Interesting analysis Jack. Curious to know what you make of a country like New Zealand using this lens. We already have over 70% renewables in our annual electricity supply mix, mostly large hydro. If that can act as a backup battery to even out intermittency, how much peaking power is really needed?
Could a few percentage points of larger industrial user curtailment agreements give enough back to cover that? Can curtailment be quick enough response to act as a peaking supply..? What about grid scale batteries?
Hydro can be an excellent source of peaking power. It just so happens that Germany's very limited hydro does not have a lot of flexibility. So for Germany we fixed the hydro capacity at its current level, and to save space I did not show that capacity in the bar chart. Maybe a mistake.
If we ran the model on New Zealand, with whatever social cost of CO2 the Kiwis decide is appropriate, we will come up with a different optimal grid. It's conceivable that grid would not use any fossil. The point is you don't decide on the grid makeup before running the numbers. You run the numbers to find out what your grid should look like.
How do the numbers look like if we look at concentrated solar power which, once heated, keeps on producing power during the night or maybe through a cloudy patch of time?
I don't have any more knowledge other than what's listed in the wikipedia page, but was hoping you would know :) There it says:
In 2021, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated the cost of electricity from concentrated solar with 10 hours of storage at $0.076 per kWh in 2021, $0.056 per kWh in 2030, and $0.052 per kWh in 2050.[2]
As of 2020, the least expensive utility-scale concentrated solar power stations in the United States and worldwide are five times more expensive than utility-scale photovoltaic power stations, with a projected minimum price of 7 cents per kilowatt-hour for the most advanced CSP stations against record lows of 1.32 cents per kWh[85] for utility-scale PV.[86] This five-fold price difference has been maintained since 2018.[87] Some PV-CSP plants in China have sought to operate profitably on the regional coal tariff of 5 US cents per kWh in 2021.[88]
I have no idea about the CO2 footprint though, without that it's impossible to compare the CO2 budget for it and if it has any edge against PV.
I looked at CSP briefly and decided it was so unpromising, it wasn't worth trying to come up with all the numbers the GKG model needs, which include not only separating generation and storage costs (the model optimizes those separately),
but also separating the fixed CO2 and variable CO2 for both generation and storage. For a technology like CSP, we are talking over 20 parameters. See
Any model that does not separate fixed CO2 from variable CO2 (which is just about all of them) is practically guaranteed to come up with misleading results.
The Flop book website can be slow. Give it some time to display the manual.
Interesting analysis Jack. Curious to know what you make of a country like New Zealand using this lens. We already have over 70% renewables in our annual electricity supply mix, mostly large hydro. If that can act as a backup battery to even out intermittency, how much peaking power is really needed?
Could a few percentage points of larger industrial user curtailment agreements give enough back to cover that? Can curtailment be quick enough response to act as a peaking supply..? What about grid scale batteries?
Nathan,
Hydro can be an excellent source of peaking power. It just so happens that Germany's very limited hydro does not have a lot of flexibility. So for Germany we fixed the hydro capacity at its current level, and to save space I did not show that capacity in the bar chart. Maybe a mistake.
If we ran the model on New Zealand, with whatever social cost of CO2 the Kiwis decide is appropriate, we will come up with a different optimal grid. It's conceivable that grid would not use any fossil. The point is you don't decide on the grid makeup before running the numbers. You run the numbers to find out what your grid should look like.
How do the numbers look like if we look at concentrated solar power which, once heated, keeps on producing power during the night or maybe through a cloudy patch of time?
E
The model is quite flexible. CSP is a combination of solar and storage. If somebody has cost figures, we can run it.
I don't have any more knowledge other than what's listed in the wikipedia page, but was hoping you would know :) There it says:
In 2021, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated the cost of electricity from concentrated solar with 10 hours of storage at $0.076 per kWh in 2021, $0.056 per kWh in 2030, and $0.052 per kWh in 2050.[2]
As of 2020, the least expensive utility-scale concentrated solar power stations in the United States and worldwide are five times more expensive than utility-scale photovoltaic power stations, with a projected minimum price of 7 cents per kilowatt-hour for the most advanced CSP stations against record lows of 1.32 cents per kWh[85] for utility-scale PV.[86] This five-fold price difference has been maintained since 2018.[87] Some PV-CSP plants in China have sought to operate profitably on the regional coal tariff of 5 US cents per kWh in 2021.[88]
I have no idea about the CO2 footprint though, without that it's impossible to compare the CO2 budget for it and if it has any edge against PV.
I looked at CSP briefly and decided it was so unpromising, it wasn't worth trying to come up with all the numbers the GKG model needs, which include not only separating generation and storage costs (the model optimizes those separately),
but also separating the fixed CO2 and variable CO2 for both generation and storage. For a technology like CSP, we are talking over 20 parameters. See
https://gordianknotbook.com/download/the-gkg-grid-model for the details.
Any model that does not separate fixed CO2 from variable CO2 (which is just about all of them) is practically guaranteed to come up with misleading results.
The Flop book website can be slow. Give it some time to display the manual.