NOAA Model Finds Renewable Energy Could be Deployed in the U.S. Without Storage

[kristopher]

Regulars to DUEE might recognize that this NOAA study is an expansion of the work Kempton did in the PJM Interconnect. For those that don't, I've added it as the second excerpt.

NOAA Model Finds Renewable Energy Could be Deployed in the U.S. Without Storage

By Monica Heger
Posted 25 Jan 2016 | 16:30 GMT

The majority of the United States's electricity needs could be met with renewable energy by 2030—without new advances in energy storage or cost increases. That’s the finding of a new study conducted by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The key will be having sufficient transmission lines spanning the contiguous U.S., so that energy can be deployed from where it’s generated to the places where its needed.

Reporting their results today in Nature Climate Change, the researchers found that a combination of solar and wind energy, plus high-voltage direct current transmission lines that travel across the country, would reduce the electric sector's carbon dioxide emissions by up to 80 percent compared to 1990 levels.

Conventional thinking around renewable energy has been that it is too variable to be broadly implemented without either fossil fuels to fill in the gaps or a significant ability to store surplus energy, says Sandy MacDonald, co-lead author of the paper and previously the director of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory. However, MacDonald thought that previous estimates had not used accurate weather data and so he wanted to design a model based on more precise and higher resolution weather data.

In the study, the team used historical and projected carbon dioxide emission and electricity cost data from the International Energy Agency, which projects that U.S. electricity will cost 11.5 cents per kilowatt hour, on average, in 2030, and that carbon dioxide emissions will be 6 percent above 1990 levels.

They designed a model called National Electricity with Weather System that took into consideration demand across one-hour time increments as well as generation capability. The main constraint of the model was that it had to use existing technologies...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/noaa-model-finds-renewable-energy-could-be-deployed-in-the-us-cost-effectively-without-storage-to-cut-carbon-emissions


From 2012

Cost-minimized combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of the time

abstract
We model many combinations of renewable electricity sources (inland wind, offshore wind, and photovoltaics) with electrochemical storage (batteries and fuel cells), incorporated into a large grid system (72 GW).
The purpose is twofold:
1) although a single renewable generator at one site produces intermittent power, we seek combinations of diverse renewables at diverse sites, with storage, that are not intermittent and satisfy need a given fraction of hours. And
2) we seek minimal cost, calculating true cost of electricity without subsidies and with inclusion of external costs.

Our model evaluated over 28 billion combinations of renewables and storage, each tested over 35,040 h (four years) of load and weather data. We nd that the least cost solutions yield seemingly-excessive generation capacity - at times, almost three times the electricity needed to meet electrical load. This is because diverse renewable generation and the excess capacity together meet electric load with less storage, lowering total system cost.

At 2030 technology costs and with excess electricity displacing natural gas, we nd that the electric system can be powered 90%e99.9% of hours entirely on renewable electricity, at costs compa- rable to today’sdbut only if we optimize the mix of generation and storage technologies.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2012.09.054

[LiberalArkie]

1. high-voltage direct current transmission lines?

[Sinistrous]

2. Yeah. Me too.

I thought that long distance direct current transmission incurred enormous losses, due simply to the resistance of the lines.

[LiberalArkie]

3. I think the loss plays into it no matter whether it is AC or DC, but with AC you can hit a

substation and with a transformer you can bump it back up to transmission voltage. Not with DC. We liked 48volt DC in telco offices and data centers as it was more efficient to step down to 15vdc, 12vdc and 5vdc. The buses were big to hold down the loss at 48VDC. DC is what killed the Edison system as it was too lossy to send very far.

[hunter]

5. AC has much higher losses than very high voltage DC lines.

Capacitive and inductive losses become very significant in AC power lines past a thousand kilometers above ground, within a few kilometers underwater or underground. Maintaining phase relationships across the network becomes extremely complicated too.

Europe has quite a few underwater HVDC links



The Pacific DC Intertie linking the Bonneville Power Administration's grid to Los Angeles was opened in 1970.

It's a well established technology.

[NNadir]

4. For the last 50 years, very few references to the expensive, failed and useless...

...so called "renewable energy" scam fail to contain the conditional word "could."

