California's Renewable Energy Problem

This real engineering episode is brought to you by a brilliant

problem

-solving website that teaches you how to think like an engineer. Monetary climate stabilization plans depend on the

energy

sector moving towards net-zero carbon dioxide production by 2050. To achieve this, fossil fuel power plants are starting. Globally shut down coal The world's stable

energy

source for centuries has been falling out of favor since 2015 With a 70% drop in new construction projects, this decline cannot be entirely attributed to global change Attitudes towards change Climate economic pressures have been the driving force for many of the shutdowns as solar and wind power continue to get cheaper, California is among the most proactive places in the world when it comes to

renewable

energy and they have good reason to be that droughts and wildfires have plagued the state in recent years and Trends. indicate that they will continue to worsen with the increase in global temperatures in the last eight years.

California's energy sources have changed dramatically in 2010. Its energy sources looked like this, with most of the energy coming from natural gas. Hydroelectricity. Nuclear and geothermal. In 2018, each of these energies. Energy sources have declined in percentage of total energy production: solar power has increased to a staggering 19% in just eight years and wind power has more than doubled to 6.5 percent last year. California lawmakers set a goal of reaching 100%

renewable

energy for states by 2045 and at least This pace California is on track But California's progress is about to get much more expensive and difficult to switch to 100% energy renewable Even in sunny California it's not as easy as installing solar panels.

Let's find out. Why visit Moss Landing in beautiful Monterey Bay? This natural gas power plant began producing power in 1950 with a rated capacity of six hundred and thirteen megawatts. In 2002, it was the largest power plant in the state of California with a capacity of two thousand five hundred and sixty megawatts. It has gone through many changes in those seventy years of operation with older, less efficient systems retired and replaced with modern, more efficient and cleaner systems. Last year, the latest upgrade to the facility was announced with an unprecedented battery storage facility. with a total of 567 megawatts of storage, making it the largest battery installation in the world.

This battery storage facility is designed to take on the role of the Moss Landing power plants as a Peeker station that provides surges of power to the grid when needed and thus decreased natural gas use in California. . The California grid operator provides historical and lifetime statistics on energy generation and consumption. Let's take a look at a typical day in the state. This is the energy supply for May 24, 2018. This line is the energy obtained from hydroelectricity. We can see that nuclear power from the Diablo Canyon power plant provides a constant base load. What is this flat exit line?

This supply is diverted very little throughout the year. At constant 2,280 megawatts, about 90 percent of the state's needs, this power plant rarely varies its load because it takes an enormous amount of time to do so here. We can see the very noticeable increase in renewable energy starting at 6 a.m. When the sun rises on this day, thirty-four point five percent of California's electricity was provided by renewable energy, 51% of it coming from solar energy, this is fantastic. But we have a big

problem

, solar power started decreasing at 5 p.m., right when the population of California. He was about to leave work and be stuck in traffic for hours before getting home to turn on the air conditioning, cook dinner, and watch TV.

This results in peak power demand at half past eight. Four and a half hours after our solar supply peaked. To address this demand, California is beginning to ramp up its natural gas power plants, which can quickly increase its energy output to meet surges in demand. California also imported a significant amount of energy from other states, primarily wind and hydroelectric electricity from the Pacific Northwest. Nevada nuclear coal and natural gas as California seeks carbon-neutral energy supply. They are looking to phase out these natural gas power states and replace them with batteries that can store excess solar electricity.

So that it is available when necessary? This battery installation in Moss. Landing will fill that role and make no mistake. Batteries are now cheap enough to be a financially viable solution for California on small scales like this. Allow power companies to buy cheap solar energy and sell it for a profit when demand requires it. However, this business model does not last long as we grow. Let's calculate how much battery storage California would need to replace. Just this peak natural gas power on May 24, 2018, step 1. Load the data of this day and graft the natural gas power production.

