Jane asks the question “Should the U.S. power grid move underground?” I would suggest this question be asked in all jurisdictions where weather events can lead to power failures.
A good example is PG&E, the California utility, whose above-ground electrical distribution system was the spark that caused a massive forest fire in the state.
Toppled utility poles and splayed power lines are unfortunately common, starting fires and damaging homes. In the United States, federal and state governments today are working to modernize the grid in conjunction with utility companies and urban design experts. Making electricity transmission more resilient and robust is a priority with a focus on withstanding natural disasters. Volatile climate activity makes many question if the grid would be safer underground. So does the rise in security threats.
Cybercriminals target critical power infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has realized this having been recently compromised by online criminal acts against the grid. As a result, the DoE has invested $34 million in moving grid technology in 11 states to below-ground. Doing this is one way to block vandals from physically interrupting power delivery.
To stop cybercriminals requires improved monitoring and running of the power grid because underground power infrastructure is not impenetrable to software hacks. Existing legacy systems need upgrades with active defence, widely deployed sensors, and reporting software. Threats may still come from physically digging below ground to try and interrupt the power, but with detection technologies grid operators can receive 24/7 alerts and know where a perpetrator is operating.
Households continue to increase the number of electric devices they use. Heat pumps and EV chargers only function if the electricity is on. The grid demand of the 21st century calls for better management, solutions and a hardened infrastructure to handle the ever-increasing demand.
Another trend is consumers transitioning to cleaner energy sources. Households are looking for ways to access power when the grid goes down. Climate change is raising expectations that outages will increase, be more severe, and will cost more. Hence, they are seeking smart technology and off-grid supplementation while striving to achieve a low-carbon future.
Grid designers are equally seeking ways to democratize power distribution to make it more robust. A good first step in the redesign is to downsize the number of above-grid powerlines. The immediate benefit is seen as strengthening the reliability of delivery whether to homes or businesses.
An unsuspecting transmission line often creeps into gorgeous nature photography or ruins the view of an expensive tourist attraction. Visual pollution disrupts skylines and scenic beauty. I know this seems like a menial motivator for moving the grid below ground, but it can have considerable positive effects.
Destroyed power lines do more than mess up a beautiful view. They contaminate oceans, pollute plains, erode hillsides with uprooted trees and can spark fires. The devastation that downed powerlines can cause includes displaced species and habitats potentially beyond repair. Environmental awareness and care increase when there are fewer overhead wires.
Tourists like it better, too. An environment without visible power is more desirable to visit or live in. Their removal can significantly increase property values and preserve the aesthetic of the landscape.
In 2023, citizens of Hawaii suspected that their electric company was the reason for 111 wildfire-related deaths on Maui because it did not shut down power lines at the time of an extreme high-wind event. PG&E went through a civil trial for its exposed liability when wildfires broke out in California forests where downed powerlines sparked the fires that led to homes and lives lost. Similar lawsuits against utility providers have increased because of aging and neglected infrastructure.
If powerlines weren’t on poles but rather underground, the abovementioned disasters would likely have been avoidable. If the utility companies had the technology to execute shutdowns quickly, disasters like these would be far less likely. Moving power-delivery infrastructure below ground eliminates liability and lawsuits.
Most evidence points to underground technology as a way to harden the grid against extreme weather events. Are there reasons to justify why powerlines remain above ground? The strongest reason to remain above ground is ease of access. It takes specialized equipment to install and maintain powerlines below ground.
Earthquakes represent another concern when burying powerlines. Areas prone to these events may have to avoid below-ground power infrastructure and look at alternative technology to protect the grid. This is one of the issues that companies like PG&E in the past, have faced when considering burying the lines.
Critical grid infrastructure is associated with towering, expansive transmission lines. Building underground in the 21st century, however, may be where utilities will move to in consideration of extreme weather events associated with climate change. When you build underground, no snow weighs down and breaks powerlines. No powerful wind gusts penetrate to where the wires and infrastructure lie buried. Even if a portion of the grid is below ground, it gives utilities better grid reliability and reduces their liability in the changing world of the 21st century.
