Marek Kubik

Taking inspiration from setinetchasketch’s blog, I have decided to also have a go at explaining my job using only the 1000 most common words in the English language.  Original credit to Randall Munroe’s “Up Goer Five” who does a remarkable job of explaining rocket science using just these simple words.

I look at wind power and how it changes with time in a place where there is going to be lots of wind power one day.  One day there will be lots of wind power in lots of places so this is important.

Sometimes wind power changes faster than we can respond. Fast wind changes can cause bad things like the lights going out.  Sometimes there is too much wind and we have to turn it off. Turning off wind loses money and makes the world hotter. I have been looking at these problems and finding answers to them.

Joining different places in the world together helps make wind power go up and down less. Changing the way we make power with dead animals out of the ground also helps to help match wind power going up and down. Using a box to store the power we get from wind and burning dead animals can also help.  Some of these things need money to happen and some of them need the people who run the places where we live to change the way we make power.

The government plans for electricity market reform (EMR) in the UK are going full steam ahead and there is a growing clarity over the form it will take.  Contracts for difference are set to phase out and replace current legislation like the Renewable Obligation, forming a new support mechanism for nuclear and renewables.  The other major policy device is the introduction of a capacity market to ensure we plan a safe margin of back up generation to meet peak demand, given the looming cliff of generation from fossil fuel plants expected to close in the middle of this decade.

The problem with the legislation in its current form is that it does not consider system operator needs.  National Grid, who have the responsibility for day to day balancing of the network, have little say over what kind of plant gets built to provide capacity in the proposals.  If, for example, we were to reinstate coal plant that provides 500MW of capacity but takes 10 hours to turn on, it is of very little value to the system operator for short term balancing to the system.  There is a danger that the capacity we provide is of the wrong sort for efficient system operation. 

This may never turn out to be an issue given that the current plans are to auction capacity with a 4-year lead in time and at the lowest bid.  Such an arrangement weights itself heavily in favour of building combined cycle gas turbine generation, or for refurbishing mothballed plant (CCGTs are the most cost effective and quick type of generation to build at the moment).  It is worth bearing in mind though the decoupling of the capacity market and real time balancing may cause some problems.  The solution, if it does to turn out to be an issue, may be something that re-couples capacity requirements to flexibility requirements: a capability market.

Large banks take a lot of flak for, well, undeniably taking some risky decisions that are a contributing factor to the economic times of difficulty that we are today. It’s easy to pick on them for other developments in the energy sector too, for example their reluctance to invest in renewables, and their role in investing in ‘unconventionals’ such as tar sand oil and shale gas. From the left, this causes protest and outrage. Aren’t we supposed to be reducing our carbon emissions? Don’t these techniques cause environmental concerns?

Ironically, of course, this is all about the risk.  Renewables are ‘new’ and there’s uncertainty surrounding the future of global energy. While the argument of climate change and impact on future generations is compelling, fundamentally the problem is a matter of economics and risk of a return on investment. If the fuels in the ground are economically extractable, someone will extract them. Call me a realist, but that’s the primary factor that drives these investment decisions. If we want to change this we have to change the rules of the game.

How?

1)  Renewables and nuclear research.  Lowering the cost of alternative technologies reduces the competitiveness of oil and gas extraction. There are some technologies (solar in Silicon Valley) for example, that are already nearly at grid parity with conventional generation.

2)  Carbon taxes. Recognising that emitting carbon is bad and applying a value to this. As a result, the economic value of extracting fossil fuels relative to renewables falls. The difficulty is implementing such a scheme fairly. The European emissions trading scheme set up to do exactly this has run into all sorts of teething troubles thanks to too many permits being issued (largely due to an unplanned recession - which does a splendid job of cutting down on our carbon emissions) and hence a very low carbon price which has not provided certainty and thus limited any investment in carbon reduction.  A higher carbon price floor would help in the future here, and we look to set to get this given that a £30/t floor is to be in place by 2020.

3)  Regulatory certainty. The barrier to investment in renewables is often surrounding policy. Knowing that the government will not move the goalposts - the government’s 2011unplanned change to feed in tariffs is a key example of this uncertainty and and how it can damage an industry.  Choose a plan, and stick with it.

