WalkerARCHITECTS
Joined: 25 Sep 2007
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 Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 9:59 pm Post subject: ENERGY STORAGE IS CRITICAL TO OUR FUTURE. |
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The following is based upon a request by Pearl Street to engage discourse and Walker Architects is pleased to extend the discussion based of Electrical Energy storage and the power delivery systems currently of critical concern to this nation and Western Europe, to this forum.
But with the exception of hydroelectric power, most sources of renewable energy—solar, wind, and tidal power—have a pretty significant limitation: the energy source is variable. The sun isn't always up, the wind doesn't always blow, and the tides come and go, all of which leaves those running the energy grid with the challenge of evening out the power supply. Fortunately, this isn't actually a new problem, and there are many options being pursued for storing power from renewable sources.
Power companies have always faced the problem that demand is uneven, peaking during daylight hours and tailing off at night. The simple solution—build enough generating capacity to meet peak demand—isn't appealing, as generating facilities require a large outlay of cash up-front, so it is hard to justify for a facility that's intended to be active only part of the time. Solar generation has the fortunate property of peaking during the times of highest demand, although the same is not true for tidal or wind power.
Still, if the country is planning on removing some of the fossil-fuel burning plants from the grid to meet targeted emissions reductions, a way of using solar power overnight will be necessary. ENERGY STORAGE CAPACITIES ARE CRITICAL TO OUR FUTURE.
The Role of Energy Storage
Although many people believe that electricity cannot be stored effectively, there are, in fact, several large-scale storage installations already in operation in the United States today. From large-scale pumped-hydro storage and compressed air energy storage (CAES) to smaller technologies such as batteries, flywheels and electrochemical capacitors, energy storage is very much on the minds of engineers, traders, security analysts and policy makers across the country.
Energy storage has critical roles to play in securing our energy future including:
1. serving as an "electricity reserve" much like the national Petroleum Reserve
2. stabilizing electricity markets
3. stablizing the transmission and distribution grid
4. enabling more efficient use of existing generation assets
5. making renewable energy economically viable
Energy storage involves methods and apparatus used to store heating, cooling, or power. In district energy applications these encompass a wide variety of applications, but all are designed to be recharged on a cyclical basis (usually daily, occasionally seasonally) and fulfill one or more of the following purposes:
A. Increase system generation capacity
B. Demand for heating, cooling, or power is seldom constant over time, and the excess generation available during low demand periods can be used to charge the energy storage apparatus in order to increase capacity during high demand periods. This allows a smaller production unit to be installed (or to add capacity without purchasing additional units) and results in a higher load factor on the units.
C. Enable dispatch of cogeneration plants
Combined heat and power, or cogeneration, plants are generally operated to meet the demands of the connected thermal load, which often results in excess electric generation during periods of low electric use. By incorporating thermal energy storage, the plant need not be operated continuously and can be dispatched within some limits.
Shift energy purchases to low cost periods
This is the demand-side application of the first purpose listed, and allows an energy consumer subject to time-of-day pricing to shift energy purchases from high cost to low cost periods.
Increase system reliability
Any form of energy storage, from a small personal computer uninteruptable power supply (UPS) to a large pumped storage project, will almost certainly increase system reliability.
Integration with other functions
In applications where on-site water storage is needed for fire protection, it may be feasible to incorporate thermal storage into a common storage tank. Likewise, apparatus designed to solve power quality problems may be adaptable to energy storage purposes as well.
