Here's how I think of the difference between dispatchable and intermittent sources of energy. Imagine you are running a convenience store, and you have two kinds of employee. One shows up on time and works an entire shift 99% of the time. The other shows up whenever he feels like it and leaves whenever he feels like leaving. He comes and goes as he pleases. Which employee is worth more? And why would you even want the unreliable kind, since you need the reliable kind always on standby anyway?
It's an engaging analogy, but devotees of the intermittent will point out that it is possible to store energy in a way you cannot store retail clerk services. The problem is they blind themselves to how expensive grid level storage is.
Yes, and the other thing they blind themselves to is the cost, both economic and environmental, of obtaining all that lithium, cobalt, and whatever else is needed to produce all those batteries.
I've often wondered how renewable so-called "renewables" really are. Advanced solar on a large scale requires massive amounts of rare earth minerals and other materials that may be in short supply and/or controlled by China. Those minerals are also critical for computers and smart phones. What happens when we run out of that stuff, or when the cost becomes exorbitant? I'd love to see that issue addressed.
My sense is that none but the most deluded are still pushing batteries for grid level storage. Green hydrogen is far better than batteries despite the putrid round trip efficiency. see
It's fun but there is no point bashing intermittents unless we can provide economic nuclear. Right now that most certainly is not the case in the West. This is where our focus most be.
Yes, and I really appreciate your explanations of the bureaucratic reasons why nuclear power is now so expensive -- even though it was originally cheap. That message really needs to get through to the general public.
The deeper problem here is that people like you are "preaching to the choir." In the end, there is no hope for a nuclear revival until we figure out how to bypass the corrupt mainstream media and get basic information directly to a majority of the general public.
Are you familiar with PragerU.com? I think they are making good progress on that front. They have hundreds of great little five-minute videos on all sorts of topics, including energy and nuclear power. For example, take a look at
Your slides are excellent. I see three that I could use right away: Energy Subsidies, Selective Optimism, and Neutrons Transmute Fertile to Fissile. We could use a good article, with updated figures on Energy Subsidies.
Anyone who has ever contemplated building an off-grid home has a pretty good idea just how expensive electricity storage is. There's also a rational limit to how many days worth of storage it make sense to purchase and install, because batteries have a limited life; 10-15 years if you're lucky, after which you'll be replacing them. And even if you're willing to install several days worth of storage at great cost, mother nature is is likely to throw curve balls at you. Once in a while, there will be cloudy or wind-free periods that exceed your storage capacity, meaning you still need that dispachable generator as a back-up.
I looked at an off-grid home that was for sale a few years ago. It had the most incredible view I have ever seen -- the Monterey Bay on the horizon, 10 miles away, with ridges of mountains and canyons in between. The maintenance of my own power system was a huge concern, but I never got around to thinking about it much. The bigger concern for me was the treacherous access roads -- long winding one-lane dirt roads that had sections with huge dropoffs. If someone is coming the other way, someone has to backup a long ways, while avoiding going over the edge. And imagine doing that on a rainy night! No thanks!
Hah -- With drop-offs I'd definitely stay home on rainy nights!
FWIW, I have a place high in the Blue Ridge. Getting to it involves several miles of winding, single-lane dirt roads in the mountains, but no drop-offs. It actually feels safer at night because on the rare occasions when there's a vehicle coming the other way, you see the light from its headlights well before you'd see the vehicle itself in daylight around the blind curves and such. That place is not off-grid, but ice storms have produced long power outages at times. It now has highly dispatchable 24 kW Kohler generator to deal with such intermittency.
I don't think you're using the word 'grid' properly here. A 'grid' consists of the power plants, plus all the transmission and distribution infrastructure needed to get the electricity those plants produce to its point of use (step-up transformers, transmission lines, sub-stations, distribution lines, and finally transformers close to the end-user). I'm confident that Germany does not have separate grids for its intermittent power vs. its dispatchable power. All their power plants are part of the same grid, regardless whether they are intermittent or dispachable.
Of course none of the above pedantry on my part contradicts the point you're trying to make: That all intermittent plants need backup of some sort, and keeping such backup available is intrinsically very expensive. And given the fact that Germany's intermittent plants have more than double the nameplate capacity of Germany's average demand strongly implies that it's cheaper to keep dispachable plants available on stand-by and feed them the expensive fuel that they need to operate than it is to store excess intermittent power when it's available.
But there is a sense in which my horribly sloppy usage is not totally misleading. The intermittents have another more minor but still expensive problem: they are location dependent. In teh case of Germany, the wind is in the north and what little sun they have is in the south. So the plans is to add 12,000 km of HVDC lines to the existing 35,000 km high voltage. Guessing something like 50 billion USD. In a rational world, the Germans could have twenty 1GW nuclear plants for that money.
Since I wrote this, the four big German transmission utilities have come out with their plan. It calls for 5,742 km of on-shore lines and 8,455 km of offshore at a total cost of 128 billion euros or about 137 billion USD. My cost guess was off by almost a factor of 3.