Resolve the above three issues, and you solve the fundamental problem with the energy game. If you can do that, the players will adapt.

(If I lost you with the title of this piece, I thought of it in mind of HBO’s show The Wire.  Although quite a different type of political commentary of impoverished, drug rife communities in America, the show draws some interesting parallels to the energy challenge; how ‘players’ are mere cogs in a machine they have no control of.)

Just a short update to add this time - my attention was recently drawn to this by a colleague and I thought it worth sharing.  Michael Gove is planning on dropping Climate Change from the compulsory part of the National Curriculum.

Climate change is a vitally important scientific topic for the next generation to grasp and understand the implications of.  It is frankly ridiculous that they should be able to pass through our education system without an understanding of the issues and decisions surrounding it and how it may affect them.

If you’ve got 30 seconds and want to do something about it, I thoroughly encourage you to sign this petition, started by a secondary school student.

Had an excellent but exhausting day at the Houses of Parliament for the SET for Britain research competition finals last Monday. The event gave me the opportunity to speak to many MPs including my local one(s) as well as various members of the House of Lords and tell them all about my EngD research and spread the message that renewable resource variability really is manageable.

While on the subject I would like to extend my congratulations to the winners of the The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (aka the engineering Nobel prize) also awarded on the same day: it went to the ground breakers who invented the Internet. Hard to argue with that.

This is a second (topical, as it turns out) post I’d like to make about how science is abused in the media. I’d like to say it’s excusable, that it happens all the time, but really that shouldn’t make anyone feel any better about it.

The subject of my annoyance this time (I’m not always this irritable) is an article in the Telegraph entitled: “Wind farms will create more carbon dioxide, say scientists.”

I’ll let you discover the article at your own pace, but to summarise it’s a anti-renewable right-leaning piece which talks about “potentially devastating” research to be published in Nature relating to wind farms on peatland.  Forget about what the content of the study shows for the moment, because the issue here is on the crediblity of the report… the “say scientists” part.

Nature, for those of you not aware, is a very credible scientific journal. The inference is that this is a strong bit of peer-reviewed science, but the key point to note here is that nothing has yet been published. If you’ve not been published, you’ve not yet passed the peer review stage, meaning your method and results have not received a stamp of approval from the scientific community.

I hope most of you can see how this is open to abuse. I could write anything I want and submit it to Nature, good science or bad. I can then contact the media and leak the results early, thus generating publicity with sensationalist headlines like the one in the Telegraph. Now as no one can see the paper (difficult I’m sure you’ll agree, as it’s not published), it’s impossible for other scientists to respond to it critically and debunk it.

You tell everyone it’s “potentially devastating research” to be published in Nature, and people will remember reading about it. If in a few months the paper gets rejected, don’t expect to see equally sensationalist headlines like “We were wrong about the credibility of this research.” Instead, the story quietly gets dropped but the damage has already been done.

There’s a possibilty that this is the last we hear of this research, but assuming in 6 months time we do see it published in an issue of Nature, then, and only then, can we get on with the business of actually examining what it says critically.

I saw this tweet by Roger Helmer a while ago and thought was worth responding to, and it’s only a few months later that I’ve found the time to get round to commenting on it.  For those of you who don’t know Roger, he’s a European Parliament member, formerly of the Conservative party, but who switched to UKIP because of closer alignment to his views.  He’s particularly outspoken on Europe and Climate change.

A number of his tweets are on the subject of renewables, and whether by design or by accident are often factually baseless, misinformed or cherry picked.  There are certainly some significant challenges to overcome regarding the integration of renewable energy, and I fully acknowledge that.  As I research into this very area, I have a practical grasp of some of the political, economic, social and technical problems that need to be solved, but often not the ones that he informs his audience of.

I’ve taken a relatively recent example in the above tweet – Roger links to a piece by the Global Warming Policy Foundation .  The GWPF is anti-renewable lobbying think tank, with a track record of producing reports that have subsequently been debunked.  While they make some seemingly valid points, their reports do not support strong statements like the one Roger paraphrases in his tweet.  The phrase “Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?” springs to mind.

