PJM Provides Update On Efficiency Of Intermittent Energy -- May 24, 2017

From an earlier post:

Solar Energy: Nameplate Capacity Vs Achieved Renewable Energy Output 

The European solar energy experience:

• Germany: 78 GW / 10.4 GW (13.2%)
• Spain: 27.7 GW / 6.8 GW (24.4%)
• Italy: 27.1 GW / 4.4 GW (16.2%)
• UK: 16.7 GW / 4.0 GW (24.4%)
• France: 14.9 GW / 2.6 GW (17.3%
• Sweden: 5.5 GW / 1.2 GW (22%)
• Denmark: 5.4 GW / 1.4 GW (25.6%) 
• Rest of Europe: 39.5 GW / 7.9 GW (19.8%)

This is not news. It has been reported many times on the blog -- data sent to me be a regular reader -- that "achieved renewable energy output" vs nameplate capacity works out to about 25% at best.

Overall, the effective capacity factor in Europe for solar energy was 18%.

Does anyone know the similar number for natural gas? Answer: 87% 

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PJM

Note: an update to this PJM post is at this link, posted at 7:51 p.m. Central Time. 

The reader who sent me the link to the article linked below suggested:

a) the whole issue is a mess
b) the article is way more than any reasonable person with a life would want to know
c) the whole issue is a mess (oh, did I already say that?)

Whatever. Time to look up the definition of obfuscation.

From rtoinsider, some data points on the recent PJM auction to contract for electricity:

• wind: 13% capacity factor (CF)
• solar: 38% capacity factor (significantly exceeds results in Europe which suggests some fancy math)
• this was the first PJM auction that required year-round availability (N.B. wind and solar)
• prices have come down significantly, as much as 25% in most of the regional transmission organization (RTO) or PJM in this case
• last year: $100
• this year: $76.53
• ComEd (Illinois): $188.12 ($202.77 previously)
• Duke OH/KY: $130 this year
• MAAC: $86.04 ($100 last year) -- most of Pennsylvania
• EMAAC: $187.87 (less than $120 last year) -- EMAAC is New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland
• this is the first year in which all generation must be Capacity Performance (CP): must be available throughout the delivery year; faces stiff penalties for nonperformance (in other words, smart operators will have excess NG peakers to back-up wind (in summer) and solar (in winter)
• season demand response (DR) no longer allowed; PJM committed to 558 MW of demand reductions under price-responsive demand (PRD)
• electricity demand decreasing: PJM forecasts a 2.1% reduction in peak load
• "we have units that are at financial risk in the area that, if they retire, it could create a reliability issue" -- confidentiality restricted much more comment, but it sounds like they are talking about coal-fired plants
• PJM: for year 2020/21 has a 23.3% reserve margin; highest ever in the 14-year history of the auctioin (technically the BRA, Base Residual Auction); by regulation, requires a 16.6% reserve
• cost load: $7 billion in 2020/21 -- about the same as 2019/20
• new generation: 3,144 MW (UCAP); of that, about 2,824 MW was mostly natural gas combined cycle and combustion turbines (NG-CCCT) (think GE?)
• wind: 888 MW (6,828.5 MW nameplate capacity; 13% CF)
• solar: 125 MW (330 MW nameplate capacitiy: 38% CF)
• amount of intermittent resources offered as CP dropped by 3,400 MW from last year
• Exelon: third year in a row that TMI left the capacity auction empty handed; Three-Mile Island (TMI) now depends on Pennsylvania; TMI has not been profitable for five years

Disclaimer: I do this quickly; there will be typographical and factual errors. If this is important to you, go to the source. I understand about 2% of the entire article.

Wind: with a CF of 13%, I suppose that means that when you see 100 wind turbines, if everything was working as advertised by the wind farm developer, one would need only 13 turbines.

Random Update Of Russia's Northern Fleet In The Mediterranean; Reason #35 Why I Love To Blog -- October 27, 2016

Updates

Later, 1:53 p.m. Central Time: from a reader's comment --

If you zoom in and select "track" the Russian tug Nikolay Chiker is paired up with a Russian ship (unclassified, but has the appearance of a cargo ship or possible odd tanker) by the name of Osipov.

I have been watching them since last night when the Nikolay Chiker was steaming toward the Osipov which was in a static position. I initially thought that the Tug was steaming toward a north African port. The track today is in the same general area and appears to be drifting or static refueling or replenishment unlike American warships.

