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https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/storing-electricity-on-the-grid-is-part-of-climate-short-list-eb4964a27e42>
"In the short list of climate actions that will work, storage gets pride of
place. As naysayers can’t seem to resist stating, the wind doesn’t blow all the
time and the sun doesn’t shine at night.
But we need a lot less grid storage than most people think. Why? Because
storage exists in context of a few interrelated solutions. As the short list
makes clear, we’re going to overbuild renewables just as we overbuilt every
form of electrical generation except nuclear energy. We run some gas plants at
10% of their potential annual generation or less. U.S. coal plants, considered
to be always on baseload by many, produced only 35% of their potential
electricity in 2022 and only 55% in China.
We’re also going to transmit more electricity further through high-voltage
direct current transmission lines, which enable much more energy to flow with
much lower losses. Continent-scale and larger interconnections are being built
globally, linking Morocco to the U.K., Israel to Greece, ASEAN to China and
Canada to the U.S. Spreading more renewables over a bigger area reduces most of
the requirement for storage that geographically bounded, limited-technology
studies claimed would be required.
But we’re still going to need a lot. Assuming a 100% renewables world, the
Jacobson et al scenario out of Stanford of 143 countries is a good place to
start. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Jacobson papers and Jacobson himself
over the past few years, and have generally found the scenario to be
conservative and plausible, although we disagree about a few things like the
percentage of rooftop solar that will be in the mix and biofuels.
The study suggests we’ll only need 3.7 terawatts of power in grid storage
systems world wide to balance those overbuilt renewables and continent-scale
grids. Of course, power isn’t all that we need. Think of electricity in terms
of a car. It has horsepower which is how much oomph it can provide at a given
moment, and it has a gas tank full of fuel which allows it to keep delivering
that oomph. That 3.7 terawatts of power requires many multiples of energy. We
need a big gas tank, in other words.
Thankfully, we know how to build big grid storage gas tanks. We’ve been doing
it since 1907, after all. It’s called pumped hydro. When we have excess
electricity, for example at night when nuclear and coal plants need something
to do, we pump water up hill. When we have more demand than supply of
electricity, for example when coal and nuclear plants are running flat out
during the day but everyone is turning on their air conditioners, we let the
water run back down the hill to generate electricity. That’s about 80%
efficient round trip."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
