Everyone is talking about building very large #batteries for energy storage, for when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. Turns out, that is the most expensive solution. There are faster solutions that yield money.
"Lovins and many other #EnergyEfficiency experts have spent decades pointing out that an integrated system approach that focuses as much or more on consumption than supply will be so much cheaper than the current approach focused on supply."
@CelloMomOnCars Basically "When the fuck was the last time it was cloudy and windless across the entire fucking country you morons. Instead of building a battery just build more windmills in a different location. It's the index fund of wind."
@CelloMomOnCars the main reason for energy storage is to allow for sudden demand surges, aat the moment this is done by ramping up the turbines in oil/coal/gas/etc power stations. Without storage of some kind it is much harder to ramp up wind/solar, even Nuclear is slow to ramp up (due to reaction times etc.)
@CelloMomOnCars one of the cheapest is being done in Finland storing energy as heat in sand, which is cheap, easy to obtain and has few environmental downsides.
As you say, most current utility batteries are for frequency stabilisation., and it's perfect for that. But the storage capacity is really too small to cover, say, an extended outage, never mind seasonal storage.
Another way to look at it is that fossil fuels are both an energy source and energy storage. As we decarbonize energy sources we are separating those two functions, but “storage” can take so many forms, and load balancing even more.
I was dismayed to encounter an article promoting “load banks” as the ideal solution to oversupply from renewables. This ‘solution’ is giant open air electric heaters that literally just waste energy.
I'm really looking forward to the time that we can all do our own load balancing arbitrage with our car batteries and timers on our appliances. The tech is there, we need the regulatory framework.
And of course energy efficiency should be at the top of the hierarchy, that makes everything else more resilient.
Lovins is pointing out that there is a large range of options to build flexibility in the grid, and some of them are fast and negative dollars (i.e., saves money, in the long run).
“Today’s exponential battery growth could get global power over 60% of the way to net zero, but that’s not the only option. The first two boxes on the left, negawatts and flexiwatts, are both several fold bigger than had been thought, yet cheaper. "