Well, maybe with geothermal. Some recent developments are accelerating its deployment substantially. And, technologically speaking, it is pretty straightforward stuff. Drilling activities account for 30% to 57% of the cost to develop and install a geothermal plant, so any speed up there results in huge cost savings. The magnitude of cost reduction so far ranges from 12% to 26%. The Utah Forge project results have been a shock to the industry.
The improved tech is an outgrowth of shale gas drilling. Which means all the skills and equipment are already readily available - there is no tech curve, and very little learning curve. This is just applying existing shale fracking technology to solve a different problem.
I think a solid 10% contribution is possible in 10 years. Imagine a large building that puts a geothermal well in the parking lot. That well now provides for all the heating and cooling of the building. That can cut energy usage 50%. You can even have one well serve mutiple buildings.
Suppose you are running on 30 percent gas. And you then install extra solar and wind to overproduce by 60 percent.
You then need some way to store the excess energy to get down to 0 percent gas, with 50 percent round trip efficiency. Why not as hydrogen or ammonia?
Is the issue with this proposal the cost of the extra equipment to overproduce? The cost of the electrolyzers, storage tanks, and generators? Or just that it makes no sense when gas is cheap.
Energy doesn't want to be stored. This is based in the second law of thermodynamics.
For the last 100 years, in every country on Earth, we have practiced just in time delivery of energy. Because energy doesn't want to be stored, and the loses are costly.
Hydrogen or ammonia will store, maybe, 30% of the energy you start with. 60% will be lost. And this is not a problem we can solve with technology, since it is rooted in fundamental physics.
"The cost of the electrolyzers, storage tanks, and generators? Or just that it makes no sense when gas is cheap."
It has nothing to do with the price of gas. You could triple the cost of gas and it would make no difference - it would still be cheaper. The added equipment is very expensive, and the storage medium is dangerous and difficult to store. Ammonia has a very low energy density compared to natural gas. Hydrogen has a higher energy density but is much harder to store.
So your argument is it's equipment cost that makes "store the energy seasonally as hydrogen" unviable.
Well, wouldn't the equipment get cheaper when built in volume? This stuff is currently rare and exotic. Hydrogen and methane fuel cells are also exotically expensive.
And bigger picture, what we should do depends on, at volume, what's cheaper:
1. Damage from pollution/fees charged for emissions
2. Equipment for energy storage
Nuclear isn't a viable option because it's actually a kinda extremely pathological case here. You don't want to size your reactors to be at max power during the winter peak and running at less than that the rest of the year. That's exotically expensive.
Quick question - if I store 1 MWh in a battery, how much is that electricity worth? What does my profit loss statement look like?
A Mwh is worth about $50, wholesale. So, I buy is at $20 Mwh and sell at $50/Mwh. That means I net $30.day
But I have a conversion loss of around 15%. And I lose 1% per day the energy is stored. And a cost to operate and manage. Maybe I make $20/day profit. But that's okay, the battery only cost me...$1 million. I'll pay that back in ...50,000 days. 136 years, for a battery that might last 20 years.
No. I'm saying the laws of physics make it is unviable. You will lose a huge amount of the energy in question. The expense of the equipment is just the icing on the cake - if the equipment were free, it still wouldn't make any sense.
We have been building the equipment in question for 100 years. We have squeezed out most of the improvements that science will allow. This is not a tech problem; this is a fundamental force of the universe problem. We won't get better tech to solve this.
The is the easiest way to understand this - energy storage is strongly discouraged by the fundamental laws of the universe. We can bend the law but not break it.
Do you think that people haven't wanted to store energy for hundreds of years? Instead of hydrogen and ammonia, how about we store the energy in gigantic flywheels? I mean, there are all sorts of ways to store energy, that seems just as good as any other. And that technology has been around for hundreds of years. basically perfected. So why haven't we ever done that? In the time of Edison, they could build huge flywheels. So why didn't they?
"Nuclear isn't a viable option because it's actually a kinda extremely pathological case here."
It's easier to change your mind than change the laws of physics. And Wyoming banned nuclear power right up till they didn't.
"You don't want to size your reactors to be at max power during the winter peak and running at less than that the rest of the year. That's exotically expensive."
I don't see why it's a problem to store wasted energy. The whole idea is, during the spring and fall, each day, the wind turbines and solar panels are oversized. There are countless kWh just wasted. This already happens every day in these seasons in California.
