Energian varastoinnin näkymät

[Heikki Jokipii]

Aloitan näin uuden triidin esittämättä tai linkkaamatta mitään avauspuheenvuoroa.

Selvää kuitenkin on, että vääntö uusiutuvista kytkeytyy voimakkaasti siihen, miten pystymme jatkossa varastoimaan energiaa, jota yhä enemmän syntyy näistä vaihtelevista ja lähtökohtaisesti epävarmoista lähteistä.

Jaa, ehkäpä kuitenkin avaukseksi tämä arvio siitä, kuinka suurista energiamääristä olisi esim. Britanniassa kyse:

On the storage of renewable electricity

[Heikki Jokipii]

Ideologia puskee valitettavasti niihin arvioihinkin, paljonko sitä energiaa olisi varastoitava:

Home2021October25CCC’s Net Zero Plans Rely On Dramatic Rise In Windy Days

Suomenkin osalta tuollainen perusselvitys tarvittaisiin. Toisaalla mainitussa Sitran tuulivoimavisiossa se kysymys kyllä ohimennen mainittiin. Mutta asiaa ei ilmeisesti siinä kuitenkaan kovin perusteellisesti selvitetty.

[Heikki Jokipii]

Epäilemättä tässä keskustelussa kohtuullinen vaatimus:

What Solution Do Renewable Energy Advocates Offer For The Problem Of Storage?

So I say to these three commenters: it’s time to step up your game. Don’t just make unsupported assertions that wind and solar are cheaper. Give us a spreadsheet with a numerical demonstration of how much storage a fully wind/solar/storage electricity system for the U.S. will need, what technology will be used to provide it, and how much that will cost. Without that, you are just dealing in fantasy.

(lihav. HJ)

Saman vaatimuksen voi esittää EU:n ja Suomen osalta.

[Heikki Jokipii]

Hyvä ehdotus:

How About A Pilot Project To Demonstrate The Feasibility Of Fully Wind/Solar/Battery Electricity Generation?

Ja melko perusteellinen tarkastelu siitä, miten Kanarian saarilla on onnistuttu, kun siellä on jotain tuollaista jo tehty.

[Heikki Jokipii]

Jatkoa tähän keskusteluun:

More Focus On The Impossible Costs Of A Fully Wind/Solar/Battery Energy System

[Heikki Jokipii]

Siihen, olisiko täydellinen varastointisysteemi mahdollinen:

More Confirmation Of The Infeasibility Of A Fully Wind/Solar/Storage Electricity System

Many recent posts on this blog have dealt with the theme of the infeasibility of a fully wind/solar/storage electricity system. Today I will deal with another study of the subject, this one from German authors Oliver Ruhnau and Staffan Qvist, titled “Storage requirements in a 100% renewable electricity system: Extreme events and inter-annual variability.” The Ruhnau/Qvist study does not have a date other than “2021,” although it appears to have come out toward the end of that year.

Although Ruhnau and Qvist do not say it explicitly, my conclusion from their paper is that it is a further demonstration of the complete infeasibility — indeed the complete absurdity — of attempting in the short term to replace all fossil fuel electricity generation in a modern economy with only wind, solar and storage.

Vastaus tuohon lienee aina, että tekniikkahan kehittyy koko ajan?

[Heikki Jokipii]

Tilanne nyt:

Report On The Status Of The U.S. Energy Storage Project

But clearly the people committing us to these goals have to know that a fully wind/solar and fossil-fuel-free electricity future requires lots of energy storage. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that wind and solar produce nothing on a calm night. And indeed, if we look around at what our government is up to, we find considerable activity on the energy storage front. But there is an almost complete disconnect between, on the one hand, current efforts of small research grants and pilot programs to investigate which of various new technologies might work, and, on the other hand, a multi-hundred-trillion dollar total transformation of the entire energy economy that will supposedly be accomplished within the next 13 years using technology not yet invented let alone demonstrated at scale.

Voimme olettaa, ettei se EU:ssa ole tuota kummoisempi.

[Heikki Jokipii]

Lisää skeptisyyttä:

The New York Times Does Energy Storage

Ote siitä:

Aha! — It’s the usual Times resort to the famous un-named “experts.” None of these experts are either named or quoted in this piece. Nor is there any mention of such issues as how many gigawatt hours of storage might be needed to back up the U.S. grid if powered only by wind and sun (the calculation in the January 14 post came to about 250,000 GWHs), or of how much that might cost, or whether batteries that can do the job can be produced, or are technologically feasible, to store energy for months on end and discharge it over the course of more months. Instead, we learn, for example, about the travails of Jakob Bitner’s battery company, VoltStorage.

[Heikki Jokipii]

Mutta olisiko niin, että tässä raportissa ei kuitenkaan päästä vakuuttavasti optimistisiin johtopäätöksiin tai tuloksiin:

MIT Weighs in On Energy Storage

And then suddenly appeared in my inbox a couple of weeks ago a large Report with the title “The Future of Energy Storage: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study.” MIT — that’s America’s premier university for matters of science and technology. The Report is 378 pages long, full of lots of detail, charts and graphs, mathematical equations, and technical jargon. It lists as authors some 18 members of the MIT faculty. Surely, if anyone can address this “net zero” energy storage problem competently, these will be the people.

Sorry. This is a product of modern American academia. MIT is as extreme left as any of them.

Having now spent about a week trying to wade through this morass, I am not impressed. The Report is an exercise by genius would-be central planners concocting enormously complex models that just happen to come to the results that the authors are hoping for, while at the same time they avoid ever directly addressing the critical question, namely what is the plan to get through that worst case sun/wind drought. Implicit in every page of the Report is that it is an advocacy document for the proposition that the U.S. should embark full speed ahead on crash “net zero” plans for our multi-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars economy without ever doing any kind of demonstration project to show it can work on any scale no matter how small.

Vaikka yritystä siihen nähtävävästi kyllä on.

[Heikki Jokipii]

Artikkeli väittää olevan näin:

Hydrogen Is Unlikely Ever to Be a Viable Solution to The Energy Storage Conundrum

The summary of the answer is that hydrogen in the form of a free gas is much more expensive to produce than good old natural gas (aka methane or CH4), and once you have it, it is inferior in every respect to natural gas as a fuel for running the energy system (other than the issue of carbon emissions, if you think those are a problem). Hydrogen is far more difficult and costly than natural gas to transport, to store and to handle. It is much more dangerous and subject to exploding. It is much less dense by volume, which makes it particularly less useful for transportation applications like cars and airplanes.