The video above is a discussion of the potential advantages the US still has in the renewable energy manufacturing sector.
Below, an example from a global leader.
Renewable electricity records are falling every day. In early October, Germany recently hit a 59 percent renewable peak, Colorado utility Xcel Energy peaked at 60 percent wind at the beginning of the year, and Spain got its top power supply from wind for three months leading into 2013.
But that’s chump change compared with Denmark. According to data from Energinet, the national grid operator, wind power has produced 30 percent of gross power consumption to date in 2013. This includes over 90 hours where wind produced more than all of Denmark’s electricity needs, peaking at 122 percent on October 28, at 2 a.m.
And Denmark has plans to get to 50 percent more wind by 2020, creating even bigger hourly peaks. Energinet predicts the country may hit as many as1,000 hours per year of power surplus.
To champions of renewables, this is validation that a clean energy future is possible and that the transition is already underway. These regions also give insight into what is to come in the U.S., and what needs to change to keep a reliable and affordable power system as clean energy grows.
Postcards from the future
As part of America’s Power Plan, we have developed a series of “postcards from the future,” describing places like Denmark that are already grappling with a high-renewables future.
Studies and real-world experience are underscoring that there are many tactics available to deal with the variability of wind and solar, and that these tactics are largely substitutes for each other.
While energy storage comes to mind first for many people, the truth is that the grid has functioned just fine with very little storage. Power system operators have to deal with variability all the time, with or without renewables. Demand fluctuates with the weather, time of day, social activities, and industrial operations. And supply varies unexpectedly too, such as when a power plant breaks down. The fluctuations of wind and solar, especially at moderate levels, are just one more variable–one that may or may not add to overall variability, depending on the system and timing.
Power system engineers use a whole suite of tools to match supply and demand, both minute-to-minute and over longer time frames. The most obvious example is a dispatchable power plant, like a gas turbine. But they also benefit from bigger balancing areas (trading power with neighbors), more transmission connections to reduce congestion, faster-acting fossil power plants, direct load control and demand response, targeted energy efficiency, and curtailment of wind and solar plants.
Hydro power and even fossil fuels are the traditional forms of energy storage, but many more are emerging, such as using power to heat district heating systems, compressed air, batteries and flywheels, and charging electric cars during the renewable peak.
It is increasingly common to treat wind power as a controllable generator, rather than just letting it go full out. System operators in New York, Texas and the Midwest direct wind farm owners to submit five-minute forecasts of output, and ramp up and down if necessary to meet system demands, just like conventional generators. The Midwest ISO enforces this with a “dispatchable intermittent tariff.”
So how can Denmark be 122 percent wind-powered? Where does the extra power go?
Denmark is part of an integrated regional grid with the Scandinavian countries and parts of Germany. They have a constant trade with utilities in the region, especially hydro plants in Norway.
As renewables grow and as Denmark attempts to phase out fossil fuels altogether by 2050, the country is aggressively adopting smart grid technologies, leading Europe in research and demonstration projects on a per-capita basis. The island of Bornholm will be a test bed, with extensive smart grid and renewable energy deployment. Demand response is beginning to grow, though in a different form than in the U.S. Denmark also has big goals for electric cars, and has exempted them from the 180 percent sales tax applied to gas and diesel vehicles.
But conventional solutions will be the first solution through better grid links between countries. As Germany’s Agora Energiewende has put it in its 12 Insights report, “Grids are cheaper than storage facilities.” More grid connections allow surplus power to be shipped off rather than curtailed or stored. Larger balancing areas reduce the variability of wind and solar across a wider geographic area. Agora thinks storage will only be necessary when renewables constitute 70 percent of total supply.
As in the U.S., European regulators are grappling with policies to integrate large amounts of renewables. While technical issues remain, they are not really new, only of a larger scale. Most of the integration tools are known; they just need to be bigger and more capable to deal with bigger variations.
Less known are the policy issues. How big should control areas be? How much should be invested in transmission lines, and who should pay for them? What is the relative value of energy payments, versus capacity payments or ancillary services? Most of all, how should we pay for the services we need to keep the lights on?
In America’s Power Plan, Mike Hogan of the Regulatory Assistance Project calls for aligning power markets with clean energy goals, giving proper incentives for market flexibility.
With 2020 just around the corner, it will be instructive to see how Denmark deals with getting half its electricity from the wind. What will the country do with a 200 percent wind day?
We know the Universities are in cahoots w oil/gas better to be in cahoots w wind/solar..
