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?
For the sake of brevity and readability, I’m going to cut my reply to Christopher Arcus into pieces. Here’s 1/2:
Have you ever drawn a phasor diagram, calculated a reflected impedance through a transformer, or analyzed the current and back EMF in an induction motor as the slip varies? I have. And you accuse ME of having no idea how a power system works… I literally burst out laughing.
France darn near does it with nuclear.
Jesus Christ almighty, are you ever great at the Gish Gallop smokescreen of trivial (at best) claims. Here: no amount of “lower wind speed operation” can offset the fact that available power varies as wind speed CUBED so max power will drop steeply no matter how efficiently you can capture the meager amount available at low speeds. V2G as mass storage for grid power demands a massive EV fleet with similarly massive battery packs per vehicle.
Some of the things you hand-wave about are merely difficult and not going to appear soon, like 250 million EVs each carrying 100 kWh of storage to yield the 25 TWh needed to carry an RE grid over a slow week. Others are utterly impossible, like getting more than the theoretical limit of about 4 watts per square meter from a 5 MPH wind. But most of all, your hysterical denunciations show just how deep you are into the dogma of the Green religion. You’re like the most reactionary Amish, rejecting any energy source newer than the water wheel because it’s not in your Bible.
The rate of growth drops to roughly zero every time the incentives threaten to expire, and it would die immediately without “must-take” regulations. You can get more of anything by paying for it, whether it makes engineering or economic sense or not.
Whether “elements can make a future power system” is an interesting question. California has recently required utilities to install storage to manage the variability of the renewables that California has mandated the utilities allow to be connected to their grid. This is another form of subsidy, transferring costs from the sources of the variability to those who are forced to deal with the consequences. If those costs were paid by RE producers, RE would be much less profitable even with the subsidies and it wouldn’t be “expanding fast” any longer. Given today’s prices, it would probably not expand at all.
Here’s 2/2 of my reply to Christopher Arcus:
Wrong. There are over 60 power reactors under construction worldwide, with 30 of those in China alone. The only places nuclear is in retreat are where it has been under relentless political attack, such as the USA and Europe.
Why are there “renewable portfolio standards” and not “carbon-free portfolio standards”? Because the latter would include nuclear, and utilities could have easily reached 50% or more without a single wind turbine. Why didn’t Vermont’s “fuel diversity” payments include Vermont Yankee, but did include fuel oil supplies for owners of gas-turbine plants to the tune of $120 per head for the entire population of the state? Same answer. Those are examples of the political bias against nuclear energy.
Sixty years… that would be since about 1954. The first commercial nuclear power station didn’t even go critical until December of 1957. The US industry was expanding very rapidly through the mid-1970’s. As it turns out, it wasn’t the industry that caused its own demise, it was a combination of economic contraction driven by 21% annual interest rates (Federal Reserve policy) and an out-of-control Nuclear Regulatory Commission which drove costs through the roof without any regard for cost-effectiveness or overall safety of the energy supply. Thus we have dozens of people dying each year from accidents involving trains shipping coal, while the NRC concerns itself with preventing fractional hypothetical deaths. The failure is of the anti-nuclear ideologues. Or do they regard this as a war, and the dead from coal as mere collateral damage? Do you?
Investors can see what’s subsidized and what’s penalized. Most don’t have the lobbying power to change anything.
You admit that wind is subsidized. That’s progress. Now, if I can ever get everyone in your camp to admit that the gas turbines that you say can also provide backup for wind are NOT running on renewable energy and are NOT going to cut carbon emissions enough to stabilize the climate, I will really have achieved something. I won’t hold my breath. Religion is stronger than reason for most people.
Just delete this one too, re-posting in pieces.
I forgot that links push stuff to moderation, so 2/2 of my reply to Christopher Arcus becomes 2/3 and 3/3:
Wrong. There are over 60 power reactors under construction worldwide, with 30 of those in China alone. The only places nuclear is in retreat are where it has been under relentless political attack, such as the USA and Europe.