This data has a resolution of five minutes. But we are going to reduce the resolution to one hour for ease of data. to Paris We will assume that our new grid will contain a constant base load of natural gas power of four thousand two hundred and twenty megawatts, which represents a 10 percent drop in our daytime natural gas usage and a 1.7 percent drop when expressed as a percentage. of total energy use in a day in an ideal world I think California would be generating this base load using nuclear power. But that seems unlikely since regulators voted early last year to shut down the Diablo Canyon power plant.

California's last nuclear power plant. Now we can clearly see the power we need to provide with batteries is the area that rises above our base load. To calculate this we simply need to calculate the area of ​​this section which will give us our battery storage requirements in megawatt hours. This works out to approximately eleven thousand two. one hundred megawatt hour of energy storage Tesla's one hundred and twenty-nine megawatt hour battery storage facility for speakers Dale firm in Australia had a price tag of fifty-six million dollars. Extrapolating that figure to an eleven thousand two hundred megawatt hour battery, we could expect a total cost of four point eight six billion dollars.

We could probably achieve a lower battery cost over time, as battery prices continue to drop over time. It is not an absurd number. The Diablo Canyon power plant, which has approximately five times the daily energy. The production cost 13.8 to build. However, it is important to remember that batteries. They do not generate their own energy. And for this to be a worthwhile endeavor, renewable energy would need to generate surplus electricity during the day to charge them, which California already does every day. California restricts significant amounts of renewable energy, which is not necessary. . This figure is continually increasing: in April 2019, a record 190,000 megawatt hours were wasted.

On May 7 of this month, a staggering 8,000,369 megawatt hours were curtailed. Almost enough to fully charge our huge battery. It is this cheap energy that our Moss Landing battery farm will look to buy and sell for a profit, however as of May 15, only 193 megawatt hours were restricted even in the summer. Our renewable resources are highly variable and unreliable. This leaves us vulnerable if we don't have alternative energy sources like natural gas or nuclear to take advantage of the slack, but let's move forward assuming that we are going to depend on solar energy, as Californian politicians seem to intend.

This requires spending billions of dollars to build redundant power that can make up for the lack of power when needed. This problem becomes particularly evident in January and December, when our power generation falls off a cliff even on sunny California days. Let's look at the towpath solar farm to see the magnitude of our problem for solar to reliably provide power. We need to size it so that it gives us the necessary energy even in the winter months once. Again, we have all the data we need to figure this out: the average power production for a single day of each month over the last four years of this farm's operation, as we can see our power generation drops from a high of four One thousand and three. one hundred eighty-eight megawatt hours in June to a minimum of two thousand six hundred thirty-seven megawatt hours in January.

This differential is quite good and other solar farms may see a larger drop in production. But for now, we'll be generous. Charge our eleven thousand two hundred megawatt hour battery with this power source in winter. We would need a solar park 4.25 times larger than that of the topaz company. Building this solar park costs 2.4 billion. So again, scaling linearly, we could expect a cost of 10.2 billion for a solar park of this size. Now this presents a new problem in our maximum power. In summer we generate an average of seven thousand four hundred thirty-seven megawatt hours per day.

If this power cannot find a home network, operators have to turn it off to prevent the network from being overloaded to avoid power reduction. will be exported, assuming neighboring states are also not overproducing or we can add more storage to the grid, which would cost about 3.2 billion using the same estimation method above. You can see a pattern emerging here for increasing solar power. We need to add more batteries to add more batteries We need to add more solar and eventually it gets to a point where batteries dominate the costs Caused an explosion as we increase our dependence on renewable energy and storage Here just to increase our renewable resources by 1.9 to perhaps 2.5% We have reached a total estimated cost of eighteen point two six billion dollars Four point six billion more than the construction cost of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant and at the same time we produce less energy.

These costs are increasing as we increase our dependence on renewable energy. To ensure that we have enough energy in the winter months, we have to build excessive amounts of renewable energy sources. Or we can try to store excess energy from the summer months and save it for a rainy day, at which point our costs become dominated by batteries The Clean Air Task Force, a research group at MIT, estimated that California would require nine point six million megawatt hours of energy storage with 80 percent renewable use and thirty-six point three million megawatt hours of 100 percent energy storage, equivalent to twelve days. and forty-five days of energy storage.