]]>At a recent Edison Electric Institute (EEI) conference, keynote speakers Bill Gates and Elon Musk described their visions of mass electrification. With today’s energy demands being met by a combination of electricity from renewable and non-renewable sources, and the balance coming from fossil fuels for industrial and heating uses, Musk told the conference attendees that only a tripling of sustainable electricity will produce a successful low-carbon future.
Musk has called for adding renewable energy sources en masse to the grid, more electric vehicles, heat pumps in buildings and homes, and hydrogen used in manufacturing and for airplanes and ships. This he calls the future of a “sustainable energy civilization.” To back up renewable energy he envisions increasing the world’s energy storage capacity by 240 Terrawatt-hours (Twhs) just for the United States alone.
Bill Gates also sees a very different grid from the one presently in place. Gates has been writing about modernizing the power grid, noting that most of the current transmission and distribution infrastructure dates back to the 1950s to 1970s. He describes the current state of the grid as being past its 50-year best-before date. He also notes that the grid’s power sources in the current model are located far away from where optimal renewable energy capacity exists. The places where the sun shines the most and where the winds blow best are not where the majority of nuclear, thermal, and hydroelectric power stations exist today.
Gates has been investing in next-generation power projects including nuclear reactors of both the fission and fusion type. One of his pet projects is TerraPower’s Natrium demonstration project in Wyoming which is expected to begin operating in 2030.
His Breakthrough Energy Fund is backing fusion power demonstration plants and envisions many fusion reactors being built that will feed electricity to grids across the planet for the next 10 million years.
Gates used different numbers than Musk in his EEI discussion. He forecasted global electrical power generation capacity to grow from 6 to 20 Twhs to bring the entire planet on a level playing field with the Western countries of the Global North. The difference in capacity forecasts between the two is that Musk only was talking about energy storage which needs to exceed the total sum of power generation capacity.
What the two didn’t talk about which surprised me, particularly referring to Musk, was the potential to generate energy from space that could either feed into future grids or bypass them entirely in a fully distributed model should the current work being done at Caltech succeed.
Space-based solar arrays that convert electricity to microwaves or lasers connected to on-the-ground receivers feeding the grid is one technology option. The other would be a point-to-point technology that uses a constellation of small solar power-generating satellites forming a mesh space power delivery system converting light energy to microwaves to connect directly to receivers in homes and businesses. This would resemble the current Starlink telecommunications network that uses a constellation of satellites to provide global telephone and data feeds.
A point-to-point system would bypass power grids which would only be needed for backup. This could reduce the need for an enormous ramp-up of grid infrastructure and would serve to democratize energy for all on the planet.
]]>In this posting, Jane describes the challenges and solutions that the U.S. and other countries are considering or implementing to sustain the power grid during extreme heat events that cause system-wide failures. Governments, utilities and consumers are becoming power aware as we feel the insidious creep of global warming.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Global warming is causing rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures, extreme weather events and natural disasters worldwide. As a result, power outages called blackouts are more frequent than ever before. During this summer, these power outages combined with excessive heat pose a significant risk to human health. And the strain on utilities is leading to a search for solutions to harden what is deemed to be failing grids everywhere on the planet.
Things have gotten hot in North America this summer. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. has been at risk for blackouts during peak demand, particularly in New England and west of the Mississippi River.
Changing demographics in the U.S. aren’t making things easier as more Americans migrate to the south and southwest, in other words, the hottest and most energy-pressured states. It’s like watching the proverbial lemmings jumping off the cliff. Needless to say, the utilities responsible for delivering power and maintaining the grid are feeling the strain.
The power grid in the U.S. is showing its age in recent years with extreme weather events happening in communities from Texas to the South and Western states. The nation’s crumbling electricity infrastructure is struggling to overcome what nature is delivering, from snow and ice storms to massive hurricanes and extreme heat waves.