In North America we have approximately 2 months of average use storage of natural gas. And broadly similar for coal and oil.
This should be the default assumption for any fully electrified temperate climate system, and the onus is on those that argue that we need less to prove it. This is not to say 2 months of battery - that would be Musk level of crazy (yes, he did say battery only), but some combination of types of stored energy.
Two months is probably excessive in most situations. Germany is subject to dunkelflauten. But when we ran wind/solar/H2 only for Germany under the tight restriction of meeting the demand in every hour for a 16 year period, we came up with 30 days of storage. Ruhnau and Qvist using slightly different assumptions came up with 24 days of average demand.
And be careful of mixing gas with oil/coal/nuclear when it comes to storage. My understanding is most stored gas is prioritized to heating and most gas plants run just-in-time. I f something screws up in the production or transmission system, things go dark. See Uri. If I were king of the world, every gas plant would be dual fueled and be required to havea couple of weeks of oil on site. (So would every H2 fueled plant.)
I'm including electrified heating in my comment for exactly that reason. As well as industrial precursors, etc. Dual fuel oil storage would also count to this quality.
And 30 days, while less than my "prove it if less than 2 months" statement is not THAT much less. You have some analysis behind it, and it's in the same order of magnitude.
We have serious (in the sense they are taken seriously) modelers claiming 5 or 10 hours is all we need.
The difference is to get weeks of storage, you have to consider realistic tech like stored fuels, low grade thermal, etc.
I did not include nuclear in that inventory, not because it doesn't have significant stored fuel, but because it stores it for reasons of the plant design, not due to the need to hedge stockpile against seasonal demands.
And that 2 months is the storage capacity. It typically only fills to ~80%, and aim to not go below ~20%.
So the actual used value is even closer to your number but for contingency and operability reasons the installed capacity needs to be high (and the cost accounted for in models).
Nice analogy. Climate catastrophisers will glaze over though and simply move on. But it's those who are undecided who need to here it. Another example I've used is, like comparing a tent with a house. Tents provide some basic living space but do an almost entirely different thing to houses.
Here's how I think of the difference between dispatchable and intermittent sources of energy. Imagine you are running a convenience store, and you have two kinds of employee. One shows up on time and works an entire shift 99% of the time. The other shows up whenever he feels like it and leaves whenever he feels like leaving. He comes and goes as he pleases. Which employee is worth more? And why would you even want the unreliable kind, since you need the reliable kind always on standby anyway?
Russ,
It's an engaging analogy, but devotees of the intermittent will point out that it is possible to store energy in a way you cannot store retail clerk services. The problem is they blind themselves to how expensive grid level storage is.
Yes, and the other thing they blind themselves to is the cost, both economic and environmental, of obtaining all that lithium, cobalt, and whatever else is needed to produce all those batteries.
I've often wondered how renewable so-called "renewables" really are. Advanced solar on a large scale requires massive amounts of rare earth minerals and other materials that may be in short supply and/or controlled by China. Those minerals are also critical for computers and smart phones. What happens when we run out of that stuff, or when the cost becomes exorbitant? I'd love to see that issue addressed.
Russ,
My sense is that none but the most deluded are still pushing batteries for grid level storage. Green hydrogen is far better than batteries despite the putrid round trip efficiency. see
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-and-windsolar
But green H2 is still atrociously expensive.
It's fun but there is no point bashing intermittents unless we can provide economic nuclear. Right now that most certainly is not the case in the West. This is where our focus most be.
Yes, and I really appreciate your explanations of the bureaucratic reasons why nuclear power is now so expensive -- even though it was originally cheap. That message really needs to get through to the general public.
The deeper problem here is that people like you are "preaching to the choir." In the end, there is no hope for a nuclear revival until we figure out how to bypass the corrupt mainstream media and get basic information directly to a majority of the general public.
Are you familiar with PragerU.com? I think they are making good progress on that front. They have hundreds of great little five-minute videos on all sorts of topics, including energy and nuclear power. For example, take a look at
https://www.prageru.com/video/abundant-clean-and-safe
Your slides are excellent. I see three that I could use right away: Energy Subsidies, Selective Optimism, and Neutrons Transmute Fertile to Fissile. We could use a good article, with updated figures on Energy Subsidies.
And there's this too: https://www.nuclearnowfilm.com/home#about Who would have ever predicted that Oliver Stone would be a voice for reason?
Anyone who has ever contemplated building an off-grid home has a pretty good idea just how expensive electricity storage is. There's also a rational limit to how many days worth of storage it make sense to purchase and install, because batteries have a limited life; 10-15 years if you're lucky, after which you'll be replacing them. And even if you're willing to install several days worth of storage at great cost, mother nature is is likely to throw curve balls at you. Once in a while, there will be cloudy or wind-free periods that exceed your storage capacity, meaning you still need that dispachable generator as a back-up.
