David McClintock Electrical Power Revolution
1. Storage Battery Revolution ←highly likely
2. High Voltage Direct Current Power Transmission ←likely everywhere but the US
3. Shipping electricity by container ← Far out, but maybe not?
Our focus here is on serious industrial amounts of electric power—as in what runs your homes, cities and factories. [Our focus here is NOT Electric Vehicles, cars or planes for which Lithium Ion Batteries make good sense.]
Present day situation: essentially all electric power produced must be consumed or it is wasted.
* Electric power consumption is not even throughout the day, week or seasons.
* One third to one half of all electric power produced can be made with very efficient means. This is called "base load" production.
* One third of all electric power is used for times of peak demand.
* "Peak power production" uses methods far less efficient, more expensive, and more polluting.
* A growing proportion of electric power produced is being made with renewable sources, notably wind and solar. There remains a serious miss-match between when renewable power is made and when electric power is in high demand.
Proposition One ---> Our purpose is to look at replacing most peak demand away from today's peak power processes to storage batteries.
Present day perception: too often we have been excitedly promised new battery types for many decades. Practical engineering progress has been much slower.
New battery types are usually first introduced in small hand held devices. The total storage capacity of all such batteries is tiny compared to what will be needed for the electric power utilities. The advent of electric cars will change the world's "total battery capacity" but will be still quite small compared to what is needed for modern civilization and the developing world.
The amounts of storage required for electric utilities are freaking huge ~ 51,827,000,000,000,000 Watt hours.
[Tera = 10 to the 12th power = 1,000,000,000,000 :: World wide production of electricity ~ approximately 155,481 Tera Watt hours (TWh) :: Approximately one third 1/3 is peak power demand so we are talking about storage battery capacity on the order of 51,827 TWh]
What is proposed is an improved form of the good old Lead Acid Battery, called an Ultra Battery.
Battery Weight is NOT a major consideration for a fixed-in-place electric power utility.
Cost and Reliability are of course HUGE considerations for an electric power utility.
Cycle Life is a CRUCIAL measure for any type of battery. 500 charge-discharge cycles is typical for most battery types.
An advance in Lead-Acid Batteries has been developed in Australia. It is called an Ultra Battery and tested by US national labs and other eminent technical centers to have cycle 20,000 – 40,000 charge- discharge cycles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraBattery#Stationary_energy_applications
http://www.sandia.gov/ess/sandia-national-laboratories-publications/
SEE especially: 2017-10 SAND2017-10903M Electrical Energy Storage Demonstration Projects (EESDP) Journal 2017 The Sterling Municipal power co installed storage batteries, got savings of $350,000 in nine months They are the future: lots of storage batteries to avoid buying expensive peak power and associated transmission costs. They typify the Battery Revolution happening in the Electric Power industry everywhere.
https://www.ecoult.com/technology/ultrabattery
http://www.eastpennmanufacturing.com/applications/grid-optimization-services/
http://www.eastpennmanufacturing.com/tag/deka-ultrabattery/
http://www.furukawadenchi.co.jp/english/research/new/pdf/ub.pdf
SO, the problem is not the "promise" of future battery lead-acid technology. It is here today.
The lead-acid battery business is a mature industry which has become environmentally highly regulated and responsible.
The problem is piloting and gearing up to manufacture battery capacity on the order of that 51,827,000,000,000,000 Watt hours.
Lead-Acid Ultra batteries may be the only ready-for-prime-time technology that can be deployed in the next few decades without requirements for unusual materials that may be best applied to other applications.
Between savings from retiring most older peak power generators, using renewable energy more effectively, the use of comparatively cheap lead-acid “Ultra Batteries” on a massive scale – estimates are that near-future electric power generation will permanently cost about one third less (in constant money terms). That would represent a gigantic increase in global productivity and enormously better environmentally. (See South Australia Power Authority for that 1/3 less)
Note 1: Everything said above could be discounted by half and it would still be most desirable to do. Hence, I assign a very high probability that storage batteries will be used to replace a significant portion of peak power generation, hence the term Battery “Revolution”
Note 2: Much of what has been written about the Ultra Battery has considered its application to Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) Why, when the Lithium Ion battery is so much lighter and better suited to a vehicle? Personally, I think consideration of the Ultra Battery for vehicles is wrong-headed wishful thinking. Pure electric vehicles can outclass hybrids without HEVs pollution. The Ultra Battery is as heavy as lead. You might not want to carry its weight or potential toxicity on your person, but you don’t mind an old-style lead battery in your car. You shouldn’t mind Ultra Batteries out on some pad at a power company. For power storage for electric utilities don’t care about the battery’s weight. The Ultra Battery should prove to be quite cheaper than Lithium Ion batteries per stored kilowatt/hour.