Early this morning the track almost appeared to be a working tug track like pushing other ships next to the Osipov.

Last night there were also two Spanish warships ahead of the Nikolay while it was steaming toward the Osipov. 

Original Post

Received signal one minute ago (approximately 11:05 a.m. Central Time), the tug escorting Russia's only aircraft carrier was headed south toward landfall, just miles off the coast of northern Morocco, just north of the port city of Al Hoceima, Morocco.

Al Hoceima has the second-largest port in the northern region of Morocco. Current, local time, in Al Hoceima, is 5:10 p.m., just about supper-time, I suppose.

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Reason #35 Why I Love To Blog

Updates

Later, 12:41 p.m. Central Time: you know, lost in all this clutter is the comment made by the reader -- "that area should have cheap electricity for decades to come." This area is often referred to as the "Rust Belt" or very near that area formerly known as the "Rust Belt." If folks don't screw this up, this could be the re-emergence of US industry in that area -- aluminum, steel, cars, trucks, rail cars, and yes, dare I say it, wind turbines and towers. Folks paying attention know that coal is expensive in Asia (particularly India) and it's unlikely energy is going to get much cheaper overseas, certainly when compared to the US.

Later, 12:12 p.m. Central Time: see first comment:

To put some of these numbers (MW) in perspective, standard Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plants generate from 600 to 1,100 MW as a rule.

They are designed to go from cold start to 100% nameplate in about ten minutes time.

(The New England grid operator, ISO, has some great info on their website - ISO Express. One of the sections is the Daily Generation by Fuel Use.

Natgas ramps up and down throughout the day to keep the lights on for the folks in the Northeast.

In Pennsylvania, there are plans, or actual development of, 18 CCGT plants with a total generating capacity of more than 10,000 MW.

That area should have cheap electricity for decades to come.

And a quick follow-up from the same reader:

The company In energy is building a 1,480 MW plant now outside of Scranton. 

Cost, $500 million. 

A second, smaller plant, 500 MW, may be built nearby. 

Comment:

$500 million / 1,480 / MW (with 100% nameplate capacity - generation =$350,000 /MW.

Wind farms/solar farms will cost in excess of $1 million/MW nameplate capacity, which means that 480 MW wind/solar plans (in the original post) will also be about $500 million. For this renewable energy (not counting the cost of back-up natural gas energy), $500 million / 70 MW generated capacity = an astonishing $7 million / MW.

Original Post

 

Because of the blog, I've learned to pay a lot more attention to exactly what word journalists use in reporting stories.

I have to thank one of my readers for "beating my head over this" on many, many occasions.

Here's an example.

From PennEnergy today: three New England states choose six clean energy generators, an AP story.  The lede:

Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts have selected six proposals to develop more clean energy for the New England market. The projects announced Tuesday include mostly wind and solar projects, which are expected to generate 460 megawatts of electricity collectively.

My hunch is that the "460 megawatts" is the nameplate capacity. We know that wind farms generate no more than 20% of their nameplate capacity (solar energy, a "meager" 10%).

It's hard to say from the article whether the reporter means that the nameplate capacity of these new "generators" is 480 megawatts, or if the reporter is suggesting that the nameplate capacity will be 2,400 MW. After all, the reported said these generators would "generate 480 MW collectively." At 20% that means the nameplate capacity would have to be 2,400 MW, and perhaps more because the article says the generator would be a mix of wind (20%) and solar (10%).

[If using both wind and solar, generation will be closer to 15% of capacity or 3,200 MW capacity.]

To put that into perspective, the Hoover Dam held the world record for power production between 1939 and 1949 with capacity of 705 MW of hydroelectricity. Grand Coulee Dam held a similar world record from 1949 to 1960 with a 2,280 MW capacity. So, if New England really has a plan for 2,400 MW of capacity (480 MW generated), I'm impressed. 

My hunch is that the reporter is talking about nameplate capacity, and is not telling us that equates to about 70 MW generation.

Note: this is not a discussion between the merits of wind/solar energy vs other forms of energy. It is a discussion of what consumers will actually be paying for when they sign on for these projects. They are not going to get 480 MW of electricity generation (if that's what the reporter meant).

