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Since I'm not a grid manager, I can't comment on the details of grid management and reserve requirements. So I will retreat to end results.
Germany added a huge amount of wind and solar to their grid, and they have some of the highest electricity rates of any continental nation. Germany still relies on a large fleet of coal power plants.
So what do you think? Was the German experiment a success? Did the Germans greatly reduce their CO2 emissions by adding the massive array of wind and solar plants? Was it a cost effective way to achieve the CO2 reductions?
I really don't have an ideological opposition to wind and solar, but how can wind and solar eliminate the need for conventional power plants that are often powered by fossil fuels? If the whole point is to eliminate CO2 emissions from the electricity sector, how can that be done with wind and solar alone?
I remain a skeptic.
I don't really care about what Germany has done. In the US wind power is selling at grid parity, not more. PV panel prices continue to drop and natural gas is really cheap. Nobody is building coal-fired plants. The new electrical generation capacity is pretty much wind, PV and natural gas.
The long term answer to that is better batteries. Tesla's fancy new Gigafactory isn't just for car batteries. It's primary motive is home and industrial storage of power. https://www.tesla.com/powerwall
Make power when you can via wind/solar and store it for when you don't have wind/night.
As you gain on economy of scale, the price keeps dropping. Solar cells are a fraction of what they were five years ago, and continue to drop. Expect the same for high-capacity battery storage. So today, if you have home based solar, you feed your overproduction back onto the grid to re-sell. In the future, you'll store it for your own later use.
I hope so.
Are batteries scalable? Is there enough lithium on the planet for batteries big enough to eliminate the need for fossil fuel backup plants? How often will the batteries need to be replaced? What will it cost?
Currently Vattenfall owns and operates eight coal-fired power stations, thereof seven combined heat and power plants (CHP) in Berlin and the Hamburg region in Germany and one condense only plant in the Netherlands:
Moorburg and Tiefstack in Hamburg, Germany
Wedel in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Reuter, Reuter West and Klingenberg in Berlin, Germany
Biomass co-fired Moabit in Berlin, Germany
Hemweg 8 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
No, but what you posted wasn't really relevant, the important thing is that I pay for a certain amount of electricity to be only produced from renewable sources. If more customers did the same then the electric companies would produce more from renewable sources and less from fossil fuels. My company uses fossil fuels for 40.5% of the energy it produces so its already the minority and it will get lower and lower. From one graph I saw that this company in Sweden only has 2% of its energy from oil and coal and 0% from gas and is aiming to further lower its fossil fuel usage in all the countries it operates in. And its not just this company - when I look up electricity contract options for where I live, at least half the contracts available were renewable energy ones like mine.
Renewables aren't always best option in all regions. Furthermore the amount of energy the world consumes is so large that we may never completely get off fossil fuels. Hell we might not even have enough rare earth minerals needed to produce solar panels to the extent that we need
Quote:
To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we'll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we'd have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now. Do you like wind? If you use every single breeze that blows on land, you'll get 10 or 15 terawatts. Since it's impossible to capture all the wind, a more realistic number is 3 terawatts, or 1 million state-of-the art turbines, and even that requires storing the energy—something we don't know how to do—for when the wind doesn't blow.Solar? To get 10 terawatts by 2050, Lewis calculates, we'd need to cover 1 million roofs with panels every day from now until then. "It would take an army," he says.
Reserves requirements are determined by total annual sales (Not by largest plant as suggested by some) MISO reserve requirement is @7%. The utility I happen to work for meets that with a mix Diesel/Duel fuel engines, straight NG fired engines and a couple little aero-derivative gas turbines. Agency's like mine that have excess generation can sell it into the market operating in a number of ancillary services. We currently sell our most efficient assets into the non-spin reserve, and the very lucrative regulation/grid stability market. We are currently discussing selling output of our newest facility to a much larger investor owned utility for grid support so they don't have to build transmission line from some large solar and wind developments currently under construction......
Renewables aren't always best option in all regions. Furthermore the amount of energy the world consumes is so large that we may never completely get off fossil fuels. Hell we might not even have enough rare earth minerals needed to produce solar panels to the extent that we need
Its not going to happen overnight but companies are making concentrated efforts to move away from fossil fuels. Its time to support that instead of clinging to fossil fuels.
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