The article seems to be missing the demand side of the equation, and the impact of EVs.
In an energy market where most of the electricity is supplied by renewables, there will be a lot of money to be made or saved by adapting power consumption to fluctuating energy prices.
EVs are part of that. If everyone has EVs that’s a huge amount of energy storage. My car could power my home for 2-3 days. And I could easily work from home, take the bus or bike, and let my car feed energy to the grid if there was money to be saved. It’s already trivial to set the car to only charge in the hours where electricity is cheapest where I live. This might only help a little, but there will be hundreds of other solutions like this.
There are already huge efforts to move industry from fossil fuels to renewable/electric energy. One of those solutions is heat batteries for industrial heat. They can save energy for many days, and in a grid with high renewable energy share they can likely be mostly charged when prices are near zero or even negative.
Another aspect of decarbonising industry is the move to green hydrogen for some processes (fertiliser, metal production, …). The hydrogen will probably be produced when electricity is cheap and stored in huge buffer tanks that can store it for when electrify is more expensive.
I could go on.. there are many more examples like this.
ZeroGravitas · 18h ago
I think the use of batteries installed for renewables when renewables are low is an underappreciated win so good to see that discussed.
However, I don't understand how letting the batteries charge from gas turbines can increase the gas burned by 10x compared with building enough turbines to do it without using the batteries.
Surely it would just be the percentage round trip loss from storing it in the battery? So more like 10% extra than 10x more.
The footnote #6 suggests the model might just be blindly running the gas turbines once batteries are at 70% rather than predicting based on weather that the batteries would empty so maybe that explains it?
In an energy market where most of the electricity is supplied by renewables, there will be a lot of money to be made or saved by adapting power consumption to fluctuating energy prices.
EVs are part of that. If everyone has EVs that’s a huge amount of energy storage. My car could power my home for 2-3 days. And I could easily work from home, take the bus or bike, and let my car feed energy to the grid if there was money to be saved. It’s already trivial to set the car to only charge in the hours where electricity is cheapest where I live. This might only help a little, but there will be hundreds of other solutions like this.
There are already huge efforts to move industry from fossil fuels to renewable/electric energy. One of those solutions is heat batteries for industrial heat. They can save energy for many days, and in a grid with high renewable energy share they can likely be mostly charged when prices are near zero or even negative.
Another aspect of decarbonising industry is the move to green hydrogen for some processes (fertiliser, metal production, …). The hydrogen will probably be produced when electricity is cheap and stored in huge buffer tanks that can store it for when electrify is more expensive.
I could go on.. there are many more examples like this.
However, I don't understand how letting the batteries charge from gas turbines can increase the gas burned by 10x compared with building enough turbines to do it without using the batteries.
Surely it would just be the percentage round trip loss from storing it in the battery? So more like 10% extra than 10x more.
The footnote #6 suggests the model might just be blindly running the gas turbines once batteries are at 70% rather than predicting based on weather that the batteries would empty so maybe that explains it?