A bit of info about Energy Storage
Energy storage is one of the most critical components of the "new" electricity value chain. Storage can be used to:
make renewable energy economically viable
enables renewables, solar or wind, to store energy generated during off-peak hours for use during peak hours
serve as an "electricity reserve" much like the national Petroleum Reserve, this is obviously critical as a safety net for future national emergencies
stabilize electricity markets
this means eliminate the disruption of major pricing moves due to weather, natural disasters or national emergencies
it also means smoothing out the wide swings between on-peak and off-peak prices
stablize the transmission and distribution grid
this is a working technology, injected stored energy helps to stabilize the physical transfer and stability of electrons along the wire to
support the integrity of the transmission infrastructure
creates new energy market opportunities
we can enable new markets for ancillary services
enabling more efficient use the existing power generation assets
applied design intelligence reduces the need for cycling large coal-fired plants (peakers) and creates efficiencies along the grid
this can significantly reduce dispatch costs incurred by generating assets
Bulk energy storage is truly one of the most promising new areas of the electricity industry. The Energy Storage Council believes that bulk energy storage will become the "sixth dimension" of the electricity value chain following fuels/energy sources, generation, transmission, delivery, and customer energy services.
ENERGY STORAGE IS CRITICAL TO AMERICA & WESTERN EUROPE
Talking Points
It’s time to talk.
We live in interesting times and this is a time of great change. During this time of great challenges (see the Solar Imperative posted on Design Community) and political change, there is a great deal of talk.
People are talking about:
Climate change energy independence, skyrocketing costs for commodity energy sources, inadequate transmission infrastructure, and unrealistic demands for renewable energy, renewable everything and conservation.
Electricity is absolutely critical to our economy and to our modern lifestyles. We need to be concerned.
Nothing substitutes for its convenience, cleanliness (at the point of use), and versatility. It is essential to our way of life. Electricity is the product at the base of our entire infrastructure, and therefore a critical part of our national security. Electricity’s role in national security, whether we’re talking about a terrorist attack or a natural disaster like Katrina, gets little attention from inside or outside the industry. We need to be concerned about security of our essential national assets.
Man generated Electricity is the one energy that is Invisible—Except When It Isn’t there.
Nobody cares or thinks about electricity until their lights go out or their rates skyrocket. When you don’t know the cost of something, you can’t understand it’s value and you have no incentive to regulate/change your patterns of consumption. We need to understand the cost impacts of power shortages and rising energy bills.
When it comes to infrastructure, Americans suffer from the long-term consequences of short-term thinking.
In the subject context, we pass through short-term fads and phases such as ethanol, solar power, wind production tax credits for two years, etc.etc. etc. and leap from election cycle to election cycle instead of adhering to a cogent long-term policy or plan. We are as a nation oblivious to what that plan is and even if there is a plan. There is sadly no debate about the most critical planning to our nations future. We accept as a given that such a plan needs to be modified as we go.
When it comes to infrastructure, Americans suffer from the long-term consequences of short-term thinking. That is a serious defect in our national character.
The industry has always been structured to pay more attention to supply than demand, and to pay more attention to building the “next thing” rather than achieving superior performance from the infrastructure we have in hand. We need to move forward into the future with sound energy policy, creative solutions and an existing infrastructure that can carry us there.
Transmission of electrical power is critical to every kind of electricity generation and it’s distribution, Transmission is poorly understood. We are setting ourselves up for unrealistic expectations for wind and solar because wind and solar depend upon effective transmission, effective energy storage and the strongest proponents of these powerful alternative energy sources can’t seem to distinguish between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour.
Energy storage is essential! We must have it, or alternative energy sources are limited in effective operational scales and application.
Optimizing our existing infrastructure and ensuring a viable and cost-effective pathway for large-scale renewable energy requires a new piece be added to the production and delivery value chain, energy storage, accompanied by a supply chain that doesn’t even exist yet.
We need infrastructure engineering—not financial engineering!
Our electricity infrastructure has become the victim of financial engineering. Our ability to manage assets diminishes as our infatuation with managing balance sheets grows.
The solution to addressing global warming is elegantly simple.
Use nuclear power in the short term combined with more renewable energy supported by robust energy storage technologies to move away from coal for electricity production. We must actively and simultaneously move toward clean, renewable energy for electric vehicles. The solutions are largely already known. (see DOE)
What we need most urgently is infrastructure engineering.