Let’s look at the accusation in that tweet that prompted me to write something.  Namely, that renewables don’t reduce CO2emissions.  I’ve dutifully done a bit of digging into the method and found that the relevant section of the GWPF report argues that:

“Wind power is intermittent and requires backup sources of power – either gas or coal. These backup sources achieve much lower levels of thermal efficiency – defined as the proportion of the energy content of the fuel that is converted into electricity - than conventional power plants using the same fuel which operate all or most of the time.   The loss in thermal efficiency is even greater if the backup sources have to run for extended periods as spinning reserve, using fuel but not delivering power to the grid, in order to smooth fluctuations in either demand or supply from wind sources. Hence, the loss in thermal efficiency when plants run as backup sources may outweigh the reduction in the total amount of power generated from fossil fuels when wind generation is added to the system.”

Now there is an underlying truth to this paragraph, but a lot of questionable content too.  I have previously covered why wind is variable, not intermittent, and that it doesn’t require dedicated back up.  So has a large body of literature by a number of authors, which I am happy to provide if interested.  So let’s start by not overstating the problem.  The spinning reserve on an electricity system is there to support all units on the grid, including other fossil fuel plants which can trip out and not just wind. 

The observation about power plant thermal efficiency is entirely correct.  A power plant operating at a lower load (producing fewer MWs of electricity than its rated output) will be at a lower efficiency, and hence its emissions (measured by the standard metric of kgCO2eq) will be higher.  However “much lower…efficiency” is a qualitative statement which is used to underpin the argument that these will outweigh the savings from wind.  Astute readers will note that Dr. Hughes who wrote this report uses the word “may”.  This qualified version appears to have been lost in translation by Mr. Helmer when he tweeted it.  I wonder why.

It is entirely possible that Dr. Hughes, who wrote the report, did not have the data to hand in order to calculate whether or not the emissions increase from part loaded power plants would outweigh the benefits of renewables.   I however, can.  So let’s go one better and quantify this and see if this is the case or not.

 <Warning, maths ahead… but its straightforward GCSE stuff, I promise>

Below is the heat rate curve for a typical fossil fuel plant.  Power plant operators think of things in terms of heat rate and not efficiency, but a heat rate curve is fancy sounding way of describing the efficiency of a power plant at different levels of power production.  The thing to remember is that a low heat rate is good and equates to higher efficiency, and vice versa.

The curve below shows how at lower loads, it requires more energy to produce a unit of electricity, and how a power plant is at its most efficient when it is close to its full generation output.  The difference between the heat rate at its minimum generation (110MW) and its average output (around 174MW)  is about 15%.

Make sense so far?  In other words you require 15% more energy to generate a unit of electricity at this low load rather than the average load.

Now, let’s qualify this with an example with and without wind.  The average grid carbon intensity of coal is around 1,015kgCO2eq/MWh., so when a coal plant is operating at 174MW its total emissions are roughly:

1015kgCO2eq/MWh * 174MW = 177tCO2eq/h

If this plant was held right back at its minimum generation of 110MW to make room for an additional 64MW of wind, the resultant emissions of the plant would increase 15%.  The net emissions of a system with this level of wind would hence be:

1015kgCO2eq/MWh * 1.15 * 110 = 128tCO2eq/h

In summary, despite the reduced plant efficiency, wind still has a net positive saving of 177-128 = 49 fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide being pumped up into the atmosphere every hour.  If we wanted to be really rigorous there are some very small emissions associated with wind production too, but not to a level that would significantly alter this outcome.

So we can safely declare this tweet debunked.  Wind energy clearly does reduce CO2 emissions. 

By way of PostScript to this blog entry, I would say there’s a need to give scientists a platform to explain their research when the media grab a hold of something and misinterpret it.  Little exercises like the one I just carried out are really vital for debunking incorrect ‘science’ and it’s important that we see more of them.

The problem is not so much lack of research or understanding, it is something really quite endemic in the media, where scientific studies are occasionally misinterpreted or skewed to support a particular view point, even when the original research may have a sound basis and be published in good upstanding peer-reviewed journals.  This is something Ben Goldacre has written in his book Bad Science and I strongly recommend giving it a read if you’re interested in arming yourselves against some of the ways science is misused in the media.