The U.S. isn’t alone in battling climate change. Many other countries are seeing their electrical grids impacted by these changing conditions. Asia has endured excessive heat and grid failures. Nearly 300 cities in China reached record-high temperatures of 35 Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) in the summer of 2022. In Guangdong province’s capital Guangzhou, where the area recorded 37 to 40 Celsius (98 to 104 Fahrenheit) for a week, blackouts were a common occurrence.
That same summer London in the United Kingdom experienced its hottest day on record at 40.3 Celsius (105 Fahrenheit), exceeding 2019’s record readings. The UK’s National Grid Electricity System Operator avoided outages by importing power from Belgium. It paid a premium, 5,000% more than normal for the electricity to keep lights and air conditioning running.
Some of us live in climate zones where we can open a window for ventilation or use a ceiling fan to cool a room. Ceiling fans alone can ease electricity demand when operating because they allow users to set thermostats to 2.2 Celsius (4 Fahrenheit) warmer to remain comfortable. But what happens when the power goes out?
According to a recent White House statement, 70% of U.S. grid transmission lines are 25 years past their prime. The U.S. is no exception. For example, about one-third of the European grid is more than 40 years old. Canada’s grid on average is 32 years old.
Utilities that rely on grid performance efficiency to help them deliver electricity from thermal, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar power plants need a reliable infrastructure that can handle heat waves and sudden spikes in energy demand. Growing renewable infrastructure imposes new challenges on utilities for several reasons that include power variability, and home-generated rooftop solar capable of feeding power back into the system.
In 2022, approximately 24% of U.S. energy generation was derived from renewable sources. Meanwhile, wind and solar contributed 22% of Europe’s electricity generation.
Microgrids are increasingly becoming part of the energy mix. Separate from the primary grid, microgrids operate locally and independently. They boost resilience and enable quicker responses to power demand spikes and outages.
Microgrids are heavily invested in renewable sources of energy. In California, the state has established the $200 million Microgrid Incentive Program (MIP) to combat excessive heat demand and wildfires. MIP has been designed to significantly benefit underserved communities by ensuring continuous, clean power for those deemed most vulnerable.
Microgrids are popping up across the globe. In Costa Rica, where 98.6% of energy generation comes from renewable sources, the country has partnered with the microgrid company Sunshine Energy to harden grid resilience, creating jobs, and boosting the economy. This has allowed Costa Rica to meet the needs of its rural population ensuring reliable connectivity and lower utility costs.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts 100 million homes worldwide will install rooftop solar panels by 2030, up from 25 million households today. The growth in rooftop solar is proving beneficial in reducing blackouts with most systems remaining connected to the main grid as a backup. Many utilities participate in net-metering receiving excess power to the grid from rooftop panels producing more than homeowners consume.
Solar batteries are also proving to be game changers for the grid improving reliability and resilience. They store excess electricity from rooftop and utility solar power. Homeowners can tap into solar batteries to provide overnight power. And utilities can rely on them to provide supplemental electricity during peak demand periods without having to build out more non-renewable generation capacity.
Using renewable energy to give peak traditional power generation a break is already proving to be successful. Here are some examples:
Finally, in a study published in 2021 in the journal Renewable Energy that looked at grid stability in 2050 across the U.S., it noted that future blackouts could be avoided entirely by transitioning to 100% clean, renewable energy with significant cost reductions for consumers of up to 57% per Kilowatt-hour. The transition would also produce cleaner air, a healthier population as a result, and 4.7 million new jobs.
With global warming no longer speculative science, a more resilient grid combining renewables and microgrids will stop needless deaths when the power goes out. As António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, stated last month “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” Grid infrastructure that can hold up to today’s and tomorrow’s climate events needs a robust renewable solution now.
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Perovskite has been seen as an alternative material to silicon for use in photovoltaic cells. The problem with perovskite has always been its durability when exposed for prolonged periods to light and heat. Considering that is the environment in which solar panels work, that would immediately make you think that perovskite would be a non-starter. On the positive side perovskite material costs are less than silicon and manufacturing solar cells with it is simpler.
Researchers at UCLA looked into ways to augment perovskite to increase its durability. They identified an additive, neodymium, a metal that when incorporated in small quantities into perovskite makes it a “game changer” according to its UCLA inventors. Not only will perovskite be better than silicon, but it will also be even easier to mass produce.