It is possible for rolling brown-outs to cripple this nation. It is possible that natural disasters or economic disasters can break the frail power delivery system and plunge large populations segments into an enduring power failure.
How to Prevent the Lights Out Catastrophe
(1) Expand our nuclear power capacity short term with nuclear fuel reprocessing. Nuclear is the most economical way to meet the short term constraints we face on the production side of the electricity value chain. Agressively build the photo-voltaic roof top power plant. Cogent power generation actions also helps address global warming by limiting the use of coal and other fossil fuels. Build no power plant that does not help heal the living world. It also accelerates the move from petroleum-based transportation to hydrogen or electricity-based transportation.
(2) Fix and expand the transmission grid. We need to tell the American people how downright dysfunctional our transmission systems are right now. This is the United States of America and we should not have a grid characteristic of the “third world.” Engineers who know our transmission system well are seriously concerned about the substantially out of date, worn, patched, and ancient transmission system. A delivery system is only as good at its weakest link and for electricity production and delivery, that link is transmission.
(3) Make sure every ratepayer has an advanced meter that displays the price of electricity where it will be see, that also tells them how much is being consumed. We need an instrumentation capacity that allows utilities to interact with users to manage demand. We cannot successfully manage electricity demand without these consumer tools, and we already need a day to day knowledge of the value of the product. These new meters must become two-way interactive point devices for automating demand management. We need to have the corresponding software and build a solid infrastructure around it to support reciprocal maintenance and reflexive self monitoring. We need a substantially more intelligent and interactive built environment that will adequately empower the management of our limited resources.
(4) Limit Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) imports, or better yet, abandon the idea for electricity production. Do we really want the bedrock of our economy, and our infrastructure, subjected to the same geopolitical uncertainty as petroleum? Do we actually want more greenhouse gas emissions, a global warming agent twenty times more damaging than carbon dioxide?
(5) Use coal intelligently or not at all. If we use coal at all we must learn to extract the full value of coal in a clean and efficient way. We do not currently have solutions in hand for that problem. We must learn to think of electricity as one of several byproducts of coal. We need efficient coal refineries. Shipping coal that is mostly water thousands of miles across the country and then burning it and dumping hard pollution on the American population doesn’t make sense.
(6) Fund a massive development program for electricity storage. As important as renewable energy sources (solar and wind) are to carbon-free electricity and to moving to electric vehicles powered by renewable sources, they will only gain a minimum of traction and will be subsidized into eternity if we don’t solve the problem of intermittency, and get the public to understand the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour. And, they will wreak havoc on our transmission and distribution grid. Electricity storage has many other benefits. It can facilitate electricity markets (all other commodities make use of storage to moderate supply and demand), make the transmission grid more robust, and improve our infrastructure security. (we need to think strategic petroleum reserve of significant scale)
(7) Shift capital and emphasis from the left side (the production side) of the value chain, to the right side, the consumption or demand side. Markets and deregulation really could work and help manage demand, but they have to be instituted much more intelligently than they are currently.
( Energy is the backbone of industry. The electricity infrastructure requires a federal agency in the same way almost every other critical industry—health care, banking, airlines, home mortgages, transportation, etc—is backstopped by the federal government .
(9) We need to have open discourse about electricity everyday. Let’s not wait to get bent out of shape just when the lights go out. Electrical power is a unique, ubiquitous and ever so valuable product that we cannot live without, we need to sustain it’s effective and ongoing presence, we will surely have a more rational future with a fully operational power generation and delivery system than without. At the very least, it needs to be as important in status as gasoline prices and petroleum in the context of public and political discourse.
(10) We need to concentrate on infrastructure engineering—not financial engineering! Increasingly, the destiny of the electricity industry is controlled by the financial industry on shorter and shorter time horizons. This is exactly opposite what you want for sensible, long-term infrastructure investment.
Whether you agree with all the points or not, the important thing is to get America talking about electricity infrastructure. Please help get America talking...
It is time to start the conversation and we need to keep it going!
Walker Architects
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