Shale gas has been hailed by some as a saviour to the European energy challenge, following the success of the US in dramatically driving down the wholesale cost of gas.  Improvements in the techniques of extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing (or ‘fracking’), together with the nature of land ownership laws in the US have meant an explosion of production from unconventional fossil fuels.  The question on many policy makers’ minds is whether this feat will be repeated in Europe and whether the US is likely to begin exporting some of its own production to European markets, potentially creating a second ‘dash for gas’ in the UK.

I have heard mixed opinions on these two issues, and I shall dutifully try to represent the comments that have been raised, drawing mostly upon panel discussion from the 9th Annual Global Energy Summit, held at the London Business School last month.  The statements made were largely anecdotal, but this is the nature of the beast when it comes to commodity speculation.

Chancellor George Osborne is certainly keen to explore the potential of shales, having promised a ‘generous tax regime’ for shale gas exploration despite a lack of evidence that it will reduce the cost of energy in the long run.  

The shale gas revolution in the US has been swift and strong, with the huge increase in production resulting in a complete reverse of the status quo; the US went from being a net fuel importer to a net exporter late in 2010.  This trend is expected to continue, with the US overtaking Saudia Arabia in exports by 2017 due in part to shale gas production and in part to rising efficiency standards under the Obama administration.

The impact of this polar flip has already had global consequences.  The US is now on the trajectory to reduce its carbon emissions as it replaces its coal generation with gas fired power plants.   Resultantly the European market has been saturated with surplus American coal, depressing prices and keeping coal plant running.  Ironically, this is thought (at least for now) to be driving European carbon emissions up. 

However, the United States are not likely to turn into a significant net exporter of shale gas any time soon, in the view of oil and gas company Repsol.  Export permits for shale gas are difficult to negotiate due to US competition law; Shale gas is seen by some in the US as home turf advantage, giving American business an edge to create jobs and spur on growth, and exporting shale gas lessens this competitive edge. 

Private investment company Kepis & Pobe also believe there are questions as to how sustainable the current low prices are.  Shale wells characteristically decline much more quickly in their production output than their conventional equivalents, and this may doom this kind of production to boom and bust.

A further consideration is that much of the fracking in the US is from onshore wells, where ownership rights extend from the earth’s surface to its core, giving land owners a right to a share of the profits.  Europe in general tends to have a stronger environmental conscience, and particularly with a higher population density than much of the states, there are more difficulties in carrying out onshore drilling.

In the UK, the Crown Estate owns the land beneath our feet and the jury is still out on whether this will make it easier or harder to permit extraction.  Given the British public’s strong NIMBY* attitude to nuclear, renewables or new power stations, we can only suppose at the outcry against fracking below people’s houses might be perceived.  All this is likely to mean shale gas fields are likely to go the way of wind energy (which faced similar objections) and move progressively offshore, which will obviously influence the economics of extraction. 

As a result of the above factors, the growth of shale gas production in Europe is likely to be considerably more muted than in the US.   There is potentially a case for shale fuels, but the results are likely to be less dramatic than in the US. 

*not in my back yard!

[Invited contribution to National Grid’s Powering Britain’s Future campaign]

Any solution to our future energy challenge has to be technically workable, economically tenable and socially viable.  With the growth of renewable energy coming from variable resources such as wind energy, a variety of ways of managing an inherently more variable level of electricity supply have been suggested.

A lot of hope is pinned on demand side management; altering the historically rigid pattern of demand to suit the profile of supply, particularly as there is a move to electrify transport and heating demand.  This would require interaction between the kinds of things we use electricity in (fridges, heating systems etc.) in what is referred to almost universally now in research as a smart grid.  When the energy supply is high (due to high wind generation for example), these devices would be optimised to turn on and draw energy, storing it in effect by keeping your fridge cold, topping up your hot water tank  and so forth.   When the energy supply is low (wind generation drops), these devices would be instructed not to draw energy from the grid for a certain amount of time.  As your fridge and hot water tank are insulated well, it takes a long time for them to start to change temperature.  This allows you to alter demand to match supply, and all is well and good with the world; the lights stay on, you use renewables, and avoid using depleting and carbon burning fossil fuels as much as possible.  World saved, Al Gore is a happy bunny.