Today, neodymium is used in microphones, speakers, lasers and decorative glass. When added to perovskite its ions get incorporated into the crystals making the material better at holding negative charges. Eight neodymium ions per 10,000 molecules of perovskite has turned out to be the perfect formula for creating perovskite panels that are 93% efficient in converting light to electricity over 1,000 hours of continuous exposure. The new material when heated to 82 Celsius (180 Fahrenheit) endured 2,000 hours at an energy conversion efficiency rate of 86%.
The UCLA team believes its perovskite-based solar cells should be on the market in the next two to three years. Their research appears in a paper entitled “Suppressing ion migration in metal halide perovskite via interstitial doping with a trace amount of multivalent cations” which is a handful. It was published in late November of last year in Nature Materials.
Forever shy these days about being in the news considering past wildfire disasters, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) earlier this month entered into a partnership with the Swiss company, Energy Vault, to create long-duration energy storage for the Northern California city, of Calistoga. It is designed to power the downtown and surroundings in the event of a Public Safety Power Shutoff when powerlines need to be shut down in the event of wildfire risk. The Energy Vault will supply 293 megawatt-hours (MWh) of carbon-free energy. Under the agreement between the two companies, PG&E can expand the storage capacity to deliver 700 MWh to operate for longer than the initial 48 hours.
Energy Vault replaces mobile diesel generators used during microgrid outages and should be operational by mid-2024. It is described as “the largest utility-scale green hydrogen project in the United States.” It is a fully renewable green battery storage system that uses electrolytic hydrogen fuel cells and produces zero carbon emissions. PG&E hopes to make it a model for utility-hybrid storage systems deployable across its entire infrastructure.
In his latest Bill Gates GatesNotes, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation describes the current state of America’s power grid and how it can be brought up to date. He notes the issue is equally important around the world while describing the U.S. as a case study.
Why does the grid need a total refresh? Because of where renewable energy is generated. In the past utilities built power stations close to customers. So thermal power plants were located near large urban centres. But wind and solar farms in the U.S. are far away from where the energy gets used. They are found where there is lots of sunlight and conditions that maximize wind: think Arizona for the former and Wyoming for the latter. With power produced far from where it will mostly be consumed, the grid will need to be expanded with longer lines.
Gates points out that the current grid infrastructure was built between the 1950s and 1970s and has only a 50-year life expectancy. When you add increasing extreme weather events in the last few decades, this creaking infrastructure is obsolete and vulnerable.
Gates argues that solutions like the previously described PG&E-Energy Vault microgrid partnership need to become commonplace in the 21st-century redesign of the power grid. He also calls for national planning and funding of the power grid while working with local utilities on distributed energy and microgrid delivery systems.
He concludes that transmission will be key to America’s clean energy future which will mean “lower emissions, cleaner air, more jobs, fewer blackouts, more energy and economic security, and healthier communities across the country.”
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Recently researchers at the Sandia National Laboratory Kirtland Air Force Base in the United States demonstrated a closed-loop Brayton Cycle engine technology as it delivered power to the electrical grid continuously. Sandia has been working with the Brayton Cycle technology for power generation for some time now because it is seen as having significant energy conversion advantages over conventional steam turbines by as much as 50%.
George Brayton, a 19th-century American inventor experimented with internal combustion engines. The Brayton Cycle Engine is his invention dating back to 1878. The engine worked by heating compressed air in a closed space before releasing it to power a rotating shaft. Substitute a turbine for a rotating shaft and you get the picture. States Darryn Fleming, at the US Department of Energy (DOE) Supercritical Transformational Electric Power Program, the Brayton Cycle is “basically a jet engine running in a closed loop with supercritical CO2 as the working fluid.”
Sandia’s use of supercritical CO2 (the gas under very high pressure) is more than just happenstance. Supercritical CO2 is chemically stable, non-flammable, non-toxic, and should increasingly be available as carbon capture projects increased promoted by incentives and subsidy programs contained within the recently US-passed Inflation Reduction Act.
