and generate in parallel with Diablo during high demand.
Where the rub comes is when renewables don't generate or demand is too high to divert capacity to charge. This happened in PJM during Elliott . Demand stayed so high they were unable to divert generation to run the pumps on pumped storage. Then stored energy is pretty useless.
When you say cheap, I say where? In China it is pretty cheap. In Europe the price is competitive. But on a MWH basis, excluding fuel cost is slightly higher than simple cycle gas turbine capacity. Given that the batteries have a four hour operation limit, gas turbines win.
The biggest issue with batteries is ROI because of their very short life cycle. Although they advertise 25 years, practice is showing about 15 years of usable life. A gas turbine may last 30 to 50 years. 15 years isn't enough time to amortize the capitol cost.
Hi kv (damn - capitalizing the "V" is reflexive; I've done it twice now!). I love talking through this stuff, too, and I don't think we disagree. It's an important distinction (and one that I didn't make) between batteries to 'firm up' renewables, and batteries (or p/s) to meet load swings - thanks for pointing that out. Your example of Helms is exactly on-point for the second use-case (I was thinking of Dinorwig, but it's the same idea) - we transform "unused" (and therefore low value) overnight capacity into valuable daytime capacity, albeit with a 20% energy loss.
Firming renewables is a much tougher proposition - we don't have dependable unused capacity (like a thermal plant overnight), so we can't schedule our battery charging cycle, and the argument for batteries kind of falls down at that stage.
Interesting about battery life - I would appreciate any reference or citation, becaue that's a trap I would like to avoid!
Great response.'...storage - its called the fuel'! Basic physics confirms your conclusion about batteries at this scale.
technically nearly all power systems are consumers when idle, including fossil fuel plants, diesel gensets have block heaters, batteries have climate control, and even switchgear have anti-condensate heaters. It might be worth study and a metric to quantify.
Rooftop solar does not have the land use issues of large-scale solar projects but otherwise does rooftop solar have too many issues? I’m not thinking in terms of intermittency as much as the technical issues I’m clueless about (harmonics, voltage flicker, etc.)
The biggest issues I am aware of come in as voltage control and feeder protection. If there is too much infeed from rooftop solar, the protective relays may be unable to see a fault on the line, preventing a circuit trip.
Roseville CA had an issue when clouds would go over, solar would shut down and the voltage would sag, so distribution capacitors would come on. Then the cloud would move off, solar would come on, and they would have a significant overvoltage until the capacitors turned off.
Here is one issue for You. LCOE is frequently used as proof that solar and wind are cheap(in some convoluted way, forgetting important factors- kind of yes)- but even on the glancing analysis- one thing is visible and rarely commented. Residential solar(rooftop) is much more expensive than utility solar. Residential solar+residential storage is very expensive comparing to doing it at utility scale.
For emission reductions I always wonder if painting roofs with very reflective paint wouldn't be better (reflecting radiation instead of turning it efficiently into heat).
Yes, LCOE makes wind and solar look cheap if the additional cost of backup conventional (coal, NG, nuclear) power plants is not considered. Add the backup infrastructure needed for when wind and solar are not producing electricity and that changes the equation. I’m not sure, though, that rooftop solar is much more expensive than utility solar in the long run. Eventually when the break even point is reached for rooftop solar the costs for the home owner thereafter is negligible whereas the homeowner without rooftop solar would still be paying the utility for electricity. I agree however that adding a battery to a rooftop solar system would make the system much more expensive and perhaps negate its advantage over utility solar.
California has now added batteries in addition rooftop solar as a code requirement for new residential construction. Sunrun Solar that operates rooftop solar in California and Arizona ownes 45% of the battery capacity in the US.
Ouch. I hear that California is no longer mandating net metering so this along with the battery requirement is going to tank residential solar there.
It is, and people are angry
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/05/27/net-metering-3-0-rules-create-chaos-in-rooftop-solar-market-in-california/
The reason I’m a fan of rooftop Solar (for a portion of total power) is that it generates power at the point of use. The worst line losses, and transformer losses, degradation, etc. all occur during the few% of the time that loads are at peak. By offsetting the transmission & distribution by just 5-10% we save a disproportionate amount of generation and equipment life. Especially when a small battery is included to time shift to match the actual peak just after sunset. And the user has the additional benefit of limited emergency power without having to maintain a generator.
First thanks for adding to the conversation, it's appreciated. Regarding the backup power, it really depends on the climate you live in. If you are on CoCoastal California, it's not the end if you run out of battery before power is restored. But in the article air regions, or hot places like Houston, it can be dangerous to be without power. Now up here in the cold country many have backup heat opposed to backup power. But I have a home standby because I have a gas furnace for one, and a cpap for another. I would not trust solar here in Ohio.
