Most curtailment IIRC is due to insufficient transmission capacity. I doubt curtailed solar can be called upon in an emergency unless the emergency is located very close to the curtailed solar.
It's a fair point (why curtailment is in effect), and I think speaks to the fact that more granular and timely data is needed wrt all nodes and transmission segment within the system. Also a call for more batteries everywhere between generation and load.
With regards to transmission congestion, that is easily fixed with installing batteries at currently storageless renewable generation facilities (the batteries then charge with excess solar, and can continue to discharge after the sun sets or the wind dies down, maximizing transmission utilization temporally). The Inflation Reduction Act also enables those batteries to charge from utility side if needed, whereas before they could only charge from the renewable generation (AC vs DC coupling).
Batteries are extremely expensive per megawatt, not very durable, require carefully controlled temperatures, and their manufacturer and recycling extract a tremendous cost from the environment. For non-mobile usage, batteries shouldn't be seen as any kind of viable solution at scale.
However, there are other ways to store energy; unfortunately, most involve converting electricity to another form of energy such as potential (gravitational) energy, like pumping water uphill or lifting heavy weights. These also have relatively little long-term environmental cost. Unfortunately, they're a bit more inefficient (but so are batteries, relative to some other forms of stored energy such as fossil fuels).
It'd be interesting if we could find some ways to convert landfills or other urban blight issues into a durable energy store without poisoning the environment.
> For non-mobile usage, batteries shouldn't be seen as any kind of viable solution at scale.
Lithium-ion, sure, but aren't there a whole host of other battery chemistries that are basically too big / too heavy to put on vehicles but a lot cheaper so well suited for stationary storage?
Are they all still at the research phase and so currently more expensive than the decades-of-learning-curve lithium-ion?
Lithium-ion is the cheapest form of stationary storage for the sub-8 hour duration niche. The vast majority of battery storage being deployed is lithium-ion.
Sodium-ion is the second largest contender, with a few pilot facilities opening in China recently, but it will be a few years before it eclipses lithium-ion.
> For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.
VRFBs' main advantages over other types of battery:
no limit on energy capacity
can remain discharged indefinitely without damage
...
wide operating temperature range including passive cooling
long charge/discharge cycle lives: 15,000-20,000 cycles and 10–20 years.
low levelized cost: (a few tens of cents), approaching the 2016 $0.05 target stated by the United States Department of Energy and the European Commission Strategic Energy Technology Plan €0.05 target
We’re currently experiencing a Cambrian explosion in battery tech. As the technology matures, and we establish a closed loop ecosystem to build and then recycle these systems, longevity can improve over time. To get better at something, you must first suck at it, and 10-20 years is not an immaterial service life for an asset that just sits and hums with no moving parts.
I agree if we were talking about a motor or a pump, but it seems like batteries basically devastate the environment every time we make one, and doing that millions of times every ten years is probably not great. (But I don't know anything about that specific battery technology.. perhaps it's just saltwater and two dissimilar metals.)
Not a single thing you said about batteries is true. Pumped hydro is in no way competitive with batteries for most locations. In the future it is likely they won't be competitive in any location.
Better still; the amount of deployed batteries world wide is projected to overtake the amount of deployed hydro this year. Pumped hydro is barely growing. Battery capacity is growing exponentially to eclipse it this year. That's driven by pure economics. Cheaper, better, faster, etc.
Neither of these points are conflicting with my argument. Just because batteries are being deployed it (and I agree that it's cheaper and faster, but not necessarily better on all axes) doesn't mean that their manufacturer is not damaging the environment.
In fact, battery manufacture is not damaging the environment in most places where first-world people live, so perhaps they just don't care, but I think that's pretty sad.
If that wasn't clear, I wasn't trying to challenge your argument; just adding to it. And you are right by adding more arguments to the pile. Not disagreeing at all.
> Batteries are extremely expensive per megawatt, not very durable, require carefully controlled temperatures, and their manufacturer and recycling extract a tremendous cost from the environment. For non-mobile usage, batteries shouldn't be seen as any kind of viable solution at scale.
None of this is accurate. I encourage you to update your mental model with recent data. Citations below for your convenience. AMA, global energy transition is my passion.
About half the comments on the article were Americans saying very similar things to your comment and denying there was a revolution to have missed, which kind of answers the question posed.
The secure authentication of all those nodes concerns me. Are these old scada systems coommunicating over plaintext rs232 or similar? Is it something running crowdstrike?
The transmission lines run to solar farms should be able to take 100% of the output of the farm and then some otherwise the farm was over built and wasted money.
At short distances from the solar farm, yes. But it's not 100% in every direction for arbitrarily long distance. At some point, you assume the energy will be tend to be used sort of near where it's generated.
To put it another way, if you build solar between city A and city B, would you build it so it can still be fully utilized even if city A stops using any power and city B wants all of it? No, you assume city A is always going to need some power.
Generally they connect directly to large back bone transmission lines that carry power far beyond the local area though not directly to more balkanized power zones. On a large scale yes if critical junctures go out the rest can't take the full load but that's different than a single plant being overspecced for the transmission capability it's connected to.
That's not necessarily optimal. For home installs, you can overbuild panels because they're cheap compared to the inverter. Then you curtail sometimes at midday and have extra energy on cloudy days and in the morning/afternoon. Turns out that's more cost effective than sizing the panels perfectly. The same logic could apply to utility farms, because transmission lines can be expensive. I don't really know myself since I don't work in the industry, but I would not be surprised if they slightly overbuild vs. the transmission line capacity.
If by output you mean the maximum output of the inverters. The maximum output of the PV modules can be higher, particularly if the field has integrated batteries.
By this definition all reserve capacity is wasted money. That is clearly false, as demonstrated by the event in this article _not_ leading to failure and harm.
I'm not talking about reserve capacity at the grid level. I'm talking about excess capacity at the individual generation plant level that exceeds the grids capacity to take in. If you can't output the energy onto the grid the only benefit is for local maintenance and you don't need huge amounts of excess capacity to solve that and that excess doesn't help in the event of a large base producer like a nuclear plant going offline because it can't get onto the grid!
