samircmi’s Recent Comments

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  hydro

  Pumped hydro is great where you have two existing reservoirs at large differential heights. If you try to build it from scratch its expensive and often has some pretty serious env impact issues. I think the consensus is that there isn't a big potential for large expansions in pumped hydro, but having said that, there are plans in Portugal to expand pumped hydro to 1 GW over the next ten years to support their projected growth of wind.On American Electric Power to install large battery banks to store wind energy posted 2 years, 2 months ago 10 Responses

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  bottling the wind

  I liked the last paragraph too

  A range of options is available for the remainder of the storage, including the use of plug-in hybrid cars, Mr. English said. The idea behind plug-in hybrids is that the owner of a car would charge the batteries every night when demand and cost of electricity were low. The next day, under a contract between the utility company and the driver, the car would be left plugged when not in use, and the power company could reverse the flow of electricity and draw power out of its batteries during times of peak demand.
  

  The idea of moving our cars with wind-generated electricity sounds great to me.

  Its puzzling to me though that they didn't mention compressed air energy storage (CAES), which as the ESA figure linked to above shows, is the lowest cost bulk storage technology. It can also ramp quickly, operate at high efficiency under part load, and appears to be widely available in wind-rich regions throughout the continental united states. The capital cost looks too high to make it readily economic, but it certainly looks better than sodium sulfur batteries in the short run. I guess blowing air underground is less sexy than high-tech batteries.

  (Matt Wald's "Storing Sunshine" in the  July 16th NYT does mention CAES however)

  Sean asked about additional motivations for storage beyond simple arbitrage. One big one is transmission constraints. Storage allows you to put much more wind capacity behind a given transmission line and also allows you to run the line from the wind farm at a higher capacity factor thus better utilizing the transmission capital. If we start building dedicated transmission lines to remote wind resources, storage may become increasingly important.

  Another reason to consider storage is that at high penetrations wind gets a smaller capacity credit. The declining load carrying capacity means that you need something else on line to come on when there is a lull. In the limit of high wind penetrations the value of wind is just the variable cost of running an open cycle gas turbine or something similar which can ramp quickly. So storage (together with other strategies like coupling geographically separated and temporally uncorrelated wind farms) can help firm up wind at high penetrations.

  It also means that you use less fossil fired capacity to back wind. Remember that wind capacity factors are like 25-35%, so even if you have your wind capacity matched to your peak load, a large chunk of your energy is still coming from some other source. If that source is hydro (as in Denmark, with neighboring Norway providing lots of balancing) then no problem. If you are balancing with natural gas or even worse an old intermediate load coal plant, then you are really not doing a great job cutting CO2 emissions.

  So if you have lots of transmission capacity to spare and can tie wind farms across the country, or if you have lots of eco-friendly hydro (not a lot of that in the great plains though), then you might not need storage. Otherwise, storage might be a good thing to consider. And considering lots of transmission projects are facing huge NIMBY (not in my backyard) and BANANA (build absolutley nothing anywhere near anything) issues, storage could likely play a big role as wind continues to expandOn American Electric Power to install large battery banks to store wind energy posted 2 years, 2 months ago 10 Responses

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  err....

  If you start with the assumption that you need to preserve the coal industry, then you've started on the wrong foot already.

  The coal industry does not lack a place at any table in US politics.  I agree that carbon policy moves forward faster if more constituencies see it in their best interest (e.g. converting closing GM plants into wind turbine manufacturing facilities) but framing CCS as a way to preserve an industry is exactly the wrong approach.

  Once viable technologies are established, there's ways forward that take into consideration all stockholders, but we can't define the future by what came before. Especially when it comes to allocating money for research, development and demonstration plants.

  "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse." - Henry FordOn Carbon sequestration is a costly alternative to renewables, not a transition to them posted 2 years, 2 months ago 21 Responses

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  agreed!

  Efficiency? YES! Renewables? YES!

  I agree, I agree, I agree. Lets do all of it!

  But if CCS gives a way to make climate change mitigation easier, then lets take look at it. The carbon price needed to bring in CCS for power generation (~$30/tCO2) is equivalent to about 25¢/gal of gasoline. Is that really that much? And even if it is, thats not a reason to ignore it as a potential solution given the urgency of the problem. Any technology that has the potential to get us off of "business as usual" in a significant way and quickly is worth pursuing.

  I'm just going throw this out again because its worth repeating - when I saw if the first time it really conveyed the urgency of this issue to me:

  
  Base on current trends (BAU), the emissions from coal plants in the 2003-2030 time period will be comparable to all the carbon emitted from coal plants over the past 250 years

  (Socolow, R., 2005: Can we bury global warming?, Scientific American, pp. 49-55, July)
  

  On Carbon sequestration is a costly alternative to renewables, not a transition to them posted 2 years, 2 months ago 21 Responses

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  the expense of coal

  If you're saying that coal is expensive when you take into account externalities, then I totally agree. What I'm saying is that supercritical steam coal-fired power plants currently enjoy a high rate of return compared to other forms of electricity generation. That is what's fueling an expansion of coal capacity. Thats the reality and any solution that stops an SCS plant and puts a low-carbon alternative in its place is something that merits consideration regardless of what fuel it uses.

  Regading the possibliity of China pursuing IGCC with CCS - all I can say is that buying down the costs of the technology can only make it easier to promote adoption of the technology. There are already plans for huge increases in wind capacity in China (last year was astonishing in terms of growth rate), but its not putting any brakes on the expansion of conventional coal. Making the alternative cheaper may not be enough, but it may be a step in the right direction. Perhaps this combined with CDM-type instruments and international pressure....

  I'm open to all possibilities at this point. I'm just saying don't rule out CCS just because it requires an equivalent carbon price of $30/tCO2 todayOn Carbon sequestration is a costly alternative to renewables, not a transition to them posted 2 years, 2 months ago 21 Responses