Starting point: the sun doesn't shine the whole time, the wind doesn't blow the whole time.
Illogical response: Storage.
Logical response: My house doesn't heat the whole time, my car doesn't charge the whole time, the factories don't run the whole time.
Enhanced response: …and I have loads of storage already, in the thermal mass of my home, in home batteries, in car batteries.
Even more enhanced response: …and there is a vast amount of electricity stored in every object around us, both physical and intellectual objects. There is 350x more electricity embedded in my car than currently stored in the batteries.
The flaw in the podcast: Instinctively thinking in terms of swapping gas generation with renewables 1 for 1. In other words, mentally thinking of something like 100% annual demand generated by renewables, instead of
starting at 400% of annual demand generated by renewables. The reality is the UK will be a massive exporter of wind electricity and, given how cheap solar is getting, solar electricity as well. Export will be in the form of physical goods, as per Iceland exporting electricity embedded in aluminium, and it will be in intellectual goods, such as electricity embedded in AI. It won't be exports of electricity itself because our neighbours will also be in surplus. Everyone will be throwing away electricity most of the year.
The bigger flaw in the podcast: Not being an economist and failing to look at a chart of solar and wind costs. Have they not seen how fast these are falling? We're now looking at 2030 for super generation, not 2050. The lines shows solar will overtake wind soon, even for Scotland. And the chart of electrical battery prices shows the same - a Tesla's batteries cost $1m a few years ago, today they're approaching $10k.
The economics: Storage economics merely changes the over-generation percentage. Cheap storage? Only 400% of annual demand generated by renewables. Expensive storage? 500% from renewables. It does not change the structure, simply because when solar costs £20/MWh all storage solutions increases the average. We don’t need to worry about what the mix is, because capitalism will do all that. It’s the perfect problem for capitalism – balancing costs and arbitraging away differences. Every country and every region will have its own balance.
Ordinary lulls: The usual poor patches for a couple of days are easily handled by ordinary storage in the form of electrical batteries in cars and homes, plus people incentivised to heat water and homes at cheap times and switch off at expensive peaks. The Octopus home demand experiments are gathering data ahead of automation of this process within a few years. Nobody freezes to death when the HP goes off for a day because of thermal mass and better insulation. When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow we don’t need to heat our homes, water and cars temporarily. There will be plenty of storage around the grid, in compressed air or hydrogen tanks or cranes in mineshafts, just for routine management.
---> ordinary lulls mean ordinary demand drops
The Super lulls:
1) Just the UK is 1,000 km north to south and 600 km east to west. Europe is 4,000 km x 4,000 km. Overcast across that entire area and no wind across that entire area will be rare events. We don’t care much about efficiency for rare events, the system needs to be
effective in keeping the lights on for a month long lull, not
efficient.
2) Solar panels generate in winter, even on cloudy days. TopBadger switched on in January and reported generation of 5-8kWh on the first cloudy day.
3) Hydro and geo continues, along with legacy nuclear
4) Interconnects will be everywhere, crossing all of Europe and heading on into North Africa
5) The super lulls are ultimately handled with demand management. Not turning down the thermostat a degree, proper demand management. The vast energy users switching off completely for a month long lull - not by government diktat, but via capitalism. They won’t pay high prices for a month when for most of the year their energy is nearly free.
---> Super lulls mean super demand drops
What the podcast said:
The problem with that is... It will help and it's built into the model of demand that we used, actually, that that's being done. But the difficulty is, you get these periods, successive periods of very low supply. Now, we can reduce our electricity demand for a few hours; we could reduce it for a few days. But we're talking about having to lose half our electricity supply for weeks. Now, if the government wants to lose the next election, that's what it makes sure happens.
The reason this is wrong is because it fails to appreciate the electricity embedded in stuff and how vast a storage this represents. One thing we’ve learned from the climate crisis is how much CO2 is embedded in an iPhone and the rest. Which obviously translates to embedded electricity. The manufacture of my car used 20,000 kWh of electricity. Flipping that around, delaying the manufacture of a car for a month saves 20,000 kWh. It’s thereby identical to a month’s storage of 20,000 kWh.