Why are there “renewable portfolio standards” and not “carbon-free portfolio standards”? Because the latter would include nuclear, and utilities could have easily reached 50% or more without a single wind turbine. Why didn’t Vermont’s “fuel diversity” payments include Vermont Yankee, but did include fuel oil supplies for owners of gas-turbine plants to the tune of $120 per head for the entire population of the state? Same answer. Those are examples of the political bias against nuclear energy.
half the reactor builds are in China. You are kind of making my point. Nuclear is only getting taken up in command/control economies, where markets don’t apply. Anywhere you have people who actually have money to risk, its not going into nuclear. So, yes, you can have nuclear, but you’d better be willing to put up a trillion bucks of taxpayers money as a small downpayment on what we need.
Somewhat less than half, actually; I read elsewhere that the total is 71.
Like Finland (Olkiluoto), France (Flamanville), and Britain (Hinkley Point)?
It’s funny you mention that “markets don’t apply” when “portfolio standards” and “feed-in tariffs” and “must-take provisions” are all anti-market actions by legislators or government regulators.
People would be fools to invest in something the government is trying to destroy. This is why the major nuclear builds in the USA are in the Southeast, where state governments (at least) are friendly. That does beg the question, though: why are politicians allowed to pick winners and losers? Don’t we have more important things to worry about… like the climate? And aren’t the most successful examples of low-carbon electric grids in the world based on either hydro (which cannot be engineered to order) and nuclear energy (which we can)?
That goes both ways. A trillion bucks is only a down payment on the transmission lines and storage systems an all-RE grid for the USA would need.
And 3/3:
Sixty years… that would be since about 1954. The first commercial nuclear power station didn’t even go critical until December of 1957. The US industry was expanding very rapidly through the mid-1970’s. As it turns out, it wasn’t the industry that caused its own demise, it was a combination of economic contraction driven by 21% annual interest rates (Federal Reserve policy) and an out-of-control Nuclear Regulatory Commission which drove costs through the roof without any regard for cost-effectiveness or overall safety of the energy supply. Thus we have dozens of people dying each year from accidents involving trains shipping coal, while the NRC concerns itself with preventing fractional hypothetical deaths. The failure is of the anti-nuclear ideologues. Or do they regard this as a war, and the dead from coal as mere collateral damage? Do you?
Investors can see what’s subsidized and what’s penalized. Most don’t have the lobbying power to change anything.
You admit that wind is subsidized. That’s progress. Now, if I can ever get everyone in your camp to admit that the gas turbines that you say can also provide backup for wind are NOT running on renewable energy and are NOT going to cut carbon emissions enough to stabilize the climate, I will really have achieved something. I won’t hold my breath. Religion is stronger than reason for most people.
Here is a damning report on the subsidies and economics of nuclear power. It shows that the subsidies may exceed the cost of the generated electricity. As of 2005, nuclear has a PTC. Remove PTCs? Hypocritical. Remove nuclear PTCs. They are not on a yoyo string like wind. Nuclear receives subsidies across the entire life cycle. Taxpayers get no royalties from uranium mining. Environmental remediation costs exceed the value of the ore removed. There are subsidies at every stage.
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear_subsidies_report.pdf
Here is a good reference on wind energy costs and subsidies. Remember, the largest subsidy, the PTC is gone in 2014 and has to be extended. For a new industry, the subsidies are lousy. That wind is crushing competition despite this poor backdrop speaks volumes about the playing field and all the cheating going on while the ref is not looking.
http://zfacts.com/node/244
Folks like Lester Brown argue that there should be no subsidies for mature industries like oil, coal, and nuclear. That makes sense. For them its just a windfall profit made possible by continued lobbying. (bribes are cheap)
You seem to specialize in uneven application of rules of logic. For wind, a Banqui dam disaster counts. Dams used in France and Ontario to provide peaks that nuclear can’t reach, they don’t count. Backup for wind costs money. Backup for nuclear outages costs nothing. A 21% interest rate caused nuclear to decline, but had no effect on any other energy source? Wind has to live a varying landscape of real world economic reality, including unreliable PTCs, but nuclear can have a PTC, no strings attached. There is no need to catch all of these fallacies. You have shown a remarkable pattern of one sided thinking. Its not so much that there are no issues to consider among renewables and energy futures. There are. The problem is that an unbalanced, unreliable viewpoint is not helpful to the discussion. Bias only adds more distortion. When sources like the NAS are repeatedly dismissed out of hand, its not a sign of balance.