In a future with lots of renewable wind and solar will be turned off sometimes to meat demand. But that not complicated. Its more complicated to turn down output from nuclair
This is all good, but…
What percentage of total power do we need to shoot (and plan) for in order to replace all carbon fuel use?
122% of demand is only the demand on the electric power grid. What about the gigajoules of power represented by millions of barrels of oil, megatonnes of coal, giga-BTU’s of gas?
Where do we really need to be? 122,000% ? 122,000,000%?
According to Jacobson and DeLucci, this is what we will need to run the world on renewables:
“We estimate that 3,800,000 5MW wind turbines, 49,000 300MW concentrated solar plants, 40,000 300MW solar PV power plants, 1.7 billion 3kW rooftop PV systems, 5350 100MW geothermal power plants, 270 new 1300MW hydroelectric power plants, 720,000 0.75MW wave devices,and 490,000 1MW tidal turbines can power a 2030 world that uses electricity and electrolytic hydrogen or all purposes.”
Peter, it is a good thing to be cheerleader for the positive things we can report have been accomplished. But being a cheerleader without also giving information about how far we are from our goals is a complete disservice – it engenders a very ill-founded complacency, a complacency at the very time we all need to realize that we are completely *failing* our responsibilities to build new renewable infrastructure quickly enough save future generations from disaster.
Could you PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE start writing about this? If you did, I believe it would make you the ONLY blogger actually talking about this absolutely crucial arithmetic.
I would hardly characterize Peter’s reporting of an occasional bit of “good news” as “cheerleading”. Particularly not in view of the fact that so much of what we see on Crock and on all climate warming sites is way more “gloom and doom” than hope for the future. I don’t think the visitors to Crock are in any way complacent. In my mind, we likely ARE doomed, and it’s not a question of IF but how long. I don’t see us moving fast enough to mitigate. I try not to depress people by saying that.
On the positive side, don’t be fooled by the seemingly daunting numbers that you have cited. Estimates have been made that ~500,000 square Km of solar panels could generate enough electricity to meet ALL the world’s electricity needs in 2030. That’s 500 x 1000 Km or around 310 x 630 miles or 195,000 square miles. The area of Arizona and New Mexico combined minus Ohio or Virginia for the WHOLE WORLD. Electricity from renewables could be used to replace some of the fossil fuels used for other than electrical generation as well.
It won’t be complacency that gets us, but the denial and delay while the fossil fuel interests get rich burning off all the fossil carbon.
I am the guy around here that keeps talking about 500,000 sq kilometers of PV panels. I am the guy who thinks we are NOT doomed – we just need to get started in a serious way.
And sorry – but Peter is constantly putting up posts that present new renewable deployments in the most positive light, and that IS cheerleading, because with virtually no posts on what we need, it is completely out of context.
You know – the world could go 100% renewable in a few years with a concerted and cooperative effort. If I have my math correct, that 500,000 square Kilometers of PV panels, at current (wholesale?) prices @ $0.74 per watt is about $18 trillion. Let’s say the U.S. is fully 1/3 of that = $6 trillion.
In 2010 (the latest figures) the U.S. spent $1.2 trillion on fossil fuels. Five years of that rate of spending would buy us our panels. The fact is, the world’s maximal output of these panels is nowhere near large enough for such a project. The U.S. government needs to start building the factories needed to produce PV panels and other renewable hardware. Then we would have less than wholesale prices, the economy of scale and standardization, and centralized planning. A 5 or 10 year project would be sufficient if this was a Federal project.
But nobody is even talking about such a plan, because nobody is writing about what we actually need, and how puny our efforts are to date. No, instead we get cheerleading when what we need is logistics. We get happy stories of homeowners investing in panels for their homes and their homes only, when we should be getting articles about how smart it would be to have the power of government investing in our renewable future.
I don’t disagree much with any of that (except for the repetition of your original indictment). Did you miss my closing sentence?
“It won’t be complacency that gets us, but the denial and delay while the fossil fuel interests get rich burning off all the fossil carbon”.
The Kochs and the fossil fuel interests own the politicians and the media, and are spending big $$$ to sow confusion and doubt among the general public. That’s why you’re hearing little about how puny our efforts are. They like it that way and work to keep it that way. The system has been corrupted to the point that we are lucky to hear much about renewables at all.
You have put your finger on the Inconvenient Truth I keep raising here.
There are so many who are certain that The Answer Is Renewables, they seem to have forgotten what the question was. They need reminders.
“We estimate that 3,800,000 5MW wind turbines…”
————————————————————————————————
There are already 225,000 turbines out there – certainly not all 5MW, but none the less the number shows the industry’s ability to produce.