Respectively, their justification for this is not clearly given in any of their documentation, but I managed to track down the original researcher: this is the storage needed to store all the excess energy in the summer months when we scale our renewables to be fifty percent. percent solar energy and fifty percent wind energy, without increasing their power generation to provide enough energy. Even on an average winter day, it's a very strange approach considering lithium-ion batteries are not suitable for long-term storage. Gradually losing your church This, along with the costs associated with batteries along with the rapidly falling price of solar and wind energy, makes me very skeptical about the amount of thirty-six point three million megawatt hours of energy storage if We gave a generous future adjusted price of one hundred dollars. per kilowatt hour it would come out to a price of three point six three trillion dollars more than California's three trillion gross domestic product for 2018.

This to me is an overly simplistic approach. So let's set our own plan taking January of this year as an example. Let's scale our energy for this month since it is our worst case scenario. By downloading the data for each day of the month, we can see the energy demand per day varying like this now if we put our solar generation on the same graph as You can see that it generated an average of 8.2 percent of our total generation with a minimum of 2.1 percent on January 4 and a maximum of twelve point seven percent on January 27.We had consecutive bad days on the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th with only two point ones. to point two five point two and three percent From solar energy, if we scale this to provide 100 percent of our energy needs even on our worst day, we can see that the high variation would add additional costs whether in battery storage or in excess of solar energy.

Fortunately, if we now Overlay our wind generation we can see that in those days the wind generation was higher than normal and recovered a little. They were obviously cloudy and stormy days in California. This raises an important point in California's strategy. They have rushed to install megawatts of solar power in recent years and we have not installed enough wind power. Wind energy may be a more expensive energy source for California, but in the future it will be a vital part of the diversification of its energy sources if we add our other renewable energy sources, which are geothermal biofuels and small hydroelectric plants. .

Our new renewable energy count works out like this, representing an average of 20 percent of our energy needs. Large hydroelectric facilities are technically a renewable energy source, but they are not counted in our total because they require environmentally destructive dams. They are also not counted because they are some of the oldest power plants and policymakers do not want large hydro facilities to dilute their efforts to increase other renewable sources for our purposes. This is a bullshit. So let's add it Once again, we have smoothed out our production, allowing us to rely less on batteries and excess power.

Closing nuclear stations is also a questionable move and will generally increase the costs and inefficiencies of our networks. The greater the probability of falls. In renewables on consecutive days like this, more batteries we will need to store excess energy on other days, which also means we will have to install additional power sources to ensure we have excess energy to charge our batteries. This can be done in summer months. But as we said, batteries are not suitable for long-term storage. Fortunately, many companies are working on developing cheaper energy solutions for the grid that will allow us to store energy cost-effectively.

Currently, the real Holy Grail is to develop cheap storage that is capable of storing all that excess energy in the summer months and allowing us to spread it throughout the year Arpa-e, an energy research group inspired by DARPA, the crazy people who funded this monstrosity. They invested $30 million in 10 startups trying to develop this technology. Some focus on thermal batteries, others on thermochemical and form energy, who is developing. a sulfur-based battery received the lion's share of those 30 million. These are technologies that could facilitate a smaller, more efficient renewable grid and we'll all cover them in a future episode, so long story short, California is headed toward overreliance on the solar power it needs to get started.

Diversify your renewable energy portfolio with wind energy and other sources. Continue to slowly build these lithium-ion battery facilities to replace natural gas in your peak power. But unless something changes dramatically, they won't be a panacea for our renewable energy woes, which is why research into low sources continues. -cost Long-term energy storage will be vital. Arpa-e needs support in this effort. This is just a brief look at California. But while the parameters of this problem change with different climates and economies, the general problem is the same. We need all For a country to intelligently optimize its grid to accommodate renewables and ensure an optimized grid, it will require careful analysis of historical data as we did above while calculating the statistical probability of not meeting demand with different energy systems , as much as I would love to.

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