Your equipment would be sized to slowly run on otherwise wasted energy in the spring and fall, and some hours in the summer, storing kWh as hydrogen or methane or ammonia, in salt caverns if gas form. So the capacity of the equipment would be relatively small.
During the winter demand periods you either use caterpillar natural gas generators (possibly a version slightly modified for hydrogen or ammonia) - or fuel cells.
No one has optimized fuel cells or electrolysis and synthetic fuel carbon capture equipment in human history, it's only at best a side project.
You cannot store energy seasonally. You are wildly underestimating the cost of the energy, the cost of the storage, and the total loss of energy incurred. Transferring it seasonally would be ruinously expensive.
1% per day. That is how much energy a Tesla battery loses. So, in 3 months it will be 60% discharged. Minus around 15% going in and out of the battery. 75%-80 energy loss.
"There are countless kWh just wasted. This already happens every day in these seasons in California."
Yes, and... why? because the cost to store that energy vastly exceeds the value of the energy stored. You can't build any container for the energy - be it as a chemical, or in a battery, that is cost effective. Energy is born to be dissipated via entropy. Again, and I emphasize, this is a fundamental law of the universe.
As to the rest - lots of luck. It won't work, and we already know it won't work, because we have been trying to make it work for a century now.
How you are thinking now is a huge reason why the problem of climate change isn't being solved - we are spending a huge amount of time and energy implementing solutions that have no real chance of working due to basic physical laws. I agree completely - it seems like you should be able to solve the problem this way, but it only seems like it. People have been knocking on this door since James Maxwell.
It's like saying you could solve the problem of climate change by hooking all the exercise bikes in the world to the grid. That seems like it should work, but it won't. I can even come up some math showing how it would work. But it won't work.
LFP battery charge loss is 1 percent per month so if you used these for seasonal storage (yes including the Tesla ones) you would lose at most 11 percent before discharge.
Please don't make rants about the "laws of the universe" you don't understand. You do admit that when we burn fossil fuels we are consuming solar energy stored millions of years ago right?
I saw it and don't accept the conclusions. The video says it's 30-40 percent net efficient as if that makes it unviable.
It depends on your cost per watt of your energy source doesn't it.
Ammonia and hydrogen make perfect sense if hypothetically it's solar on desert land that is otherwise worthless, and the solar production cost per kWh is 1 cent.
By Swanson's law that is 20 years away. 2 cents is projected by 2030.
Colorado could hope to reach 30 percent of their energy from gas in 20 years. These things take time and recent political trends have added a few years to the timeline.
So 20 years from now the first hydrogen storage plants could begin construction.
We are talking about storing energy for the winter peak. So it's excess kWh stored the other 3 seasons used exactly once in the winter.
Batteries of the most stable available chemistries last 15-20 years. So with LFP cells at $50 a kWh storing energy for the winter peak that would be a cost of your MARR on the capital - about 10 percent - so $5 a kWh.
If hydrogen based fuel can be generated and stored and burned for less than $5 a kWh it's cheaper.
Also this kinda explains the default option - big cheap gas generators, with the caterpillar natural gas engine variant being the go-to choice.
I did a study in 2014. The average residential price for installation of solar cells was $3.48 per watt at that time. Of this the cost for the solar cell was a mere $0.72 (20% of the total cost). Therefore, even if solar cells were to suddenly become 20% cheaper, that would only be 20% of 20%, or 4% cheaper overall.
See the problem? You can keep cutting the cost of the solar cell, but it represents only a small fraction of the overall price of the project. Land, clearing labor, aluminum, glass, transmission - those are unaffected by the price of the cell.
There's unpriced advances though. Perovskite/silicon cells that collect 30 percent power power per panel for example add almost a straight 30 percent to the cost effectiveness for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Since the panel cost and the larger inverter cost to handle the extra energy is small, and the labor and land clearing and other costs are the same for the same size panels, that's a significant gain there.
You also have the near future possibility - certainly available by the time Colorados government decides what to do and funds anything - of either automated installation or more prefab. Solar array strings that come pre wired and unfold from flat packs in a shipping container are an obvious thing to do.
Excellent analyses and I can find no fault.
