By Paul Homewood
AEP makes a fool of himself yet again, with a naive article about energy storage that would Jillian Ambrose might have written!
It is paywalled, so the DT won’t let me publish in full, but I have summarised the gist:
The curse of intermittency for wind and solar power may be conquered sooner than almost anybody thought possible. A beautifully-simple technology from a British start-up has slashed costs to levels that drastically alter the calculus of long-term energy storage.
Highview Power is pioneering the use of "cryogenic" liquid air to store electricity for long enough periods to cover the lulls in renewable energy.
It appears close to doing so at levelized costs that will undercut competition from fossil fuel plants once scale is reached. Highview will almost certainly be the biggest company of its kind in the world by the early 2020s.
If it can deliver the full promise – big caveat – the cost break-through overcomes a key barrier for a future global economy driven primarily by zero-carbon energy. One oft-repeated argument against Britain’s North Sea wind expansion falls away.
As was the case with Silly Jilly, AEP totally fails to comprehend just how much storage is needed to cover the intermittency of wind and solar power.
Battery and other forms of storage are fine for providing power for an hour or two, but the natural intermittency of wind power would require many days worth, if not more. As for solar, where you would need to store all of the summer output, when demand is low, to use in winter, storage is a non starter.
I have analysed wind output in January 2019, which was not an untypical winter month. During the month, wind output averaged 5468 MW, which was 15% of total generation, again not untypical.
There were, as you can see, very large variations within the month.
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main
The longest consecutive period below the monthly average was from the 1st to the 7th of the month, a period of 133 hours.
The cumulative shortfall in output during this period, in relation to the monthly average, was 417813 MWh. This equates to 76 hours of wind generation at average output.
During this period, wind output averaged 2322 MW, or 42% of the average.
In other words, you would to store three days’ worth of wind power, just to cover January’s weather. There have been many occasions in the past when cold, anticyclonic weather has lasted for much longer than five days, and certainly been a lot more intense.
Realistically, you would need to plan for this sort of shortfall extending for a month at least.
To put these numbers into perspective, Tesla’s oft-quoted battery in S Australia is rated at 129 MWH. You would need 3240 of these to store 417813 MWh.
As for costs, the recently approved 50 MW / 32 MWh battery project at Whitelee wind farm is costing £20m. You would need 13056 of these to store 417813 MWh, giving a cost of £261 billion!
No matter how efficient Highview Power’s new system is, it is still going to run into the same problems of scale. Their pilot plant is only 15 MW.
As Jillian Ambrose before him, AEP totally confuses the role of small scale peakers, with which he compares this new system. Peakers, such as small gas and diesel engines, are not designed to cope with the intermittency of renewables, as he wrongly claims. They are there, as they always have been to manage spikes in demand.
During January 2019, OCGT for instance only averaged 5 MW, 0.01% of demand.
AEP claims cryogenic liquid air appears close to doing so at levelized costs that will undercut competition from fossil fuel plants once scale is reached.
This is a grossly misleading statement, as he is comparing with peakers, and not large scale CCGT plant, as he goes on to report:
Mr Cavada said the levelized costs for a one gigawatt (GW) plant comes in “way below” $100 per MWh. This is already cheaper than any other back-up option on the market, fossil or not. “In ten years from now, I can see that being $50.”
These are remarkable figures. Lazard estimates the levelized costs for gas peaker plants at $152-$206, new pumped-hydro at $152-$198, or a lithium-ion equivalent at $285-$581. Lithium batteries are superb for a few hours but the economics are not viable for utility power over long periods.
Mr Cavada, Highview’s CEO, also notes that the process loses two fifths of the energy input:
Mr Cavada said the "round trip" efficiency of the Highview process so far is 60pc (ie two fifths is lost).
Does not sound very efficient to me! AEP’s logic is that there will be lots of “free” electricity available, which will help make the process viable:
The official Committee on Climate Change wants to go for broke with 75GW of offshore wind to meet the UK’s Net-zero 2050 target. Such scale means a wash of surplus power in the middle of the night or at times of low demand.
This implies "free" or ultra-cheap electricity for energy storage, since otherwise it would have to be curtailed by shutting down turbines – “off-peak waste electricity” in the trade jargon. The UK plans makes cryogenic liquid air almost unbeatable.
However, if wind farms have to give away half of their power free, that will simply double the cost of the rest. This makes a nonsense of regular claims about how cheap wind power now is .
The new cryogenic system may be cheaper than OCGT and batteries, but will do nothing to solve the problem of wind power intermittency.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
August 27, 2019 at 09:48AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.press.
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