Rate-payers need to start asking not what the cost / MW nameplate, but the cost / MW generated. 

Note: I often make simple arithmetic errors, and am prone to misreading or misinterpreting something. If this is important to you, go to the source. If this is not important to you, I assume you have not read the post anyway.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

Years ago, your mom and your aunt lived overseas when "we were in" the USAF. We visited all the major cities in Europe. One of our favorite cities, of course, was Vienna. We spent a full week in Vienna around Christmas during our first year in Europe: your mom, Kiri, would have been about five years old; your Aunt Laura would have been about eleven months old.

Today while reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes, I came across this passage describing the Palais Ephrussi (the palatial home of the author's family several generations earlier) and the Ringstrasse in Vienna:

It is all so self-consciously grand, and yet a bit Cecil B. de Mille. I am the wrong audience for it. A young painter and architecture student, Adolf Hitler, had a proper visceral response to the Ringstrasse:

From morning until late at night I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings that held my primary interest. For hours I could stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the whole Ringstrasse seemed to me like an enchantment out of The Thousand and One Nights."

Hitler would paint all the great buildings on the Ring, the Burgtheater, Hansen's Parliament, the two great buildings opposite the Palais Ephrussi, the university and the Votivkirche. Hitler appreciated how the space could be used for dramatic display. He understood all this ornament in a different way: it expressed "eternal values."

We would have walked right past the Palais Ephrussi (multiple times). Kiri would have been about seven years old, walking with us, while Laura would have been about three years old, able to walk, but mostly being pushed in a stroller.

Great, great memories.

Another Burr Under My Saddle -- August 8, 2015 -- Intermittent Energy, Nameplate Capacity, And The Capacity Factor

Updates

August 14, 2015: capacity factor appears to be all the rage right now; "greenies" tell us future wind farms will reach 65% capacity.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently released data showing that the capacity factor (CF) for wind power can reach 65 percent -- comparable to the CF of fossil-fuel-based generation.

While the headlines aren’t as sexy as Tesla’s "Ludicrous mode," the transformative implications for climate change dwarf Elon Musk’s latest accomplishment. Increasing a generator’s CF can increase its value in a variety of ways, including: reduced cost of energy, improved transmission-line utilization, and often, reducing stress on the grid by providing more power at times of peak demand. It will also likely reduce the amount of storage and natural gas needed to manage the grid under scenarios of high renewables penetration. Implicitly, NREL’s new report positions wind to become a dominant and possibly the primary source of electricity in the U.S.

Iowa will lead the way.  

Original Post

 

There will be nothing new in this post that you haven't already seen somewhere else on the blog. I'm doing this for my own benefit -- please skip this if  you came here looking for the Bakken.

A number of articles on "the unseen costs of intermittent energy" have been published in disparate media outlets over the past few weeks that seem a bit more than simply coincidental. I linked the various articles in various spots on the blog but now I'm going to try to put them in one spot for archival purposes.

I'll begin with this "cut and paste" from one of my posts:

Personally I have learned a lot about energy by following the intermittent energy story. Prior to the blog, I did not understand "nameplate capacity" and, now, all of a sudden there's another "old" concept that is getting a lot of attention: "capacity factor" which is very closely related to "nameplate capacity."They may be synonyms. I recently posted a story from The Lead for the archives and now it turns out that Forbes has a long article on the very same subject: "The Clean Power Bill Will Collide With The Incredibly Weird Physics Of The Electric Grid." Coincidence?

According to wiki:  Nameplate capacity, also known as the rated capacity, nominal capacity, installed capacity, or maximum effect, is the intended full-load sustained output of a facility such as a power plant,a chemical plant, fuel plant,metal refinery,mine,and many others. Nameplate capacity is the number registered with authorities for classifying the power output of a power station usually expressed in megawatts (MW).

The other day a reader sent me the link to an article from an Australian publication, The Lead (linked above) in which the wind energy apologist was writing about the "best wind farm" in Australia:
Hornsdale is touted as Australia's "best'' wind farm project due to its high capacity factor of almost 50 per cent when compared to other wind farms in Australia which operate between the high 30s or low 40s.

I did not recall seeing that term before, and it was not one of the wiki synonyms for "nameplate capacity." But now that I have had time to think about it, that makes sense. At its simplest, nameplate capacity and capacity factor are measured in different units. The former is often measured in MW while the latter is almost always a percentage.