The challenge in this sort of solution is only partly technical.  It’s also social and behavioural.  I see behavioural change as a problem that cannot be fully overcome.  Humans have a funny knack of not liking change, and this has confounded a lot of well thought out technical solutions in the past.  It’s the reason a lot of efforts into designing low carbon buildings are struggling to meet their design values; people use them in a way they aren’t supposed to.

One of the areas of huge potential for smart grids is to be the take-off of the plug in electric vehicle (EV) market.  A large number of cars, with a large number of batteries make a huge aggregated store for excess renewable energy when we have it, and supply when we do not.  However, the principle is very difficult to get off the ground – why?  Firstly, infrastructure.  Conventional internal combustion (IC) engine cars on average have a tank of 60-70l (around 15 gallons), and the best cars we’re producing can do over 100MPG.  That’s a 1,500 mile range (ok, so an average car does 30MPG but you get the point), which is plenty for reaching a petrol station, filling up a petrol tank and shooting off again.  The plug in EVs on the market today do 35-90miles on a full battery, and even fast charge batteries need 1.5 hours to fill up completely, and that’s if you can find a charge point, because while there are plenty of petrol stations, there aren’t all that many charge points. 

This comparison is a little unfair, as it is worth stating that the idea of the phased introduction of plug in EVs is that most families have two cars (if you accept this is narrowing your market down) – one for long range travel, and one for regular driving for work, the school run and the shops – after all some 95% of journeys are under 25 miles.  There’s also talk of biofuel/electric hybrids (think of the future along Toyota Prius lines) giving the best of both worlds; range and not having to worry if you don’t have time to charge, but this is limited due to the size/weight of batteries and the need to still find room for a combustion engine and a fuel tank. The issues surrounding biofuels are also another whole matter for discussion.

The facts around electric vehicles suggest to me that the plug in approach is a nonstarter because it requires people to accept that they have to treat this kind of car differently.  The charging infrastructure doesn’t exist yet (chicken and egg situation this – a proper infrastructure for EVs won’t exist until there are EVs, and vice versa).  The issue of having to wait for your car to charge and the limited range makes it clear that EVs are impractical for long distance travel.  Batteries are also a very expensive part of a car and the main reason why EVs cost a lot more up front than conventional IC cars.  The running cost of EVs on electricity is very low relative to the running cost of an IC car on petrol or diesel.

Finally, to be used on a smart grid at all plug in EVs are expected to require users to sign up to special tariffs that give permission for the grid to charge and discharge the batteries in order to balance supply and demand.  To make a meaningful difference, this has to be from a lot of people to be able to cope with significant quantities of variable supply renewable energy on the electricity grid.  These are a really significant part of the problem, as electrifying our cars without helping decarbonise our grid will increase our overall consumption of fossil fuels.  Burning diesel in your car directly is more efficient than burning diesel to generate electricity to power your car because of the losses in the process – electrifying cars ONLY works if your electricity comes from low carbon sources. 

If you add all these individual components up, it comes to quite a lot to ask from people who are used to the independence and flexibility of IC travel.  If we can’t get acceptance then we have to shelve this solution as one that is technically workable, economically tenable but not socially viable. 

Let’s sum up the problems with plug in EVs:

·         Car range not suited to all types of journey – only short distances

·         Charge times – even fast ones don’t come close to a petrol fill up

·         Lack of charge points for EVs, lack of EVs for charge points.

·         Lack of smart grid infrastructure

·         User acceptance: having to opt into being charged

·         High up front cost of electric vehicles

·         High adoption needed to decarbonise electricity for net benefit.

Seems a bit difficult to get around doesn’t it?  However, in my opinion there is something that sweeps all of these problems aside and is entirely compatible with our existing infrastructure.  What is it? Interchangeable batteries.