Well, maybe with geothermal. Some recent developments are accelerating its deployment substantially. And, technologically speaking, it is pretty straightforward stuff. Drilling activities account for 30% to 57% of the cost to develop and install a geothermal plant, so any speed up there results in huge cost savings. The magnitude of cost reduction so far ranges from 12% to 26%. The Utah Forge project results have been a shock to the industry.
The improved tech is an outgrowth of shale gas drilling. Which means all the skills and equipment are already readily available - there is no tech curve, and very little learning curve. This is just applying existing shale fracking technology to solve a different problem.
I think a solid 10% contribution is possible in 10 years. Imagine a large building that puts a geothermal well in the parking lot. That well now provides for all the heating and cooling of the building. That can cut energy usage 50%. You can even have one well serve mutiple buildings.
Suppose you are running on 30 percent gas. And you then install extra solar and wind to overproduce by 60 percent.
You then need some way to store the excess energy to get down to 0 percent gas, with 50 percent round trip efficiency. Why not as hydrogen or ammonia?
Is the issue with this proposal the cost of the extra equipment to overproduce? The cost of the electrolyzers, storage tanks, and generators? Or just that it makes no sense when gas is cheap.
Energy doesn't want to be stored. This is based in the second law of thermodynamics.
For the last 100 years, in every country on Earth, we have practiced just in time delivery of energy. Because energy doesn't want to be stored, and the loses are costly.
Hydrogen or ammonia will store, maybe, 30% of the energy you start with. 60% will be lost. And this is not a problem we can solve with technology, since it is rooted in fundamental physics.
"The cost of the electrolyzers, storage tanks, and generators? Or just that it makes no sense when gas is cheap."
It has nothing to do with the price of gas. You could triple the cost of gas and it would make no difference - it would still be cheaper. The added equipment is very expensive, and the storage medium is dangerous and difficult to store. Ammonia has a very low energy density compared to natural gas. Hydrogen has a higher energy density but is much harder to store.
So your argument is it's equipment cost that makes "store the energy seasonally as hydrogen" unviable.
Well, wouldn't the equipment get cheaper when built in volume? This stuff is currently rare and exotic. Hydrogen and methane fuel cells are also exotically expensive.
And bigger picture, what we should do depends on, at volume, what's cheaper:
1. Damage from pollution/fees charged for emissions
2. Equipment for energy storage
Nuclear isn't a viable option because it's actually a kinda extremely pathological case here. You don't want to size your reactors to be at max power during the winter peak and running at less than that the rest of the year. That's exotically expensive.
Quick question - if I store 1 MWh in a battery, how much is that electricity worth? What does my profit loss statement look like?
A Mwh is worth about $50, wholesale. So, I buy is at $20 Mwh and sell at $50/Mwh. That means I net $30.day
But I have a conversion loss of around 15%. And I lose 1% per day the energy is stored. And a cost to operate and manage. Maybe I make $20/day profit. But that's okay, the battery only cost me...$1 million. I'll pay that back in ...50,000 days. 136 years, for a battery that might last 20 years.
No. I'm saying the laws of physics make it is unviable. You will lose a huge amount of the energy in question. The expense of the equipment is just the icing on the cake - if the equipment were free, it still wouldn't make any sense.
We have been building the equipment in question for 100 years. We have squeezed out most of the improvements that science will allow. This is not a tech problem; this is a fundamental force of the universe problem. We won't get better tech to solve this.
The is the easiest way to understand this - energy storage is strongly discouraged by the fundamental laws of the universe. We can bend the law but not break it.
Do you think that people haven't wanted to store energy for hundreds of years? Instead of hydrogen and ammonia, how about we store the energy in gigantic flywheels? I mean, there are all sorts of ways to store energy, that seems just as good as any other. And that technology has been around for hundreds of years. basically perfected. So why haven't we ever done that? In the time of Edison, they could build huge flywheels. So why didn't they?
"Nuclear isn't a viable option because it's actually a kinda extremely pathological case here."
It's easier to change your mind than change the laws of physics. And Wyoming banned nuclear power right up till they didn't.
"You don't want to size your reactors to be at max power during the winter peak and running at less than that the rest of the year. That's exotically expensive."
No, that is completely incorrect.
I don't see why it's a problem to store wasted energy. The whole idea is, during the spring and fall, each day, the wind turbines and solar panels are oversized. There are countless kWh just wasted. This already happens every day in these seasons in California.