I looked at an off-grid home that was for sale a few years ago. It had the most incredible view I have ever seen -- the Monterey Bay on the horizon, 10 miles away, with ridges of mountains and canyons in between. The maintenance of my own power system was a huge concern, but I never got around to thinking about it much. The bigger concern for me was the treacherous access roads -- long winding one-lane dirt roads that had sections with huge dropoffs. If someone is coming the other way, someone has to backup a long ways, while avoiding going over the edge. And imagine doing that on a rainy night! No thanks!
Hah -- With drop-offs I'd definitely stay home on rainy nights!
FWIW, I have a place high in the Blue Ridge. Getting to it involves several miles of winding, single-lane dirt roads in the mountains, but no drop-offs. It actually feels safer at night because on the rare occasions when there's a vehicle coming the other way, you see the light from its headlights well before you'd see the vehicle itself in daylight around the blind curves and such. That place is not off-grid, but ice storms have produced long power outages at times. It now has highly dispatchable 24 kW Kohler generator to deal with such intermittency.
"To support these two grids..."
I don't think you're using the word 'grid' properly here. A 'grid' consists of the power plants, plus all the transmission and distribution infrastructure needed to get the electricity those plants produce to its point of use (step-up transformers, transmission lines, sub-stations, distribution lines, and finally transformers close to the end-user). I'm confident that Germany does not have separate grids for its intermittent power vs. its dispatchable power. All their power plants are part of the same grid, regardless whether they are intermittent or dispachable.
Of course none of the above pedantry on my part contradicts the point you're trying to make: That all intermittent plants need backup of some sort, and keeping such backup available is intrinsically very expensive. And given the fact that Germany's intermittent plants have more than double the nameplate capacity of Germany's average demand strongly implies that it's cheaper to keep dispachable plants available on stand-by and feed them the expensive fuel that they need to operate than it is to store excess intermittent power when it's available.
Guilty as charged. Mea culpa.
But there is a sense in which my horribly sloppy usage is not totally misleading. The intermittents have another more minor but still expensive problem: they are location dependent. In teh case of Germany, the wind is in the north and what little sun they have is in the south. So the plans is to add 12,000 km of HVDC lines to the existing 35,000 km high voltage. Guessing something like 50 billion USD. In a rational world, the Germans could have twenty 1GW nuclear plants for that money.
Since I wrote this, the four big German transmission utilities have come out with their plan. It calls for 5,742 km of on-shore lines and 8,455 km of offshore at a total cost of 128 billion euros or about 137 billion USD. My cost guess was off by almost a factor of 3.
In North America we have approximately 2 months of average use storage of natural gas. And broadly similar for coal and oil.
This should be the default assumption for any fully electrified temperate climate system, and the onus is on those that argue that we need less to prove it. This is not to say 2 months of battery - that would be Musk level of crazy (yes, he did say battery only), but some combination of types of stored energy.
Jesse,
Two months is probably excessive in most situations. Germany is subject to dunkelflauten. But when we ran wind/solar/H2 only for Germany under the tight restriction of meeting the demand in every hour for a 16 year period, we came up with 30 days of storage. Ruhnau and Qvist using slightly different assumptions came up with 24 days of average demand.
And be careful of mixing gas with oil/coal/nuclear when it comes to storage. My understanding is most stored gas is prioritized to heating and most gas plants run just-in-time. I f something screws up in the production or transmission system, things go dark. See Uri. If I were king of the world, every gas plant would be dual fueled and be required to havea couple of weeks of oil on site. (So would every H2 fueled plant.)
I'm including electrified heating in my comment for exactly that reason. As well as industrial precursors, etc. Dual fuel oil storage would also count to this quality.
And 30 days, while less than my "prove it if less than 2 months" statement is not THAT much less. You have some analysis behind it, and it's in the same order of magnitude.
We have serious (in the sense they are taken seriously) modelers claiming 5 or 10 hours is all we need.
The difference is to get weeks of storage, you have to consider realistic tech like stored fuels, low grade thermal, etc.
I did not include nuclear in that inventory, not because it doesn't have significant stored fuel, but because it stores it for reasons of the plant design, not due to the need to hedge stockpile against seasonal demands.
And that 2 months is the storage capacity. It typically only fills to ~80%, and aim to not go below ~20%.
So the actual used value is even closer to your number but for contingency and operability reasons the installed capacity needs to be high (and the cost accounted for in models).
Here’s my take
Fuel is stored energy
Wind and solar are not fuel
Go figure it out from there !
That rain / cistern / water-well metaphor is excellent.
How about extending it to cistern pressure is low; so you'll need a pump anyway to get the water to the upstairs bathtub.
Sort of like battery voltage is low and dc, so you'll need an ac inverter to boost it up to 240 V.
Nice analogy. Climate catastrophisers will glaze over though and simply move on. But it's those who are undecided who need to here it. Another example I've used is, like comparing a tent with a house. Tents provide some basic living space but do an almost entirely different thing to houses.