A diagram showing the Brayton Cycle can be seen above. The gas is heated to temperatures much greater than steam at water’s boiling point, 100 Celsius (212 Fahrenheit). In fact, heated CO2 can reach temperatures seven times greater (700 Celsius or 1,290 Fahrenheit). That’s what makes the energy conversion 50% more efficient than using steam which loses as much as a third of its energy potential as it converts back to water during the process.
This past April, a Sandia team heated CO2 to 315 Celsius (600 Fahrenheit), a little less than half the optimal temperature. Their Brayton Cycle engine was able to send continuous power to the grid for 50 minutes. Although only 10 Kilowatt-hours, less than a third of what the average American home consumes in a day, it was the first demonstration of the technology as a reliable energy streaming source for the electrical grid. The test included three controlled shutdowns and restarts and the technology aced it.
Scaling up from 10 Kilowatts to 1 Megawatt appears to be doable by 2024 based on the Sandia Labs team. They plan to double the temperature of the supercritical CO2 in the next iteration of the Brayton Cycle engine. It requires upgrading materials and parts to withstand these changes in heat and pressure. A 1-Megawatt demonstration technology will be enough to power up to 1,000 homes or could be used to replace diesel generators in remote locations such as communities in Alaska or Northern Canada.
The Sandia Labs team goal along with industry partners is to increase the capacity of their Brayton Cycle system to generate up to 5 Megawatt-hours continuously to the electrical grid. They see that as being a technology that grid operators will be more willing to allow. That’s because those operating and maintaining the grid don’t take kindly to anyone disrupting it in any way. For utilities, the work being done at the Sandia Labs could prove to be a game changer in what is a power industry moving away from its heavy reliance on fossil-fuel thermal energy production.
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The many blank spaces indicate that grid-distributed energy is a luxury for much of the continent. But does Africa have to build a power grid infrastructure similar to those found in Europe and North America? Or can the continent develop an electricity distribution model that is a true reflection of the 21st century?
Think how much of Africa has implemented telephone infrastructure. Instead of telephone poles and landlines, the continent has been able to deploy mobile cellular networks with more than 650 million users on the continent. That number is greater than the number of cellphone users in either the United States or Europe. How has Africa created its cellular network without a parallel electricity grid provides clues as to how the continent should move forward on the issue of power.
Why not dispense with a grid entirely? I look at the picture below and see an interesting juxtaposition of old and new: a thatched-roof hut powered by a solar panel. Consider this a metaphor for how Africa can move ahead with electrical infrastructure different from Old and New World paradigms.
What Africa needs today is reliable electrical power. For much of the Sub-Saharan part of the continent, there is little to no electricity. According to United Nations-collected data, as of 2014, this has impacted 62% of the population.
Africa can leapfrog transmission towers and power lines, and go off-grid to a large extent by developing local distribution clusters powered by wind, solar, geothermal, and micro-nuclear while keeping the existing utility infrastructure of hydroelectric and thermal power plants without a larger investment. To go beyond local distribution of electricity, Africa may consider developing technologies such as microwave-energy transmission.
Today in Sub-Saharan Africa, off-the-grid small villages are connected to the Internet by standalone telecommunications installations like Clear Blue Technologies, a Toronto-based company. Each installation is powered by solar and battery backup and provides communities with WiFi Internet connectivity and phone service. The same technology is also delivering electrical power to villages, lighting homes and powering refrigerators and other appliances. So we know that off-grid can work.
But what about energy distribution clusters? In 2016, a building in Bloomington, Minnesota installed a microgrid, a distributed energy generation decentralized technology that no longer required hookups to long-distance transmission lines. In other words, it was grid-independent. The building was powered by a combination of natural gas turbines, a solar array, wind turbines, battery storage, a diesel backup generator and in the event of all the others failing, a utility connection to the local grid provider.
The city of Adelaide in South Australia has clusters of buildings in its downtown all powered through a series of microgrids, each with solar panels supplemented by battery backup and more conventional energy generation.