I completely understand that, though I think it’s more nuanced. I personally have all 3. I am in Rural CA so can use firewood with only 8 W needed for the stove fan, and it will function without. I have a portable generator, but my other half was terrified to use it if I’m not at home , so the battery/PV was a relief, since it’s fully auto and can run the well. My experience with critical loads was that I could run 20 or so hours from full charge on 14kWh and still get ~6 kWh PV production on an overcast day, extending it. My Uncle in Ohio got one of the gas fired 22kW gensets to run the furnaces, but that’s overkill for maybe 1,200 W? And a CPAP is 10W maybe? Fuel costs are staggering if it has to run more than a couple days, so a small portable battery is still a good companion to a genset to minimize runtime. And after 3 years hos didn’t start (too cheap for the maintenance contract!) I was in the Generator business before I did Batteries, and I saw so many fail to start due to deferred maintenance. I think the average person is better suited to the minimal maintenance of the solid state approach, if they can afford it. For hot climates, a single room with a window AC or Minisplit is what I recommend, for a “comfort room” that can run on PV/Battery or a small genset.
🤣🤣Ruben that comment sounds just like one all the native Californians I know would make! I worked in California 35 years, most of them in Redding. FYI you might be interested in my original six part series starting with this piece; https://kilovar1959.substack.com/p/when-you-are-ready-for-that-generator?r=23kggy .Suffice it to say Ohio is not California. We get periods of near or below zero weather, sometimes with 30 to 40 mph winds. Dragging out a portable and trying to refuel it in that weather can literally get you killed. When I worked in Montana I had to work on an outdoor standby diesel when the ambient was an actual -37F, 5 minutes on, ten minutes inside. Until you have done it, you don't understand. Besides, natural gas here in Ohio costs far and away below the cost of natural gas in California, so fuel costs, meh.
I know Redding well, I have family up there, and one of my peaker plants was just to the South. No argument about the risk of a portable in that weather! I personally don’t like that all the waste heat that gets thrown away, but that’s another topic. I haven’t experienced that kind of weather (30F is cold for my CA tush! 🥶 ) but my Dad told me stories like that of working on his carburetor in Eastern Oregon at -30F! I recall my brother who is now in upper NY, asking why his Volvo was clattering so much after starting at -20F…. (I said “GET THEE A BLOCK HEATER!) But the question that comes to mind about your repair in Montana, is how did you get it started after that? I’ve had Diesels and know they don’t like cold weather starts!
PS, speaking of waste heat, a peaking turbine isn’t exactly innocent when it comes to waste heat. The heat columns coming out the stacks on the REU peaking units is ”impressive”.
It’s one of those stories! I was there to do a startup on the new generator for the Poplar Community Hospital in Poplar Montana. I was actually done and spent the night in a local motel. I stopped by to make a last check before heading out and found the coolant heater had stopped working overnight. This was one of the new Onan’s with the Komatsu engine. They mounted the coolant heater directly under the radiator in a spot almost impossible to reach. You really couldn’t work in heavy gloves, thus the breaks. It turned out the electrician had a poor connection where he connected power to the coolant heater and it melted the wire nut. I had to cut everything back to new fresh wire and make sure it was made up correctly. Once the block heater was running we gave it two hours to get enough heat to start., then ran the engine until it was warm. We were good from there. Even at two hours of heat, the engine ran pretty rough for the first three or four minutes.
I’m an old school, rotating inertia, generator droop electrical engineer, and I’ve always been skeptical of the ability of grid forming inverters to both respond fast enough for voltage and frequency stabilization, and to form a sine wave without harmonics. But recently, I’ve started to learn that some of the newest and innovative grid forming inverters are Approaching the stability provided by mechanical inertia. While they may never reach the level of a frame seven based CCGT, they are getting better.
Having said all that, I’m still frustrated by conversations about what kind of electricity generation people “feel is best”, and to paraphrase a famous T-shirt, Maxwell doesn’t care about your feelings. I take a utilitarian approach and look at the attributes of that electricity. On the super spiked Substack, Arjun Murti writes about the attributes of solar with one positive being it is a domestic energy resource that doesn’t require the primary energy source to be imported.
Thanks for the response! We all learn when we chat like adults. Yes grid forming inverters are getting there, but the fact a PID response loop is involved means there will always be a meaningful delay. The real issue is the amount of electronic inertia is limited by the batteries and the inverter power electronics. As you know a traditional rotating machine can give up many times it's rating for a moment, but power electronics cannot. What a grid forming inverter does have that is very important is the ability to mimic a droop governor That's where having the sychronous condenser with a flywheel comes in. It can deliver that momentary energy without damage or limitations, then the grid forming inverter droop characteristic has the microseconds needed to activate as the flywheel gives up energy.
Indeed, I think that is the key, to leverage the strength each has, to compensate where others fall short. With 2 peaker plants i was involved with, they were very proud they could be online and up to 100% in as little as 5 minutes in an emergency. A battery can be activated in mS after the command is received, or even automatically pick up load, when it is in standby, or charging. This buys time for slower, larger resources to come up to speed and take over.
It sounds like Murti completely ignores the fact that the collectors for this "domestic energy resource" are all manufactured in China and require rare minerals that we have decided not to mine domestically.
Doesn't matter if the fuel is domestic if all the equipment to use it is imported.