It's of no interest to any defender of this trillion dollar scale waste of money, but here is what is happening as a result of 50 years of "renewable energy could" statements:



So called "renewable energy" is not renewable; it's not sustainable; it's not clean. This much is beginning to sink in, even as we continue to squander these trillions for no result:

Numerous wind turbines, solar power stations and other facilities will need to be constructed if a significant proportion of global electricity is to be produced sustainably. Building these facilities will require vast amounts of metals and other raw materials, which will then be sequestered for several decades and cannot immediately be recycled. Easily mined ore deposits are quickly declining and although new resources will be found in the deep subsurface or in remote locations, mining these deposits will consume large amounts of energy. Humankind faces a vicious circle: a shift to renewable energy will replace one non-renewable resource (fossil fuel) with another (metals and minerals).

Source: Nature Geoscience 6, 894–896 (2013)

As it happens, many of the these minerals and metals, notably cadmium and arsenic but including others um, are, well known dangerous poisons.

One can call up thousands upon thousands of "modeling" exercises but one cannot point to 5 of the 560 exajoules of energy consumed by humanity each year being produced by solar and wind; this after a half century of statements about what so called renewable energy "could" do, tens of thousands of them written right here, at Democratic Underground, and millions, if not billions of them published elsewhere, often on computers powered by electricity produced from coal and gas.

I will tell you not what the "renewable energy will save us" fantasy could do. I will tell you what it is doing. It's being fostered on humanity as a dangerous fad that will make us totally and completely dependent on dangerous fossil fuels until the last molecule of carbon dioxide that can be squeezed into the atmosphere is squeezed into the atmosphere, while 7 million people die each year from air pollution while anti-nukes run around complaining about an atom of fukushima cesium in a tuna fish.

Have a nice evening.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

9. What about the giggle jewels

i liked them more than the x's - oh

[hunter]

6. Frankly the biggest fans of an improved national grid...

... are cheap and dirty coal utilities that wish to export electricity to states with cleaner, more expensive power.

I think people should have to live next to their power provider.

I think large scale desert solar developments are despicable.

[kristopher]

7. Well aren't you precious.

Bless you and your lil ol' bitty heart.

[hunter]

8. I'll oppose power importation into California so long as there are coal fired plants...

... in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, etc...

The coal industry is using wind and solar supporters as witless (but well-meaning) stooges.

[kristopher]

10. You are the precious darlin', aren't you?

But bless your little ol' bitty pea-picking heart anyway.

[hunter]

20. I'm not your opponent. The same folks who shut down solar in Nevada are...

Sunny Nevada is killing the solar industry in the state with new net-metering rules

To drive out solar power companies out of sunny Nevada, you have to do something pretty bad. This is exactly what happened while most of us weren't paying attention, enjoying the holidays (or stressing out, depending...). The Nevada Public Utility Commission (PUC) changed its rules surrounding net metering and increased fees charged to the owners of solar systems (who said the sun was free?):

"The base service charge is rising from $12.75 to $17.90 per month [a 40% increase] for southern Nevada solar customers and from $15.25 to $21.09 [a 38.2% increase] for northern Nevada customers. The changes also reduce the amount the utility pays to buy power back from rooftop solar panels, from 11 cents a kilowatt hour to 9 cents [an 18.2% decrease] in southern Nevada and from 12 cents to 10.5 cents [a 12.5% decrease] in the north. The service charge will rise and the reimbursement will drop every year until 2020." (source)

--more--

http://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/sunny-nevada-killing-solar-industry-state-new-net-metering-rules.html

I know it's possible to make a good living as an "environmentalist" working for the fossil fuel industry, but the fossil fuel industry is never a "friend" of the environment, whatever their advertisements say or whatever grants and consulting work they happen to be handing out.

Personally, I've never aspired to environmental triage or damage control, my experiences with medical sorts of triage have been harrowing enough, thank you. I don't want to be deciding which undeveloped landscapes its preferable to destroy with further solar, wind, or fossil fuel development. I say none. We ought to be un-developing places, restoring damaged and unsustainable developed lands to some sort of wilderness status.

Perhaps you'll pardon me if I see the expansion of grid capacity as the same sort of process by which an aggressive cancer increases blood circulation to itself.

When the fossil fuel industry is mortally wounded, maybe then we can talk about Buckminster Fuller scale international electric grids.



Whenever I do the math, these large scale electric power grids are undesirable, whatever the source of power is. They are especially loathsome when a major source of power is fossil fuels.

[kristopher]

27. California has a law against importing coal power

The companies that had contracts when the law was passed are grandfathered. No new contracts are allowed and the grandfathered contracts must end not later than 2026. If a grandfathered contract is terminated early for other reasons, such as the out of state coal plant shutting down, the permission given to the holder of the contract is rescinded and the holder of the contract cannot substitute power from another coal plant.