Then there is transmitting energy without wires. Emrod, a New Zealand-based company has developed a method of wirelessly transmitting electricity over long distances safely. Powerco, New Zealand’s second-largest energy provider, is its first customer.
And a quick note about microreactors. Earlier this week I posted a story about this emerging technology. These are small output modular reactors for use individually or conjoined where more energy capacity is needed. They can be dropped into almost any community to power a village or a cluster of companies independent of the power grid.
So does Africa need to fill the map above with more transmission lines? Not with what is available to them here in the 21st century.
]]>The work is being done by a team within X Lab, a skunkworks operation within Alphabet that focuses on breakthrough technologies with the potential to create disruptive, sustainable transformative businesses. Why transformative? Because the projects X Labs works on aim to deliver global solutions to current and anticipated human challenges.
X Lab’s work is aimed at using artificial intelligence (AI) to create a comprehensive visualization of the entire power grid leading to better planning and more effective operations. Astro Teller, who heads up X Lab has brought on Audry Zibelman, a former CEO of AEMO, an Australian energy company to head up this particular endeavour. Zibelman brings expertise in decarbonizing the generation and delivery of electricity. But he also will focus on grid stability, something that was truly non-evident when Texas was subjected to a polar vortex in February this year that led to massive power disruptions across the state.
The subject of modernizing the grid is one that is near and dear to my heart. Back when I was doing telecommunications and network consulting in the late 1990s, I began studying how the power grid could become a data transmission source. I envisioned data streaming along with electricity to everywhere the grid went. Instead of an Internet cable, the power cord would not only provide the energy to run your computer but also all the data you received and all you transmitted. There were a number of challenges to this concept. Probably the biggest was handling step-down transformers at the last mile. How could data not get scrambled or destroyed when it passed along with the electricity through a transformer?
The technology I proposed was an AI solution plus centralized network monitoring that could serve to monitor both power and data delivery. It meant deploying sensors containing software neural agents (pieces of AI code) that would establish baseline performance at every critical point throughout the grid and learn all its behaviours. The neural agents would in time anticipate when performance was not nominal and would compensate. This was what I conceived of back then. Alas, the technology was still too early in development to meet what I had in mind. But it made me cognizant of what could be done in the future.
Enter Alphabet and its X Lab electric grid moonshot headed up by Teller. He writes in an April blog posting, “The electric grid is an engineering marvel — a vast and complex system that keeps our lights on and powers all of the devices that are now essential to modern life. Designed more than a century ago for electricity to flow in one direction from fossil-fueled plants to cities and towns, it wasn’t built for what the modern world is asking of it.”
Why is it incompatible with 21st century needs?
Teller wants to reimagine the grid by introducing machine learning, advanced computing tools, and AI. He wants to create a virtual grid that would be an accurate representation of the real one. The virtual grid could be used as a simulated testing ground. The questions he raises include:
With the exception of predicting the weather, I believe all of the challenges Teller poses can be answered satisfactorily. And I still dream of a grid that can serve not just to be an energy, but also an information highway, something I hope the folks in the X Lab can try and execute. The latter would mean data would share the power lines, come directly to your home through the same power cords you use to plug in all your appliances, computers, lights, and more. Imagine what that would conceivably do for smart homes.
]]>According to Bill Gates and the Breakthrough Energy Sciences (BES) organization founded by the Microsoft billionaire, the U.S. could achieve 70% carbon-free electricity and emissions reductions of 42% by the end of the decade. The cost, $1.5 trillion, $400 billion less than the current COVID rescue plan.
Achieving a renewable energy balance for the U.S. power grid will require investments in clean generation capacity and an enhanced transmission network to support it. Called the Macro Grid, the network will combine high-voltage direct current transmission (HVDC) with conventional AC transmission. Why a combination?
HVDC is more efficient for long-distance transmission. Renewable power generators like wind and solar produce direct current. Using HVDC combined with AC allows for the different regions of the U.S. to complement each other. Some areas like the Western states produce more renewable wind and solar while many Eastern states rely on thermal generated power using coal and natural gas. These power plants are more suited to AC transmission.
