Energy Storage and Distribution: When the Wind Isn’t Blowing

Dis­trib­uted Wind and Solar make the grid more stable

A new study has deter­mined that renew­ables could eco­nom­i­cal­ly ful­ly pow­er a util­i­ty scale elec­tric grid 99.9% of the time by 2030 — and with­out gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies, if the prop­er mix is imple­ment­ed.  This new study affirms what we’ve been say­ing for a decade now: we don’t need nuclear, coal, oil, gas, bio­mass/incin­er­a­tion or oth­er dirty ener­gy sources.  We can meet our ener­gy needs with con­ser­va­tion, effi­cien­cy, wind, solar and ener­gy stor­age… and it’ll be reli­able and cheap­er than our sta­tus quo.   See the press release or the full study.

We need big envi­ron­men­tal groups to start accept­ing that this real­i­ty is pos­si­ble so that they can stop pro­mot­ing nat­ur­al gas and bio­mass as if they are nec­es­sary “tran­si­tion fuels.”  One way to help, aside from shar­ing this info, is to sign onto our plat­form call­ing for a 100% shift to clean ener­gy, and encour­age oth­ers to do the same.

Along the lines of the above study, dis­trib­uted wind makes a grid more stable:

Mid-Atlantic Off­shore Wind Poten­tial: 330 GW “To make wind pow­er more uni­form, the study shows that mul­ti­ple sites could be con­nect­ed through pow­er lines to reduce the num­ber of times of both max­i­mum and min­i­mum pow­er. Changes in new and replace­ment ener­gy-using devices, includ­ing auto­mo­biles, also could pro­vide for greater pow­er storage.”

Fly Wheels for Ener­gy Storage

The nation’s first com­mer­cial fly­wheel ener­gy stor­age facil­i­ty went online in upstate New York in 2011: Fly­wheel ener­gy stor­age makes 100% wind and solar pos­si­ble. Anoth­er is planned for Hazle Town­ship in north­east­ern Penn­syl­va­nia: Devel­op­ers to seek approval for Hazle Twp. ener­gy project.

Hydro­gen for Ener­gy Storage

Hydro­gen is not a fuel, but rather an ener­gy car­ri­er, like a bat­tery. It can be elec­trolyzed from water with excess elec­tric­i­ty, stored in tanks, and called upon to be trans­formed back into elec­tric­i­ty when the demand shifts. Hydro­gen is not, how­ev­er, a very effi­cient ener­gy car­ri­er. This process is often only about 30% effi­cient, and should be thought of as a fall­back and not a priority.

Hydro­gen is NOT, how­ev­er, suit­able for use in vehi­cles. We would need to build an entire infra­struc­ture around this, when we could use elec­tric vehi­cles (EV) and plug-in hybrid elec­tric vehi­cles (PHEV) with the exist­ing infra­struc­ture and with some­thing like 1/3 the elec­tric­i­ty hydro­gen-pow­ered vehi­cles would require.

See Hydro­gen and Fuel Cells Fact Sheet for more information.