I don't see you as an opponent; just confused about a few things.

[hunter]

28. Confused?

Seriously?

About what?

Let's see: I despise development of undeveloped land, I despise fossil fuels, I despise automobile culture.

So I read an article that compares a national HVDC system to the Interstate Highway System, and wow, I should jump on your bandwagon?



From my perspective the article of your original post is three misses in three pitches and out. The ball didn't even touch the bat.

No confusion at all.

[kristopher]

29. Well aren't you precious.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112796343#post8

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. Large scale desert solar developments are where the energy's at

and, being in the desert, they're where people don't want to be, because of the lack of water.

If you insist power has to be generated close to use, then you'll need a lot more area covered in solar panels to get something when an area has low wind, and more storage (because it might also be cloudy).

[kristopher]

12. Did you look at the second study?

What you say is 'sort of' accurate, but I believe your perceptions of the scale of the obstacles has them being greater than they are.

In particular, storage when deployed is a lot different that what people generally have in mind. Why? Because usually their mental model is trapped by the way our lives revolve around the performance of a centralized grid. For example, when it's all said and done, most energy storage will almost certainly be in EVs and end use user heating/cooling systems.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Yes, but that study include offshore wind for high coverage

which at best only counts as 'next to where people live' for those on the coast. For anyone inland, you'd need a decent power grid to use that.

[kristopher]

14. i don't understand your remark.

Yes the area includes offshore wind resources but I dont see how that's particularly relevant to the point of distributed vs centralized infrastructure and storage not being as important as most people think.

The study shows that the distribution of infrastructure, even involving sub-optimal resources, is a viable strategy for both smoothing out variability and reducing costs.

The offshore wind is helpful, but it's benefits need to be evaluated in terms of its higher costs and the degree of population density that exists along the midAtlantic coast.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. The offshore wind is a vital part of that solution, and it's centralized

It has to be, since only a large entity can build and maintain offshore generators. The solution works because it uses capacity well above the average power needed, and distributes the power from areas working near their capacity at a given time to those that aren't.

[kristopher]

16. I think you've miscast the significance of offshore wind

It isn't an irreplaceable element. It is simply one more asset in the roster. If the same terrestrial resources extended to the east of what is the coast, the solution would still work just fine, but the cost factor would slide. That can be said with a pretty fair degree of confidence because of the national findings by NOAA.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. But you can't point to a study that uses offshore wind AND a large scale grid

and then say "everything adds up in that study, so we don't need offshore wind OR a large scale grid" - which is what hunter's "everyone should live next to their power generation" would mean.

[kristopher]

18. Define "large scale grid"

A highly redundant intra-regional distribution system is a different animal than a trunk system for inter-regional transmission of large blocks of power. Both have their advantages and their problems, but my personal opinion is that the system which will eventually service most of the people in the world will tend strongly towards local production and consumption.

YMMV

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. The "large regional grid" in that paper stretches from Illinois to North Carolina (nt)

[FBaggins]

21. The size of the grid in that "study" is irrelevant

Because the study ignores grid loss... and cost. It also doesn't even try to model below the 1hr timeframe (either for demand or generation). Additionally... they seemed to think that meeting demand 99%-99.9% of the time was good performance -where that would be unacceptable performance in the real world (in the first world anyway) - and almost entirely ignored basic economics (while pretending to be conservative in their assumptions)

If the first study mentioned in the OP truly is similar, than it can safely be ignored.

[kristopher]

25. The study doesn't require grid loss or grid cost to be addressed.

They are presently separate from pricing the input power and there is no reason to think that the costs would significantly different.

The purpose of the study was to examine the way real time demand and real time production by renewables would work together. The 4 years of real world data used shows conclusively that both nuclear power and fossil fuelsl are not required AT ALL. There are obviously engineering challenges that remain in developing a renewable energy infrastructure, but the I'm certain that the remaining renewable resources (biofuels/hydro/geothermal) are quite capable of providing the performance characteristics to enable a grid more reliable than what we have now.
Also, from what I see with Flamanville, Hinkley, and, well, the entire history of nuclear power, the scale of the challenges to achieve a renewable grid are far, far smaller than those of bringing in on-time and on-budget even a single nuclear plant.

[kristopher]

22. Muriel - That was rhetorical

The body of the post was an explanation.

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. You said the body was just your opinion

So I thought your title was what you wanted an answer for.

[kristopher]

26. Yes, sorry about that.