Five useful insights into where the electricity industry is headed.
Repost: Lessons From 40 Years of Electricity Market Transformation: Storage Is Coming Faster Than You Think | Greentech Media
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Tag Archives: storage
Getting EV owners to participate in electricity storage
Just hooking up EV owners and not compensating them for the storage services they can provide won’t be a successful or popular idea. Rather the first step is to figure out what is the value of that storage? A new NREL study estimates that value to be about $59 per kW-year with a 33% RPS portfolio in California, increasing to $109/kW-year at a 40% RPS. For a typical EV, that could translate into $300 to $550 per year or $2,000 to $5,000 over 10 years.
Then you assess what are the incremental costs to the EV owner in reduced battery life. Note that batteries depleted 30% can’t be used for EVs any more but are still valuable for grid storage. Vendors probably can build in-home racks that store and connect the depleted batteries. Those become factors in determining the payments to the EV owners and their agents.
As for enrolling EV owners in a storage management program, it need not be cumbersome if enrollment is the default (opt-out) when buying a car or installing a charging station. (See all of the literature on the importance of opt-out vs. opt-in and status quo bias.) The auto dealer or charging administrator becomes the agent. An EV buyer might sign up for the program and not even know it. The charging process could work much like the massive distributed computing projects that harness small parts of the idle processors across millions of personal computers. All of this becomes part of the peer-to-peer transactive energy (TE) grid.
Do we really need more storage for our renewables?
PG&E has been running a series of “advertorials” on clean energy in the Sacramento Bee and other papers. Today’s on the need for electricity storage caught my eye. I’m not sure that we need new storage in California, at least not large-scale, in the immediate future.
The PG&E article describes an event in February 2014 when California generated more energy, much of it from solar and wind, than consumers were using. PG&E raises this as a concern that should be addressed so as not to lose that energy. But PG&E’s premise ignores one critical point–California is not isolated–it’s connected to many other states.
California is the largest electricity consumer in the Western Interconnection (with 10 other states and parts of Canada and Mexico). However the state only represents 30% of Western load. All of those states have weaker directives on renewables and greenhouse gas emissions, and most have much larger portions coming from high-emitting coal-fired plants.
When California overgenerates from renewables, it exports that power to those other states. This leads to a reduction in natural gas and coal use. When California needs power, it imports power as it has been doing for decades. In other words, the rest of the Western Interconnect is already acting like a storage device. The Southwest utilities have long exported excess coal-fired power overnight to California at low prices. Now California can turn the tables. PG&E may not be getting renewable portfolio standard (RPS) or greenhouse gas reduction credits for those exports, but they reduce GHG emissions in other states.
This situation is similar to the recent rise in petroleum production in the U.S. The country now exports refined products thanks to advances in extraction technologies. Congress is considering whether to allow the export of crude oil. For both California and the U.S., the concept of exporting energy has been inconceivable up to now. Time to rethink our paradigms?
Cheap energy storage may be parked in your garage
One of the key questions about how to bring in more renewables is how do we provide low-cost storage? Batteries can cost $350 per kilowatt (kW) and pumped storage somewhat lower. Maybe we should think about another potential storage source that will be very low cost: automobiles.
California has about 24 million autos. The average horsepower is about 190 HP which converts to about 140 kW. Let’s assume that an EV will have on average a 100 kW engine. Generally cars are parked about 90% of the time, which of course varies diurnally. A rough calculation shows that about 2,000 GW of EV capacity is available with EVs at 100% of the fleet. To get to 22 GW of storage, about 1% of the state’s automobile fleet would need to be connected as storage devices. That seems to be an attainable goal. Of course, it may not be possible for the local grid to accommodate 100 kW of charging and discharging and current charging technologies are limited to 3 to 19 kW. So assuming an average of a 5 kW capability, having 20% of the auto fleet connected would still provide the 22 GW of storage that we might expect will be required to fully integrate renewables.
The onboard storage largely would be free–there probably are some opportunity costs in lower charging periods that would have to be compensated. The only substantial costs would be in installing charging stations and incorporating smart charging/storage software. I suspect those are the order of tens of dollars per kW.
Economics Outside the Cube 