BES’s research has focused on four options to connect the country’s renewable resources to customers. It requires significant investments in new wind and solar capacity. Through these investments, the U.S. would be able to reduce annual grid emissions by 850 million tons.
The major challenge that wind and solar present is their variability as energy sources. How do you build an assured energy flow if the wind stops or the sun doesn’t shine? That means “we need to find ways to make the grid more robust to…these kinds of challenges,” states Dhileep Sivam, Vice President of BES.
Improved energy transmission across the U.S. would involve better integration of renewables and an increase in the grid’s resiliency. That’s why finding better ways to transfer electricity across the country is key to making renewable energy increasingly dominant.
In their proposals, BES notes that the energy captured from strong winds and sunny skies in different parts of the country needs to be available to consumers in places where those conditions at the time of generation do not exist. A windy day in Texas should be able to power up homes in California when there is no wind in that state. And a sunny day in California should be able to power a mid-western home in Texas on a day when local winds die down. If such were the case, the problems Texas faced during the recent polar vortex causing coal and natural gas thermal power plants to fail along with breakdowns in local wind turbines, would not have mattered because power would have been delivered to homes and businesses from across the grid originating elsewhere.
The BES proposals, which include upgrades to local AC transmission lines to link up short distances, and HVDC lines to connect resources crossing multiple states would lead to complete decarbonization of the U.S. grid by 2035, meeting the current administration’s targeted goals.
There are jurisdictional challenges to what BES is proposing. In the U.S., every state has sovereignty over energy generation and transmission. Utility companies tend to stay within political boundaries unless they are multi-state energy providers. Therefore local regulatory processes need to be overcome for the BES plan to succeed.
According to BES, if all states that have adopted 2030 clean energy goals were to meet them, the cost of upgrades would be $360 billion. The emissions reduction, however, would amount to a mere 6%, a far cry from the national target or the one proposed by BES above.
What’s missing from the BES plan. There is no discussion about energy storage and how adding battery capacity could impact the grid. Nor is there any mention of green hydrogen.
BES has made their model open source to allow anyone in the field to comment and contribute to the plan. Plans are afoot to look at Europe and other geographies.
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Considering what happened in Texas, maybe it’s time to get to understand how electricity is produced and delivered.
A power grid is a mass of equipment designed to create and transfer electricity from one place to another. Power plants generate electricity through various means. Fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) and nuclear are two of the most common energy sources for generating electricity.
The turn to more sustainable practices includes hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal energy generation. Depending on location and provider practices, the electricity you use could come from any of these sources.
Once electricity is generated it requires a medium for transmission traveling through conductors while insulators manage the direction and flow of the energy. Transmitted from generators, electricity gets introduced to the power grid where it is conducted through high-energy capacity wires to electrical distribution centres and substations.
The high voltage that enters substations must be decreased before it can be used by homes, factories and businesses. Through transformers, the electricity is futher reduced in voltage so it doesn’t overwhelm smaller systems. Bus bars aid this distribution process and plays other vital roles within electrical systems. The metallic strips transfer high currents for localized dissemination, especially in large buildings and apartment complexes.
The final stop in the electrical journey is your home. From creation to use, electricity must travel hundreds of kilometers to recharge smartphones, and power microwaves, home appliances, televisions, and HVAC systems. When in the home, a central switchboard connects every outlet through internal wiring with the electricity flowing into your appliances.
Now that you know how electricity gets generated and delivered to your home or business, it may help you to better navigate power problems that you may face in the future. Or at least, when you call your utility provider and they explain to you why your power is out, you will at least be able to understand where they screwed up.
]]>Storing energy is nothing new. From the Neolithic Revolution to the present, humans have attempted to harness the latent power of nature whether it be falling water or fire. In building dams, we created an early form of storage technology. The end goal wasn’t to produce electricity but to use the force generated by water falling from a height to power machinery. In this case, the water wheel which became a common way to power mills for grinding cereal crops. Water wheels were used to power sawmills before we learned to harness electricity. The water wheel’s descendant today is the turbine which in hydroelectric facilities is used to power generators turning the energy of falling water into kilowatt-hours of electricity.