Proposition Two ---> Power Transmission, HVDC
Obviously, home battery banks like the Tesla Wall are so local as to largely eliminate transmission line losses. The are losses converting DC to AC but modern electronics are making that an ever more efficient process. The world's cities and factories are not all about to go “off-grid.” There are still economies of scale that mean large centralized power generating capacities will still be required.
In Israel, the Ashalim solar power project occupies 740 acres for 50,000 mirrors to concentrate solar heat on an 820 foot high tower/boiler. It should generate 310 megawatts of power, about 1.6 percent of that country’s energy needs.
https://inhabitat.com/israel-building-worlds-tallest-solar-tower-to-power-130000-households/
Such things will not conveniently fit within London or Manhattan. So electric power will still need transporting.
Generally, moving electric power around from where it is produced to where it is consumed has traditionally meant transmission line losses of around 10%.
The very old debate between Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison over AC power versus DC power seems quaint today, but given the technology of the past, AC power had the advantage that a transformer can convert high voltages (needed to overcome resistance in transmission lines) down to lower voltages safe to use in practical equipment
https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/transformer/transformer-basics.html
An ideal transformer is 100% if it delivers all the energy it received. Real transformers have energy losses, so real transformers deliver between 94% to 96% efficiencies which was pretty good in Edison and Tesla's day. Today, the very best power transformers operated within highly controlled parameters can deliver 98% efficiency. That’s a huge advantage in favor of AC power.
Edison era technology could deliver DC power for some miles. AC power thanks to simple transformers can deliver power for hundreds of miles. So AC won out. Fewer AC power plants can serve a given population, eliminating the need for lots and lots of DC power plants to serve the same size population.
What is under-appreciated is how still today modern AC power distribution systems practically deliver power for only some hundreds of miles.
What is changing all of that are modern high power solid state semiconductor switching devices which can today convert very efficiently high voltage DC power to conventional lower voltage AC power.
Modern High Voltage DC (HVDC) power transmission can deliver electric power for more hundreds of miles than AC high voltage lines, and do so more effectively.
A high voltage transmission line designed for AC power can deliver about 30% more power if operated as a HVDC line. [Why? A “120 volt” AC line has a peak voltage of 170 volts. The power delivered is the area under the sine wave, its “root-mean-square” value we call “120” volts. A system designed to handle 170 volts can handle 170 volts. If that 170 volts is DC, the same same wires will deliver 170/120 ~ 30% more power.]
The US does not have a national power grid. There are historic reasons why this is so, but it is. With HVDC technology, there would be substantial advantages and economies if there were a national power grid.
Here is why there won’t be a national grid any time soon: The National Energy Policy Act of 1992 paved the way for deregulation of energy markets within the United States. Good enough. But then along came Order 888 in 1996.
[There is an American tradition for fuzzy economic ideas without coherent thought or empirical facts. US energy “policies since the 1973 oil crisis have been dominated by crisis-mentality thinking, promoting expensive quick fixes and single-shot solutions that ignore market and technology realities. Instead of providing stable rules that support basic research (leaving plenty of scope for American entrepreneurship) congresses and presidents have repeatedly backed policies which promise solutions that are politically expedient, but whose prospects are doubtful, without adequate consideration of the dollar costs, environmental costs, or national security costs...”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_United_States
Order 888 wanted to “deregulate for the benefits of competition” but ended up separating the parts of the electric power business that were more profitable for investors (surprise, surprise) from the parts that were less investor-interesting. Some matters must be considered as a system, but this order required utilities to make available “open access non-discriminatory transmission services.” As a result, transmission services were separated from power plants. This disrupted a lot of things, notably no one was clearly responsible for maintaining and improving long transmission power lines... In the energy business a new term gained relevance: “stranded assets” cutely referred to such things as power lines no one wanted to pay for. A hideously complex mish-mash of arrangements have since tried to cobble Humpty Dumpty into something workable, not coherent. Duh. If you can repeat a dozen times “our leadership couldn’t have been that stupid” read carefully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_transmission_organization_(North_America) then try to design a better electric system within those arrangements.