Going from 225k to 3,800k over a 17 year period implies a growth rate of 18% per year. Isn’t the wind industry now growing at 25% per year? So if you use industry growth as a rough proxy for turbine number growth then we might be on track so far.
OK, I will bite. The subject gets discussed all the time, but a spotlight directly on it is a good idea. IPCC is an authoritative reference. Most of the deniers talk about the subject, in a negative way. There are two parts. One is the emission scenarios, primarily CO2. The other is the estimates of warming. The warming estimates come from the sensitivity, a hotly debated topic. The sensitivity is estimated at 3C, with a range, but there are several caveats. Among them is unknown future non-linear feedback scenarios like albedo. The evidence for such phenomena is clear from the climate record, events like Meltwater Pulse 1A and many others. IPCC clearly states that since many potentially more negative phenomena are not well understood, their effects are not included, and the 3C is therefore not a full estimate. The CO2 emissions scenarios are A1,A2, B1… and so forth. They are based on assumptions of population, education, mitigation efforts, technology, and so on. More importantly, they show what levels CO2 reaches under those scenarios at steady state. At the lowest scenario we have 2-2.5C temperature increase. We have experienced 0.8C increase so far since the 1880 time frame. The lowest emission scenario winds up with somewhere between 400 and 500 ppm CO2, and decays, time frame about 2100. The others have various responses, higher than that with slower decay rates. See the text for further details. Anyone more eagle eyed than me with helpful corrections, jump right in.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/ch3s3-5-2.html
http://www.ipcc-data.org/observ/ddc_co2.html
You can figure that warming from those two curves or you can jump to IPCCs results. (easier)
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html
That last one best sums it up with sea level rise and all. There you have it. Let the fun begin.
I’m just a dumb old guy, but it looks as if we will be screwed if we don’t get moving soon. Please tell me I’m wrong.
Roger – This is the best summary of the Big Plan, I have ever seen.
Unless the district heating system is already running on carbon-free or renewable (and storagle) energy of some kind, a complete decarbonization must as a consequence eliminate its ability to buffer or act as a dump for un-dispatchable electric generators.
In the real world, Germany is already trying to dump excess wind power into the natural gas pipeline system with a scheme called “E-gas”. Germany is within a factor of 2 of having instantaneous PV output equal to total grid demand on sunny weekends. This needs something to manage it, because the generators which provide demand balancing and regulation cannot shut down. Big inverters fed by equally big batteries could do it (supporting the grid while gas turbines start up from cold), but that co$tS.
Indeed it will be instructive. I’m looking at dealing with this on a very small scale, with a 4400 W alternator I hope to put 60 feet in the air soon. After batteries are charged (should I install a battery bank), I have several options for dump loads. The last one is the simplest: just connect the WT to resistors, and rachet down the value until it is nearly braked to a stop. With the alternator outputs shorted together, the blades stall and the problem is dealt with.
A follow-up on the recent China pollution post, the country is making an effort and wind power certainly was quite high up in recent RE expansion:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-12-04/china-doubles-renewable-energy-capacity-amid-pollution-cut-push
It is a mammoth uphill task, but I believe there is still time to phase out fossils:
http://theconversation.com/china-roars-ahead-with-renewables-21155
That will be short-lived. China has 17 nuclear plants in operation, but 30 under construction and many more planned. The variability and long, expensive, lossy transmission lines from the windy inland plains to coastal load centers will limit how much wind can be installed.
Ironically, the thing RE advocates say makes nuclear “obsolete”—the inability to turn it up and down rapidly to offset variability in RE generation—should instead be turned around: wind and PV are obsolete, because they cannot be turned up on demand for love nor money. But the true believers will never get this.
You never seem to get how a power system works and that your understanding is fantasy. One source type will not supply the load now or ever. No matter how many times you are reminded that there are dispatchable renewables like geothermal or hydro, and underdeveloped ones like wave, you forget immediately. You are creating a straw man. No one is arguing the scenario you created. There are also mitigating factors like the increased availability of of shore wind, lower wind speed operation, etc. not to mention V2G and much more. A more pertinent question is what elements can make up a future power system. Based purely on today’s evidence, renewables are expanding fast, and improving rapidly. Nuclear is decaying and cannot even build new plants as fast as the rate old ones die. Sorry. That is today’s news. It is you that is the starry eyed dreamer. Worse, you are not even starting with a clear slate. You are starting with a proven sixty year record of failure. This is not just my opinion. It is the opinion of investors who bet their money based on hard acceptance of the consequences. That says all you need to know. If it doesn’t happen with them, it ain’t gonna happen. Arguing for more subsidies for nuclear, or less for wind only shows the desperation of your argument. Nuclear would not need it if it was so good. But you will not pay the slightest heed to any of these comments and instead go on painting a fantasy of a rosy vision disconnected to the reality of everyday lives. Hippies are not making nuclear decline. Investors are. Take your argument to them. Good luck.