I believe that solar cells now being produced in the United States by Silfab as well as other companies. Probably a drop in the bucket compared to China though. Silfab also manufactures solar panels in North America but in the past the cells were sourced from outside North America.
The vast majority of solar cells/panels come from China, manufactured with energy from cheap coal.
If they were sourced in the USA the price would be vastly higher.
The solar panels I bought from Silfab were priced competitively and manufactured in North America but the solar cells were probably made in China. We’ll see what happens to their prices when they start using cells made in the United States. I agree that the vast majority of solar panels come from China using energy from coal and this makes them less “green” than is claimed.
Adding more cogs to the machine is never a good idea - more opportunity for things to break and more opportunities for energy to be lost to inefficiencies of conversion. If we have to add all of these complexities to make renewables more like fossil fuels or nuclear, then perhaps we should just stick to those.
Chris, understand your point of view, but the issue is renewables really don't work to power a major power system in their present form. I recommend you read my "Power Systems" series on my Substack. it starts with https://kilovar1959.substack.com/p/power-systems-playing-with-magnets?r=23kggy. Up to you.
Thanks for the suggestion, very interesting- especially the part about synchronizing with the frequency of the grid- I’m always interested in more hard truths about “renewables”, albeit that I am biased against them. I was underwhelmed by my solar panels and started to look into them and have become keenly aware of just how bad an idea it is.
Like everything, they have their place. In California if you live in the hot Central Valley the ridiculous energy rates charged by the Investor Owned Utilities (IIOU) means you probably need solar or solar + battery just to afford to run your air conditioner, and trust me, you need it. So be selfish if it's a matter of self preservation.
" I don’t have anything personally against wind and solar. " -- makes no sense. Any engineer or scientist who doesn't know the First Law of Thermodynamics and uses "renewable" energy as if it were real, is a disgrace to the profession and is misleading ordinary folks who don't deserve that..
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Dr. A. Cannara
650-400-3071
Care to elaborate, because your comment makes no sense.
His comment is the logical conclusion from your very good point in the article. The deep frustration of people who are able to understand the flow of power and the basic math behind renewables makes us reject them as basically useless because to make them reliable, as you very well point out, makes them far to expensive to consider. I did the math for this 20 years ago in the Philippines when I was facing 24 cents / hour, unreliable grid power and wanted to see if solar was reasonable. The batteries to firm it were the killer expense and the payback period was the life of the panels. The ONE application that does make sense is using solar to power a DC water well pump into a small water tower. The tower is the battery and the system pays for itself in one or two years. Running a water pressure pump takes a LOT of electricity, so the small tower to pressurize an home or small facility is helpful. However, your initial capital cost is high for the tower.
Thanks for the interpretation. I am pretty good at understanding folks, but I often fail at "College Professor". Not that there is anything wrong with his comment! I just couldn't process it.
Agreed that we probably shouldn't rip out existing renewables. However, it might be a good idea to phase them out gradually over the next 20 years or so, as they start wearing out and needing replacements. As the landfills start filling up with wind turbine blades and worn out or obsolete solar panels, and as the cost of electricity continues to accelerate, and as federal and state governments realize subsidies no longer make sense, more and more people will see the light.
If renewables are subsidised anyway, it may be more efficient for system operators to provide additional grid inertia and some backup at scale, with renewable producers taxed in return.
The issue is you separate cost centers from the entity generating the cost. That is simply bad economics. Typically you want the profits and costs to occur together so they give you a true indication of the cost of production.
Ideally yes
What would it take to make them work?
Unicorns. A whole lot of unicorns. And Magical Fairy Dust.
And probably a fairy godmother or two.
Thanks EC! hat’s kind of the reality follow my opinion isn’t it. I think there is a place, a niche market for it for those that want to to “buy green”. There is always a spot for expensive supplemental power to fill in the peak and valleys we now fill with fast start peakers. But if you're invest that kind of capitol in something that, even with batteries, has less than a 40% capacity factor, that power will be very expensive without subsidies to artificially support it. Whether that price would take them right out of a competitive energy market remains to be seen. They would certainly need to compete with the fast start plants to survive.
Do t you not know the resource consumption of generator types needed to generate a Watt? Suggest Section 10 of DoE's Quadrennial Review. FYI, it takes PV 16 times the raw material to generate a Watt relative to common nuclear. Wind is actually 'better', consuming over 10 times the raw material per Watt.
AI training & recognition processes make power per materiel consumption more critical now, especially as GHG emissions are self accelerating, especially methane. This site needs to do some homework on reality.
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Dr. A. Cannara
650-400-3071
Dr Cannara we can talk about research, consumption, and lab theory until we are blue in the face. I won't even argue this with you. It's the "buts" that always kill a nice theory. But you see, we need to make that energy into constant consistent energy that flows to the end use customer 24/7/365 at a reasonable price. It might be better at energy conservation at the moment, but it's not consistent, and it's not controllable, and it's expensive. The interconnection needs to operate at on steady consistent frequency, you can't do that with a power source that just goes on vacation whenever it wants. If you think price doesn't matter, there is a single mother of three I want you to meet.