Nuclear power in decline – the economist 7/2513. I’m not going to google it for you. Thought I would pick a conservative source. One thing for sure, there is no renaissance, and the build rate is struggling with the rate of aging plant retirement.
Wind is not subsidized in 2014. The ptc ran out. But nuclear gets ptcs, loan guarantees, insurance breaks, and massive subsidies no strings attached and is a mature industry. In a sane world, new tech gets subsidies, old tech gets none. What inanity drove you to believe that old tech should receive subsidy parity compared to new tech is beyond ken. There is so much straw man, what’s the point? All the arguments are meandering into a world far from electric power production reality. No matter how many references are given to the fact that wind requires little or no additional reserves, it’s back to storage arguments. You have confined everyone that you have an irrational love of nuclear power. If your argument were a movie, it
Would be called how I stopped worrying and learned to love fukushima. It’s been endlessly proved that wind lowers co2 and the impact of gas plants is negligible, but citations do not move the unreasoning mind. It’s a Gish gallop of endless and now boring, denial, devoid of any connection to reality. Monty Python black knight of denialism award coming right up. I think I’ve decided. The amount of posts even responding is declining. The arguments don’t hold water. Wind increases CO2? Right in Heartland territory. Carrying water for Koch bros indeed. The evil hippies in NRC made nuclear too expensive and are trying to kill it. Really? That’s your argument?
And you wonder why no one is sympathetic? Did it ever occur to you that your extreme nuclear cheerleading is hastening its demise?
Btw, your deficiency is not in phasor diagrams, it’s in power system planning, dispatch, and distribution. Don’t try to impress me with your expertise. I’m not impressed. If you want to impress me, tell me what percentage reserves hold over demand at present on the caiso. If you even respond with a number, it will impress me, but so far you have shown no inclination. Nor have you responded to any citation given re wind lowering CO2. Here’s another one. What is on the cover of the current November/December issue of IEEE Power and Energy magazine? If you respond to any of that, it would be progress.
Hinkley Point etc economics require a huge subsidy from the State in the form of guaranteed prices well above comperable non-nuclear. The Japanese are buying out the original bidders in the UK, just so they can buy in their own reactors, as no-one else wants them – especially in Japan.
Intersting but I dont understand that. Will they move power plants from Japan to UK? Btw, how many nuclear plants has started started up in Japan after the accident? Economy is great in Japan.
Toshiba/Westinghouse want the nuclear business. Obviously, their Japanese market and the world market have gone cold recently. Meanwhile, other players are nervously exiting the business, viewing debacles like Olkiluoto. Japan has not set a date for restarting nuclear power plants.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-18/japan-won-t-set-dates-for-restarting-50-idled-nuclear-reactors.html
Epot is not going to answer. The cover of IEEE power and energy features a wind farm. The title: Seasons of change, an update on wind integration. Features a look at the Western Wind study. Real world proof that wind lowers CO2. It’s an everyday fact if life. Nearing 30% wind penetration in Iowa, several other Midwest states catching up fast. Record 25% renewable penetration in California. Germany, Denmark, Portugal, more. Sky still has not fallen.
I’m looking at
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=8014
and not seeing it, can you point me to it?
front cover
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6634498
the whole enchilada
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=6634492&punumber=8014
Thats not the only issue re renewables and the grid. There have been others. Wind integration is a big topic, because its the largest utility scale renewable.
thanks much.
My other comments re wind penetration are from a variety of sources. The IEEE Power and Energy is significant in showing that wind integration is a current topic of the conservative working engineering profession. Why not? Wind is > 25% of electric energy in Iowa, thats a lot of power.