Comment by gwright
1 year ago
Here is a study for two areas, Germany and California:
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...
1 year ago
Here is a study for two areas, Germany and California:
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...
The "trick" here (sadly common in this debate) is the paper assumes you're never allowed to overbuild the solar/wind generation capacity. You can only time-shift, even when oversupply would actually be cheaper.
The most economical solution uses a mix of both, but they quietly discard the best approach to reach the (preordained?) conclusion that batteries are "ruinously expensive." Bad form.
To stabilize the grid you don't buy batteries that cycle just once per year. There's a better way.
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jrse/article/13/6/066301/285194
I'm willing to accept I'm missing something, but overbuilding is not a sufficient approach because you still need to have generation available at night when there is no wind. Doesn't matter how much you overbuild solar and wind you can't overcome the problem of no sun and no wind.
That study isn't hiding anything, it is an attempt to estimate how much storage is required. If you adjust the solar/wind capacity (i.e. overbuild), you'll reduce the storage requirements but there are diminishing returns resulting in very expensive systems long before your solved the storage problem.
If we had grid-scale storage that was economical, it should be very easy to build a production system to demonstrate that capability. I've not seen any examples. And it certainly seems wise to actually build a system that demonstrates the viability of grid-scale storage before decommissioning base load generating capacity.
>overbuilding is not a sufficient approach because you still need generation at night
The energy storage provides generation at night, of course.
I said an optimal mix of oversupply and energy storage. You need both.
Your linked paper tries to use only 100% storage and 0% oversupply, which results in very suboptimal economics. The correct approach is to find the cost-optimal mix.
It's not a "trick" just an acknowledgment that overbuilding wind/solar generation capacity does nothing but waste money and fail to significantly improve outcomes.
You're utterly wrong there. The optimum, cost minimizing solution can involved overprovisioning of renewables.
Indeed, we already see this internally in PV installations. It's best to overprovision the modules beyond what the inverters can handle and just clip some of their output at times of peak insolation. That's because inverters that could handle the peak would hardly ever operate at top power and could be downsized without losing much overall output.