The grids that crisscross continents today are extremely complex. They have been designed for power-sharing and distribution that follows daily patterns. Energy storage currently plays a small part in ensuring power is available where needed at all times. One of the reasons it plays only a small part is because existing power generation and distribution capacity have been built to exceed peak demand.
The pattern of power requirements is a predictable cycle of daily, weekly, and seasonal demand. Matching supply to the need is one of the raison d’etres for continental power grids. The current grid has been built to ensure demand will always be met at the highest peaks unless something not predictable happens. When the unpredictable does occur in one or more utilities that feed the grid, power generation capacity from other sources can meet the emergency. This isn’t always the case leading to brownouts and occasional blackouts.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration describes how power demands change daily and throughout the year. The patterns are consistent:
A pool of water’s latent energy is a form of storage. Today, dams that provide hydroelectric power stations with energy from falling water to continuously produce electricity can take advantage of lower than peak periods to reverse the water flow. By pumping water uphill into reservoirs, they can use the increased water volume during peak demand periods to deliver added kilowatts of power to the grid.
In the United States, the first pumped storage facility opened in 1929 in Connecticut. Since then the growth of energy storage has surpassed 31.2 Gigawatts as of early 2019, a fraction of the more than one thousand Gigawatts of the country’s installed generation capacity. That amounts to 0.3% which sounds absurd considering the balancing act previously described for dealing with peak, shoulder, and low demand electricity requirements.
Globally, elsewhere energy storage for power generation plays a greater role in the mix. In 2018 total energy storage capacity exceeded 175 Gigawatts. In Europe, 10% of the continent’s power came from stored energy, while Japan’s stored energy amounted to 15% of capacity.
California has been the big player in energy storage in the United States. As of 2018, of the 300 energy storage projects there, 220 were grid-connected. The remainder were associated with distributed local energy delivery and off-grid.
The future of energy storage on the planet is likely less and less tied to traditional utilities and the grid as new energy storage materials and technologies emerge. The illustration below shows the range of energy storage technologies present and future.
Beyond pumped hydro, compressed air, different types of batteries using familiar chemistry such as lead-acid, and ones more exotic based on aluminum, sulfur, potassium, that breathe air and don’t require oxidizers, flow batteries, cryogenic storage, flywheels, magnetic energy storage, supercapacitors, and advanced fuel cell technologies, these existing and nascent technologies are ready to play a role in supporting the existing power grid. But more importantly, they are the bridge to solving the intermittency issues associated with the current forms of renewable energy on the planet today: wind, solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, geothermal, wave, and tidal power.
Their application will alter both grid and off-grid power delivery. Storage technologies give utilities greater flexibility in distribution and capacity. Storage technologies can save money and prolong the life of the power grid which has some old-age problems. If you don’t believe me, read the article I posted previously on this website about the long-term survival of the electrical grid.
Just how innovative can we get with energy storage. Carbonate fuel cells are a technology that does not just supplement the energy requirements of a powerplant burning fossil fuels, but also captures and uses the carbon emissions as the material in its fuel cell stacks. In 2016, Exxon installed a pilot project of experimental carbonate fuel cells at an existing coal and gas-fired power plant near Mobile, Alabama. So far so good. If widely adopted, this type of innovation could be a significant gamechanger for both grid and distributed power.
Recently, Tesla built a 100 Megawatt lithium-ion battery for an Australian utility. It is the world’s largest lithium-ion storage system, and one of a number of Australian-based projects slated for completion next year.
And speaking of distributed energy storage, in a recent Navigant Research study entitled “Country Forecasts for Distributed Energy Storage,” it cites the increase in solar and wind power as key to a projected 20 times increase in distributed storage systems by 2028. Research analyst for Navigant, Ricardo F. Rodriguez, sees the growth of distributed energy storage as a panacea for dealing with peak capacity requirements with or off-grid. And unlike reserve gas-fired powerplants that need to be brought online in periods of peak demand, storage systems can release electricity instantaneously with no downtime or ramping up, a distinct advantage over older paradigms.
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