By this I mean having EV batteries you can swap out when they’ve run down.  The charge up nightmare is avoided, as is the journey range issue.  You can use the existing petrol station infrastructure for recharges and travel as much as you like.  Without the battery coming as part of your car, the price of EVs is dramatically cheaper, so adoption rates go up.  This solution also neatly steps round the user-smart grid acceptance issue, as companies that would be responsible for the vending of the batteries would also be responsible for their charging and conditioning (which would also be done to prolong asset life in a way that individual car owners may not).  Having a large collection of batteries in one place (think local storage warehouses for regional petrol station resupply) also ensures that when the batteries are not on the road, they are in use helping to balance the grid.  As this would be done commercially, there is direct value in providing capacity storage or ancillary service prevision to the grid, and the political and socially difficult smart grid rollout with differential tariffs (in a time when the government is demanding simplicity) is avoided.

In one fell swoop, the problems of EVs disappear and all the benefits remain. 

The business opportunity for interchangeable EV batteries is there; the only truly significant hurdle to overcome is the need to standardise an interchangeable battery design that will work with future EVs on the market.  Solve this, and the business opportunity solves itself.

The battle over renewable energy and how it should be supported is a bitterly contested one, with two main policy camps: one supporting the role of market based interventions (i.e. a carbon tax, EU emissions trading, cap and trade and all that malarkey), the other with technology specific subsidy for support (feed in tariffs, contracts for difference). 

A recent report by Imperial College presents a very well thought out document on the subject.  Having recently attended a meeting at the House of Commons debating this very issue, I thought I’d share the key thoughts I took away from the encounter.

From a neoclassical perspective, the argument for a market based solution to encourage renewables investment is compelling in economic theory: it avoids the need for risky judgement of the cost of specific technologies and their potential.  Essentially such an approach lets the free market mechanism pick the winners through direct competition of their economic viability.  However, a body of historical evidence has shown that technology specific interventions have been far more successful at encouraging renewables than this market based approach  (I’ve written about this myself in the past here).

The reason market approaches struggles is that this neoclassical economic approach is too idealistic.  Ian Temperton uses the analogy of a physicist who has devised a model to predict the outcome of a horse race – provided the horses are perfect spheres, racing in a vacuum.  The economist’s spherical horse is the ‘perfect market’, where market players are perfectly rational and there is no informational asymmetry (everyone has access to the same, complete information).

The problem with spherical horses, Gross argues, is that they do not represent reality well.  The perfect market assumptions do not translate into reality, and these make finding an optimal price to carbon infeasible.  The politics around implementing a carbon  tax are also extremely difficult to negotiate – in many places, fossil fuel based generation is subsidised (the IEA estimate by around $409bn in 2010).  Because the results of climate change will impact some countries more than others, setting a single global optimum will mean individual countries are winners or losers, making such a scheme politically challenging to implement.  Finally, risk plays a crucial role in renewable investment, and carbon prices are uncertain as they can be changed by future political decisions. 

At the Commons debate, panellists from both the banking sector (BNP Paribas) and renewables development sector (RES) raised political certainty as key to reducing risk, and hence the cost of renewables projects.  Transparency, longevity and continuity of any renewables support were called for a number of times, and this is far more achievable in a technology specific support structure that guarantees a certain level of operational revenue.

Feed in tariffs have clearly shown to have reduced the cost of capital of funding renewable projects in a number of countries like Germany and Spain.  The UK has also had considerable success encouraging investment in small scale PV, although this latter case also provides a demonstration of exactly the sort of uncertainty that should be avoided when a renewables support mechanism has been established.  The renewables sector is dynamic, with new and improving emerging technologies, and as a result, Gross argues for the benefit of dynamic, targeted support towards specific technologies.  Action to encourage investment drives innovation, and costs come down with scale. 

The feed in tariff mechanism is not without criticism, as think tank Policy Exchange (firmly in the camp of emissions trading and global energy markets) raised a number of concerns with technology specific intervention at the debate, namely:

• When technology specific subsidies exist, the most cost effective doesn’t necessarily win: the one with the most successful lobbying does.
• While a single tax on carbon globally is regressive, benefiting one country more than another, the same can be argued regarding technology specific subsidy, which benefits one industry more than another.
• Whilst FiTs reduce risk on the investor, these are actually moved onto the consumer.
• Too fast a deployment of “immature” renewables squeezes supply chains and can actually drive up costs for renewable technologies (e.g. offshore wind).
  