Your equipment would be sized to slowly run on otherwise wasted energy in the spring and fall, and some hours in the summer, storing kWh as hydrogen or methane or ammonia, in salt caverns if gas form. So the capacity of the equipment would be relatively small.
During the winter demand periods you either use caterpillar natural gas generators (possibly a version slightly modified for hydrogen or ammonia) - or fuel cells.
No one has optimized fuel cells or electrolysis and synthetic fuel carbon capture equipment in human history, it's only at best a side project.
You cannot store energy seasonally. You are wildly underestimating the cost of the energy, the cost of the storage, and the total loss of energy incurred. Transferring it seasonally would be ruinously expensive.
1% per day. That is how much energy a Tesla battery loses. So, in 3 months it will be 60% discharged. Minus around 15% going in and out of the battery. 75%-80 energy loss.
"There are countless kWh just wasted. This already happens every day in these seasons in California."
Yes, and... why? because the cost to store that energy vastly exceeds the value of the energy stored. You can't build any container for the energy - be it as a chemical, or in a battery, that is cost effective. Energy is born to be dissipated via entropy. Again, and I emphasize, this is a fundamental law of the universe.
As to the rest - lots of luck. It won't work, and we already know it won't work, because we have been trying to make it work for a century now.
How you are thinking now is a huge reason why the problem of climate change isn't being solved - we are spending a huge amount of time and energy implementing solutions that have no real chance of working due to basic physical laws. I agree completely - it seems like you should be able to solve the problem this way, but it only seems like it. People have been knocking on this door since James Maxwell.
It's like saying you could solve the problem of climate change by hooking all the exercise bikes in the world to the grid. That seems like it should work, but it won't. I can even come up some math showing how it would work. But it won't work.
LFP battery charge loss is 1 percent per month so if you used these for seasonal storage (yes including the Tesla ones) you would lose at most 11 percent before discharge.
Please don't make rants about the "laws of the universe" you don't understand. You do admit that when we burn fossil fuels we are consuming solar energy stored millions of years ago right?
The problem is hydrogen/ammonia makes no sense. There's a great explanation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE
I saw it and don't accept the conclusions. The video says it's 30-40 percent net efficient as if that makes it unviable.
It depends on your cost per watt of your energy source doesn't it.
Ammonia and hydrogen make perfect sense if hypothetically it's solar on desert land that is otherwise worthless, and the solar production cost per kWh is 1 cent.
By Swanson's law that is 20 years away. 2 cents is projected by 2030.
Colorado could hope to reach 30 percent of their energy from gas in 20 years. These things take time and recent political trends have added a few years to the timeline.
So 20 years from now the first hydrogen storage plants could begin construction.
I think there will always be cheaper alternatives. Like batteries.
We are talking about storing energy for the winter peak. So it's excess kWh stored the other 3 seasons used exactly once in the winter.
Batteries of the most stable available chemistries last 15-20 years. So with LFP cells at $50 a kWh storing energy for the winter peak that would be a cost of your MARR on the capital - about 10 percent - so $5 a kWh.
If hydrogen based fuel can be generated and stored and burned for less than $5 a kWh it's cheaper.
Also this kinda explains the default option - big cheap gas generators, with the caterpillar natural gas engine variant being the go-to choice.
I did a study in 2014. The average residential price for installation of solar cells was $3.48 per watt at that time. Of this the cost for the solar cell was a mere $0.72 (20% of the total cost). Therefore, even if solar cells were to suddenly become 20% cheaper, that would only be 20% of 20%, or 4% cheaper overall.
See the problem? You can keep cutting the cost of the solar cell, but it represents only a small fraction of the overall price of the project. Land, clearing labor, aluminum, glass, transmission - those are unaffected by the price of the cell.
See Lazards. Prices have continued to fall for installed utility level arrays.
Sure, prices have fallen, but the decrease is leveling out.
Read the footnotes of Lazards and see what they leave out.
There's unpriced advances though. Perovskite/silicon cells that collect 30 percent power power per panel for example add almost a straight 30 percent to the cost effectiveness for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Since the panel cost and the larger inverter cost to handle the extra energy is small, and the labor and land clearing and other costs are the same for the same size panels, that's a significant gain there.
You also have the near future possibility - certainly available by the time Colorados government decides what to do and funds anything - of either automated installation or more prefab. Solar array strings that come pre wired and unfold from flat packs in a shipping container are an obvious thing to do.