Be that as it may, within hours of seeing "capacity factor" in that Australian publication, I saw it in a linked article from Forbes, sent to me by a reader. Very coincidental.

Here are some data points from the Forbes article:

The idiosyncratic physics of electricity will ultimately doom the aspirational goals of the new 1,560 page [Obama] Clean Power Plan, more than will an army of lobbyists, lawsuits and laborious studies. It is an inconvenient truth that electricity is profoundly different from every other energy source society uses; it is, in fact, weird.

In energy equivalent terms, the nation’s electric utilities deliver 5 oil supertankers every day. This feat is performed on a network where operational dynamics and disasters can happen at near lightspeed. And here is the critical singular fact: Over 99 percent of all electricity has to be generated at the same instant that it is consumed.  Try doing that with wheat, steel, or oil.

Thus the problem: The [Obama] Clean Power Plan (CPP), as by now everyone knows, sets a course to radically increase the use of wind and solar power everywhere in America. And, cost aside (which it never is in the real world), it should go without saying that neither wind nor solar are available all the time.

“Availability” is not a semantic nicety. It is a specific and critical technical feature of power plants.

In order for the grid to deliver power continuously and nearly instantaneously in the face of inevitable challenges (plant failures, or the highly cyclical nature of demand), operators must have access to unused capacity that is available to be called upon, any time.

While wind and solar have very low average availability compared to conventional power plants, what is more important is that they have zero availability for many hours at a time every day.

And similarly neither are available, even when operating, to increase output to follow normal daily and hourly demand surges.

The Capacity Factor

It bears noting that “availability” is distinct from another technical, non-semantic, feature of power plants, the “capacity factor” which is a measure of total energy delivery. Unsurprisingly, wind and solar also have low capacity factors compared to conventional power plants: over a year, a megawatt of wind, on average, can deliver less than one-third as much energy as a megawatt of gas turbine. If one rated automobiles this way, for example, capacity factor would measure how often, on average, you were actually able to use your car for all reasons, regardless of how big the car or its engine. Availability is the if, when and how long each day at any given time your car would actually start.

When it comes to cost of capital, capacity factor matters. Simplistically, you need to build three wind or solar megawatts of capacity to equal the energy produced by one megawatt of turbine capacity. (Obviously the exact ratio depends on how windy or sunny the locale.) That means it is just nonsensical to claim a solar or wind plant with a capital cost per “nameplate” megawatt equal to a conventional power plant has achieved the Holy Grail of “grid parity.” And even if you build extra wind and solar capacity, the extra capacity is worthless if it’s not available when needed.

It is availability that matters when it comes to the engineering, and derivatively economic challenge of keeping a grid continuously operating and stable (the latter no small feat). A stable continuous grid is utterly essential for modern society and the hallmark of modernity. Just ask anyone in India, or dozens of other countries plagued with episodic grids.

Storage Doesn't Work For Electricity

Elon Musk has given us a way to illustrate the challenge to store power at grid levels. The astoundingly big $5 billion Tesla battery factory under construction in Nevada, the so-called “gigafactory,” is slated to produce more than all of the world’s existing lithium battery factories combined. For battery cognoscenti, that represents a quantity of batteries each year that can store 30 billion watt-hours of electricity. A big number. But the United States consumes about 4,000,000 billion watt-hours a year. Thus the entire annual output of the gigafactory can store about five minutes worth of U.S. electric demand.

Consider one more example of the scale challenge for storing electricity. Cushing, OK, is home to one of the nation’s preeminent, and numerous, tank farms to store oil. In order to build a ‘tank’ farm to store kilowatt-hours equivalent to the energy stored at Cushing, we’d need a quantity of batteries equal to 40 years of production from 100 gigafactories. Electricity is hard to store.

Good, one burr under the saddle removed. I finally read that article. Putting Elon Musk's gigafactory into perspective was worth the read.

President Obama is pretty smart they say. The Economist is a fairly respected publication. Almost two years ago, The Economist had the European experience with intermittent energy figured out: how to lose half a trillion euros.