I understand why they don’t instinctively get this. We’re used to the status quo and build our expectations around it. We’ve no appreciation of what vast surpluses of electricity on windy and sunny days mean for capitalist enterprises. The world of 2050 is very strange because all our notions of efficiency are no longer valid. Inefficient use of electricity in the super generation periods are hardly penalised. Any use of electricity in the super lulls is very costly. It means different business models (and different products we can’t yet imagine). By assuming a 2023 energy world in 2050 the Professor is making a fundamental error - he instinctively thinks he should be storing every ounce of wind electricity generated instead of throwing it away for near-free. That’s because he starts with thinking about the energy currently stored in the UK as fossil fuels.
As an example, VW needs 20,000 kWh to build me a car. At 2p during sunny and windy days that’s £400. At 34p during a super lull that’s £6,800. It’s the easiest decision in the book: delay building that car until the windy weather returns in a month or two.
Now repeat for aluminium, fertiliser, steel, TVs, paper, cement, chemical precursors… And more interesting is the non-physical stuff. The data centre. The computer crunching a zillion calculations every nanosecond. The AI machine churning out popular Harry Potter novels.
To our status quo selves it feels inefficient for VW to shut off production for a month-long super lull that happens every 17 years. But it’s not. It is effective and cheaper than massive storage in salt caverns or storing electricity for 10 years. If VW wanted to keep producing cars for that month they would be free to install massive batteries or buy their own salt cavern. But they won’t. No way will that make economic sense. The analogy is with the UK grinding to a halt every few years when snow is more than usual. It’s not that there’s more snow than in Canada, it’s simply that its uneconomic to invest in stuff not needed most years.
The muddled section of the podcast: It’s clear where he loses his way. He says:
But then you're storing every damn bit of wind, you have to have colossal power, you have to have huge stores, it bankrupts you.
But then he stops himself and realises he doesn’t need to store every damn bit of wind. And he almost gets there:
We have a surplus, which comes about in two ways: some of the time the store's full. I mean, you don't make the store bigger than it has to be, so the store's full, you can't store anymore. Or, the wind and solar power is so high in some hours, it would be madness to try and store it, because you build something to capture it, which was not needed most of the time. So, there is a surplus, which has two components where it comes from. So, the question is: it's being generated, would it have any value? So, we've thought about it. There could be uses for electricity which are not in our model of demand, because they don't exist today. But if there's cheap spare electricity going, somebody will think of a way of using it. So, I'll give you one example. One example would be drying biomass. If we're going to have a lot of biomass, people will be chopping it down, and then they're putting it in big hangars, and blowing hot air through it. So, that's a wonderful demand, because it doesn't matter when you do it. You can turn it on and off whenever there's a surplus, so that would be a use of it; what it would be valued at I don't know.
But then he stops and diverts onto hydrogen again. It quickly gets lost in a random mix of nuclear hydrogen and 4-stroke engines and salt caverns to store electricity for 10 years. What he should have said is: "But if there's cheap spare electricity going, somebody will think of a way of using it -
and if there's mega expensive electricity going, somebody will think of a way of not using it.
To put it in numbers:
Current UK 300 TWh a year. He uses 570 TWh 2050, with a range 440-700. He thinks we need to store 100 TWh in salt caverns. He thinks this means 600 TWh a year of renewables.
I think it means 2,300 TWh of renewables. During super lulls assume this falls to 20%, i.e. the equivalent of 460 TWh p.a. (he assumes super lulls are 50% falls in generation). Other stuff and interconnect for another 40 equivalent. Oh no, looks like a shortfall, 500 vs the 570 run rate. We all freeze and can’t charge our cars for a month. But no, domestic use is only about 75 currently, triple it to cover HPs and cars. We’re fine. But there’s no room for the mega consumers to operate as normal. VW shuts down for a month.
More exact numbers depend entirely on the economics, but fundamentally there’s absolutely no need to store 100 TWh long term in salt caverns. Solar on overcast December days generates so much that the overbuild delivers a respectable chunk during super lulls, with normal battery and compressed air and whatever storage adding to the grid capabilities. And the UK hasn't yet started on any meaningful solar build, at the moment the only generation basically being TopBadger's roof and a solar farm off the A303.
To be clear, I’ve no objection to any capitalist enterprise investing in salt caverns if they want, but there’s no chance they’ll make money. I mean I can compress some air for free right now with a bike pump, how is massive civil engineering going to compete with that? I suspect his mistake is the economic one: he thinks VW will need 20,000 KWh of electricity for a car, in a super lull he'll be the only person with that capacity stored in a salt cavern, therefore he can sell it to VW for 34p/kWh when it only cost him 5p to fill up the cavern the previous summer. He will go bust because VW will refuse to buy and simply go without.