Roger Caiazza
Francis Menton (here) and I (here and here) have previously written about the Magical emission -free resource technology (DEFR) technology (New York State Agenture “to describe the resources that are required in times of expanded low and solar resource availability for an electrical system that is based on wind, solar and energy storage. Further errors in the magical DEFR solution that ignore supporters.
David Trever Writing in the own value sub-stack wrote an overview of the great electricity memory report of the Royal Society, which predicted how much hydrogen storage is required on a large scale for a British electrical system, which is dependent on the wind and solar. A newer article from Turver follows his attempts to obtain the climate change committee (CCC) in order to tackle the problems identified by it. Both articles are read alone because it identifies weaknesses in the reports that are used to establish goals in the law that I think that they are common problems wherever there are net zero transition plans.
Quantification of renewable resource gap
In Turver's first article, he indicated that the CCC made a mistake in the calculations of how much memory is required to switch the light with a grid that is mainly driven by intermittent renewable energies. He explained that the electricity report of the Royal Society (RS) large scale written by Professor Chris Llewellyn-Smith claims that Britain can satisfy its demand for electricity with wind and solar, supported by large-scale hydrogen storage. A large-scale hydrogen storage is the placeholder DEFR technology in the New York plan. This applies directly to New York.
Turver argues that the RS report is deeply faulty and receives extraordinary claims that are not secured. One of his concerns includes the following:
They begin with the assumption that the electricity requirement in 2050 570TWH will be, which corresponds to the energy requirement roughly in the categories of residential, transport and industrial and industrial and commercial categories. The evidence from our world in data shows that rich economies require high energy consumption in order to thrive. There are no rich countries with low energy consumption and those countries that have reduced energy consumption have grown or even shrunk more slowly. The first extraordinary claim of low energy consumption fails because the evidence shows that if we allow this, we will be much poorer.
The report then assumes that the profile of the electricity requirement matches as today. However, if we switch from gas to electricity to heat our houses and offices, the winter expenditure of the electricity requirement is further exaggerated. In addition, the demand will change from year to year, as in the cold winter in 2010, which also coincided with a quiet time in which we would have generated much less renewable electricity. These variations of the demand profile will lead to more generation capacities and an even larger energy business than RS assumes and increases the costs.
He continues to argue that there are other defects. The report requires unrealistic load factors for both onshore and offshore wind. It underestimates the amount of offshore wind that is needed and assumes the efficiency and costs for hydrogen electrolysers, storage and production that do not withstand the exam. He also points out that the economic assumptions are incorrect.
I was interested in the “most important positive aspect of the report”:
The most striking thing is the careful analysis that was carried out to understand the very significant changes in the weather that occur in annual and decadical time scales. They analyzed wind and solar recordings over 37 years to estimate the level of variation that we could expect from wind power.
I have clarified several times in the New York procedure that a similar analysis is required. The analysis of 37 years is longer than anything that has been done for New York so far. It also points to a aspect of DefR based on hydrogen stores, which I have not previously taken into account. It is not only the worst episode, but there can be several years of issue:
They found that sometimes we can have several consecutive years in which the wind speed is lower than the average. This means that in the windy years that are to be used in the quieter years, we have to build massive energy storage if we have to build a network that is only to be powered with wind, solar and storage. They come to the conclusion that, in order to consistently deliver your 570th stream every year, we need a 123 -TWH storage of hydrogen storage. Part of this hydrogen may have to be saved for a decade or longer before it is used.
He also points out that the requirement for decadian storage is another error for every DEFR backup resource, which in my opinion can be used for the entire life capacity of DEFR technology:
This has important effects on the economy of the memory and effectively excludes batteries as a storage medium. Who would like to spend millions for the construction of a battery or hydrogen storage cave, even more to fill and maintain them, but have not seen any income from this for years?
DEFR backup risk risk
In my opinion, Turver's article corresponds to the ultimate risk of reliability for a weather -dependent electrical system. Today's resource planners for electrical systems for a conventional system are based on the decades of observations of the fallability of power plants. The result is that you have a good understanding of the likelihood that the available capacity lacks to meet the load if the capacity edge of the installed reserve system is a fixed percentage of the expected load. The installed reserve breakdown was in New York in order not to meet the accepted probability of a loss of vice expectancy of a failure again than once in ten years to meet a reliability metric of around 20%.
A fundamental observation of this approach is that there is no expectation that the failure of conventional power plants will be correlated. We do not expect many to fail at the same time for similar reasons. This in turn means that even if we have decided to determine the reliability metric with a longer period of time that the installed reserve stroke is not significantly increased.
This changes when the electrical system merges into a resources dependent on correlated wind and sun weather. We know that solar energy is zero and night and is much lower in winter. Similarly, we know that the wind energy is much lower in a high -pressure system and that these systems are huge and at the same time cover all of Britain and a large part of Western Europe or East North America. To tighten the problem is the fact that these conditions are associated with the hottest and coldest episodes with the largest expected electrical loads.
This affects the amount of DEFR that is expected to be needed. For example, the independent system operator of New England (ISO-NE) has completed the surgical effects of extreme weather events that meets the defr requirements required in Neuengland. The study assessed the extremes and hot events of 1, 5 and 21-day events based on a database that covers 1950 to 2021. The results showed that the system risk or the aggregated unavailable offer plus the extraordinary demand during an event increased with increasing buoyancy period. If the planning of the resource adequacy for New England has only been examined for the past ten years, the system risk would be 8,714 MW, but over the entire period of the record the worst system risk was 9,160 MW, which is 5.1%.
Turvers Post explains that the CCC did not even use the worst-identified report by the Royal Society: “You used in 1987 as a 1-in-20 year stress test when you admit that 2010 was a 1-in-50 year event.” His inquiries to fix this and other identified problem have been ignored and concluded that if an “incompetent and harmful” analysis is used to determine the law that the results are impractical.
I think his analysis shows the point that the DefR gap is an insurmountable problem. We know that when an even longer recording of weather observations is used to identify the gap, that there would very likely be an even worse event. Instead of trusting into the current planning process that the increase in the lookback period does not significantly change the resources required for the worst case, it means that the weather-dependent resources increase significantly. There will be inevitably a time of extreme weather that exceeds the selected planning criteria and the expected resources used on the basis of the chosen criteria. The cost of providing DEFR -Backup support will be unusual, and the establishment of excess capacities for a very rare event will significantly increase these costs. It is unsustainable to offer an even rarer event. This compromise means that there will ultimately be a catastrophic power failure if the load exceeds the DEFR capacity.
Diploma
The articles from Turver are further evidence of the problems of the defr “gap” for every electrical system based on weather-dependent renewable resources. The first problem is that you have to determine how much DefR capacity is required, which is limited by the amount of data available. The second problem is that there is no DEFR technology available in stores that can be provided for the Aspirational 2050 Net-Ziele. Third, until a DEFR strategy is suggested, we are no idea how much this will cost, so that the claim that the net zero transition 2050 is “affordable” is incomplete. Finally, the insurmountable weather-related probability is that there will finally be an unusual series of weather conditions in connection with extreme load requirements that exceed the defr resources used by DEFR resources.
In summary: we know that a new resource is needed, we do not know how much what it will be, how much it will cost and that everything we do one day will not be enough. After all, people will die in a catastrophic power failure if electricity is not available if it is most needed. This is amazing.
Roger Caiazza blogs with pragmatic environmentalists from New York about New York energy and environmental issues. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of one of his former employers or another organization with which he was associated with.
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