On June 16th, 2013,  something very peculiar happened in Germany’s electricity market. The wholesale price of electricity fell to minus €100 per megawatt hour (MWh). That is, generating companies were having to pay the managers of the grid to take their electricity. It was a bright, breezy Sunday. Demand was low. Between 2pm and 3pm, solar and wind generators produced 28.9 gigawatts (GW) of power, more than half the total. The grid at that time could not cope with more than 45GW without becoming unstable. At the peak, total generation was over 51GW; so prices went negative to encourage cutbacks and protect the grid from overloading.

The trouble is that power plants using nuclear fuel or brown coal are designed to run full blast and cannot easily reduce production, whereas the extra energy from solar and wind power is free. So the burden of adjustment fell on gas-fired and hard-coal power plants, whose output plummeted to only about 10% of capacity.

These events were a microcosm of the changes affecting all places where renewable sources of energy are becoming more important—Europe as a whole and Germany in particular. For established utilities, though, this is a disaster. Their gas plants are being shouldered aside by renewable-energy sources. They are losing money on electricity generation. They worry that the growth of solar and wind power is destabilising the grid, and may lead to blackouts or brownouts. And they point out that you cannot run a normal business, in which customers pay for services according to how much they consume, if prices go negative. In short, they argue, the growth of renewable energy is undermining established utilities and replacing them with something less reliable and much more expensive.

Germany has built a low-carbon energy business to the point where new solar power needs few subsidies; where wholesale energy prices are falling and threats to the reliability of the grid have not materialised. What’s the problem?

There are several. First, utilities have suffered vast losses in asset valuation. Their market capitalisation has fallen over €500 billion in five years. That is more than European bank shares lost in the same period. These losses matter in their own right. For pension funds and other investors, they represent lost capital and lower future earnings. For employees, they translate into lower wages and lost jobs. The losses—many of which predate the boom in renewable energy—have come on top of the huge sums Europeans have also spent on climate-change policies. Subsidies for renewable energy are running at €16 billion a year in Germany (and rising); the cumulative cost is around €60 billion. [A disconnect? See previous paragraph.]

Next, utilities have lost their investment role. Once they were steady, reliable and inflation-resistant, the US Treasuries of the equity markets. Pension funds need such assets to balance their long-term liabilities. But utilities no longer play this role, as evinced not just by collapsing share prices but by dividend policies. Until 2008 the yields of RWE and E.ON tracked German ten-year bonds. Since then, they have soared to around 10%, while government-bond yields have stayed flat. Renewables are not the only risky energy investment.

Most important, the decline in utilities’ fortunes raises disturbing questions about the future of Europe’s electricity system. To simplify: European countries are slowly piecing together a system in which there will be more low-carbon and intermittent energy sources; more energy suppliers; more modern power stations (replacing coal and nuclear plants); more and better storage; and more energy traded across borders. All this will be held together by “smart grids”, which tell consumers how much power they are using, shut off appliances when not needed and manage demand more efficiently.

And there it was! The Economist calling wind and solar energy what it is: intermittent energy.

Americans prefer reliable, continuous energy, not unreliable, intermittent energy. On top of that, this new unreliable, intermittent energy will be more expensive.

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The Suicide of Liberal Arts

A Note to the Granddaughters

One of the best gifts I received while in high school was an 8-week summer course (between my junior and senior years) in liberal arts at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. This op-ed piece in today's WSJ was of interest:

Liberal arts has not been killed by parental or student philistinism, or the cupidity of today’s educational institutions whose excessive costs have made the liberal arts into an unattainable luxury. In too many ways the liberal arts have died not by murder but by suicide.

To restore the liberal arts, those of us who teach should begin by thinking about students. Almost all of them have serious questions about major issues, and all of them are looking for answers. What is right? What is love? What do I owe others? What do others owe me? In too many places these are not questions for examination but issues for indoctrination. Instead of guiding young men and women by encouraging them to read history, biography, philosophy and literature, we’d rather debunk the past, deconstruct the authors and dethrone our finest minds and statesmen.

When properly conceived and taught, the liberal arts do not by themselves make us “better people” or (God knows) more “human.” They don’t exist to make us more “liberal,” at least in the contemporary political sense. But the liberal arts can do something no less wonderful: They can open our eyes.

They show us how to look at the world and the works of civilization in serious and important and even delightful ways. They hold out the possibility that we will know better the truth about many of the most important things. They are the vehicle that carries the amazing things that mankind has made—and the memory of the horrors that mankind has perpetrated—from one age to the next. They teach us how to marvel.