Cost Effective Ways To Power Grid

A well-designed combination of wind power, solar power and storage in batteries and fuel cells would nearly always exceed electricity demands while keeping costs low, the scientists found.

“These results break the conventional wisdom that renewable energy is too unreliable and expensive,” said co-author Willett Kempton, professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy in UD’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment.

“The key is to get the right combination of electricity sources and storage—which we did by an exhaustive search—and to calculate costs correctly.”

The authors developed a computer model to consider 28 billion combinations of renewable energy sources and storage mechanisms, each tested over four years of historical hourly weather data and electricity demands. The model incorporated data from within a large regional grid called PJM Interconnection, which includes 13 states from New Jersey to Illinois and represents one-fifth of the United States’ total electric grid.

One of several new findings is that a very large electric system can be run almost entirely on renewable energy.

In this study, reliability was achieved by: expanding the geographic area of renewable generation, using diverse sources, employing storage systems, and for the last few percent of the time, burning fossil fuels as a backup.

During the hours when there was not enough renewable electricity to meet power needs, the model drew from storage and, on the rare hours with neither renewable electricity or stored power, then fossil fuel.

When there was more renewable energy generated than needed, the model would first fill storage, use the remaining to replace natural gas for heating homes and businesses and only after those, let the excess go to waste.

The study used estimates of technology costs in 2030 without government subsidies, comparing them to costs of fossil fuel generation in wide use today. The cost of fossil fuels includes both the fuel cost itself and the documented external costs such as human health effects caused by power plant air pollution.

The projected capital costs for wind and solar in 2030 are about half of today’s wind and solar costs, whereas maintenance costs are projected to be approximately the same.

 

Source and Read More  

If you want to know more about this and other topics directly from end users of energy storage technologies join us at one of these annual events: The Energy Storage World Forum (Grid Scale Applications), or The Residential Energy Storage Forum, or one of our Training Courses.

LATEST ARTICLES

Energy Storage Systems: the role of an Integrator

Simplifying BESS deployments by mastering their associated risks With the introduction of Battery Energy Storage Systems ‘BESS’, a new role has been created on the value chain. It is the role of a BESS integrator. The role of an integrator can be misunderstood at times or blended with other roles at other times. This is…

Read More

Product Development: Embracing product safety and compliance

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: EMBRACING PRODUCT SAFETY AND COMPLIANCE Recent safety incidents on storage plants have raised concerns about the fire safety of battery storage systems. Such events are extremely rare compared to the cumulated global deployments of energy storage systems, which have reached more than 27 GWh by end of 2020 (Wood Mackenzie 2021). However, for…

Read More

The UK National Energy Grid – A Story of Islands, Trading, and Energy Storage

As first seen in Energy Global, grid software acts as a modern-day map, helping to chart and navigate today’s energy grids; software engineers are tasked with carefully delineating how each region’s energy markets operate. However, looking more closely at energy markets makes clear how unique each market is – each defined by different topography, resources,…

Read More

★REVIEWS

“Probably the most interactive and well organized storage event on the calendar.”

★★★★★

Sales Director, S&C

“Great topics, competent speakers, good networking: keep it like that.”

★★★★★

TLC & SCADA Manager, FRI-EL

“High scientific content, well targeted, perfect organization.”

★★★★★

Expert Technical & Governance, Elia

Excellent networking event. The sponsorship was well worth it.”

★★★★★

Manager, ATL

View More

x