Meanwhile, The Mediterranean TSO is en route to becoming a multi-national power compact https://www.euneighbours.eu/en/south/eu-in-action/projects/med-tso-mediterranean-transmission-system-operators
Around the Mediterranean, roughly along the northern side you have a large wealthy population of electric power consumers, while along the southern side you have the thinly inhabited Sahara Desert – an enormous solar power generating potential.
The distances involved are within the reach of HVDC technology, so an HVDC grid is being designed.
That the entire European Union could some day be essentially solar powered would give Europe some very significant environmental and economic comparative advantages. And folks with a vast desert could derive substantial income from it.
The risks of appropriation by some Saharan countries of the large European investments that will be required – will be crucial. However, the EU has it within its grasp to field political, economic and even military influences proportionate to the risks. So that project should proceed, slowly, but proceed – thanks partially to the HVDC engineering that makes it practical.
For charging huge capacities of storage batteries, this growing engineering competence by electric utilities in handling huge amounts of DC power is promising.
Still, even HVDC power lines barely reach more than 1,5000 miles. That’s good, but can we do better?
Proposition Three ---> Power Transmission, by sea – Reykjavik to Rotterdam!
This last proposition is a bit far-out, at first blush. It rests on several sequential factors.
Today, shipping anything by sea, specifically shipping anything by standard container is to say transporting 95% of everything transported!
HTTP://www.maritime-executive.com/article/20-ways-shipping-containers-changed-the- world#gs.ZXGKlyQ
In Proposition One we were dealing with places that already produce electric power and consume electric power, so the focus is on making economic and environmental improvements using storage batteries.
In Proposition Two we focused on applying HVDC engineering to link a wealthy massive consumer of electricity (the EU) with a place with enormous potential for solar power generation.
Here in Proposition Three we are considering a place: Reykjavik Iceland, with great potential for generating geothermal power (which generating machinery does not yet exist) with a place: Rotterdam (THE container port of Europe). Conventional and even HVDC power transmission is rather daunting technically (try the salty North Atlantic in winter) and expensively far – about 2,000 miles!
What the container revolution has proven is that the absolute distance traveled by a container on a ship is a very trivial cost compared to the economies and reliability of container shipping.
So why not build storage batteries sized as containers?
If you use 518 TWh of electricity at x Euros per Tera Watt hour, if I can deliver one tenth of a Tera Watt hour at 50% of x, would you buy it? Likely very interesting.
What if that were delivered once a week to Rotterdam where you have existing facilities to handle containers and feed that power into your grid? Even more interesting.
What if I build up the capability to deliver eventually 200 Tera Watt hours weekly, would you be even more interested? Yes, of course.
What does a container-battery look like? Just like a container.
What’s inside the container battery? Either something like one big mother Ultra Battery or perhaps with some R&D some kind of Aluminum Ion battery. We have time to try proven-today battery chemistries and be profitable enough to partner with some R&D to improve on our first container batteries with later versions that may use other chemistries.
To meet Rotterdam’s demand for our electricity at our lower prices, we will need some time to build up our conventional technology geo-thermal generating capacity. So our first container-batteries may not have to be batteries that use the latest and greatest technology. We just need to be reliable, safe, and cheaper per Tera Watt hour.
For Iceland, that computes to being quite feasible.
Who would pay for the R&D? - EU power companies might help. - UK. west coast harbors have been permanently damaged by the fact that Rotterdam is THE container port. So those UK west coast port cities like Liverpool and Glasgow are near dying. Would they like to get their government to chip in something for R&D? Those ports are closer to Iceland. They would not need to build huge container facilities (Rotterdam already has them beat there) But modest facilities that could feed Tera Watt hours into the UK grid should have some interest, no?
If this Proposition Three conceptual design becomes reality, one can start to go a bit wild imagining power being container shipped from very distant point of production to distant point of consumption.
Seems far out, except remember: distance is a trivial cost of shipping things by container from distant places. Shipping by container is already used for 95% of everything transported! Why not electricity?
David McClintock