My reply is posted in 3 parts (for readability and links) starting here:
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/12/21/the-future-is-now-in-denmark-122-of-power-from-wind/comment-page-2/#comment-37800
True believers, those hippies, the DOE. What do they know about energy? What a resource we have here with Epot. He knows more than the DOE and NAS combined. How impressive. And you can’t argue with logic like that. Ask Dr. science. He knows more than you do.
No, Chrissy-poo. I neither know, nor claim to know everything. Far from it. However, unlike the DOE and NAS, I do not have to rely on pleasing the Powers That Be in Washington to be able to get a paycheck or have my grants approved.
“Chrissy-poo”? E-Pot’s narcissism is in full bloom today.
You just keep believing that, DOGgy-doo.
Words of a true anal orifice.
Hard to imagine it doesn’t make economic sense. Start up subsidies come to an end but the power just keeps flowing.
I find the development of other wind based systems are ongoing, the “windpod” looks a very interesting alternative to the conventional turbine, “The city of Cockburn, Australia is helping to test some pioneering new urban wind power generators. Windpods produce lower noise and vibration than conventional style wind turbines and are efficient in turbulent environments, such as on and near buildings.” Earth Operating Manual:
http://www.sciencewa.net.au/topics/technology-a-innovation/item/2632-building-tops-to-house-urban-windpower.html
That’s cool!
I have often wondered why only one propeller is put on a stalk. I saw a YouTube of some do-it-yourselfers who put up a homemade stalk, put a crossbar on top, and had ~ 4 or 5 propellers on it. The output was the actual multiple – 5 rotors put out 5 times more power.
I have also wondered why vertical rotors are not more popular? All the mass is near the ground, which one would think would be a lot easier to maintain/ less expensive than a multi-ton generator-propeller assembly several hundred feet up in the air.
Kites are another interesting, low cost idea. Big kite on a single cable – the force of the kite pulling and moving about could be engineered to make juice?
Saw an article on a park “forest” – fluted wands, which were graphite wings. They looked like a blade of grass, or a human hair attached to its follicle. Each blade was 1 or 2 hundred feet tall, the generator anchored in the “follicle”. They would not rotate, merely bend to the wind like wheat blowing in the wind, but the torsion would drive the generator. The park looked like a Japanese bamboo forest made of these things – wind generation without loss of habitat.
Speaking of success stories in other countries, here is the best summary article I have ever read on the German Energiewende. Its readable.
http://breakingenergy.com/2013/12/06/germanys-revolution-in-efficiency-and-renewable-energy/
Denmark has long been the leader in wind and laudably so. Denmark had long enjoyed complete social support at all levels from community to government. It makes a big difference. Wind was viable decades ago. It took political will to get to the next level stacked against century old entrenched interests still unfairly enjoying subsidies.
http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/wind-energy/
It is easy to get gloomy on our climate outlook, especially if you take note of all the Arctic bomb methane concerned sites, but then you read that even Russia is taking note and boosting RE, it gives heart and hope.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/09/russia-awards-first-renewable-energy-tender-to-boost-the-industry
Yes, and that “heart and hope” is quickly diminished by the fact that Russia has teamed with Shell to drill for oil under the ocean in the arctic. The Greenpeace members who demonstrated against Shell came close to disappearing into the Gulag. Putin has stood up and said, in effect, “We will not be deterred”, and implied that it will go much worse for the next bunch of “greenies” that gets in their way.
IMO, any Russian RE efforts are more for show than anything else. Selling gas and oil is a big part of their economy, and they are NOT going to back off any time soon.
Its not a lot diufferent in N.Z (except for the gulags) where offshore exploration has taken off and the government has cracked down on protesters.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/8492471/Environmental-protesters-Govt-crack-down
It would be more urgent if an large asteroid was on target to hit Earth however we can hope that science will overcome in the end,
Peter – thanks for the article highlighting wind success. It shows how wind integration is happening now. The future holds even more improvement. Thanks for showing the positive. We need that to move forward with verve. There is hope and we are part of the solution.
There are methods of dealing with variability. The sky once again, has not fallen.