I acknowledge these factors are worthy of consideration, but they are all associated with the detail of designing a well thought out, well balanced and structured policy for technology specific support, which should minimize all these problems.  Imperial’s report sets out a clear case for why the top down market approach of economics, whilst sound economic theory, does not work in practice.  Whilst the feed in tariff form of support is imperfect, the arguments and historic evidence for its success in growing the renewables sector in countries that have adopted it are compelling. 

It beats betting on spherical horses, at any rate.

You can read the full report here.

My sponsoring company, the AES Corporation*, have relaunched with a snazzy looking new website, so I thought this would be a time to give them a more direct blogging mention.

For those of you that haven’t heard of them, these are the guys that sponsor my research doctorate.

They’re a Fortune 200 global power company with generation and distribution businesses all over the world, operating with a portfolio of just about every conventional and renewable generation technology out there.

We teamed up around three years ago to look at the impact of renewable energy on existing electricity markets.  A broad remit, granted, but one that gave me the freedom to pick a project that played to my strengths, and that would have a real world relevance and impact (unlike some PhDs which can end up being some interesting bits of research, but one that is ultimately never utilised).

It’s refreshing working for a power company that is genuinely forward looking, keen to be proactive and to understand how it can help facilitate renewables growth.

The team I work with, the European wing of the business (primarily for me looking at Northern Ireland and the challenges there), is giving me an excellent opportunity to respond to the very real but necessary challenges of integrating wind energy with the Irish electricity market. As I’m now slowly starting to thread together the distinct lines of inquiry my research has led me down, I’m starting to get excited about how my conclusions will influence the development of the Northern Ireland electricity system for the better.

 You can read more about AES, our businesses and our values at: www.aes.com.

*I think, for clarification purposes I should mention here that this blog has always been, and will continue to be “all views my own”.

My final argument against those who argue that 100% dedicated backup for wind generation is necessary:

3)  Variations in wind are to an extent predictable, and not instantaneous.

As already established in my last piece (It’s not reinventing the wheel), the system of balancing electricity generation already has a framework established to compensate for the loss of generation or deviation from the expected supply/demand balance.  Often this achieved by part loading existing power plants (in other words running them at less than their maximum output).  This allows those who control the system to increase or decrease their output in order to keep the whole delicate see-saw of electricity supply and demand matching.

Most of us experienced a trip at home when a light goes and the circuit breaks automatically, but at transmission scale the loss of a power plant is of megawatt or gigawatt scale.  It is important to remember that these sort of trips are low probability, high impact event.  It means the loss of a significant amount of power in a fraction of a second on the system.  This very kind of intermittent power loss cannot be predicted in advance, yet sufficient measurements must be in place to ensure the system readdresses the balance very quickly or the result will very quickly be a loss of grid stability and force rolling blackouts.

If we now come back and think of wind generation and how it changes, its nature is very different.  As opposed to being intermittent (as it is often cited), wind generation is variable because changes in wind generation vary more gradually. 

Gigawatts of distributed wind do not get shed in an instant, as there is not a single point of failure like when a power plant trips, hence we have more time to respond to a moving weather front.   Allowing for sufficient reserve is actually easier than for conventional power plants in this respect.

Furthermore, wind variability is also predictable.  Although forecasts are still out on timing occasionally, generally the pattern and  rate of change is correct. 

Compensating for a gradual loss of generation that you  know is coming is considerably easier than planning for a sudden shock loss of a large amount of power.  When thinking about the challenge from this respect, the argument is completely flipped – if anything we need dedicated backup for our conventional generation more than for the wind added to the system!

Reason number two why wind generation on a large scale electricity system does not require 100% dedicated backup is:

2)  Electricity systems already require balancing and backup.

This is a critical and often overlooked point.  Whether or not variable generation is on an electricity system, there is a need to have generation in reserve to deal with in any deviations between demand and supply.  This is not a new concept, it has been around from the early days of large scale electric power generation.

Demand is not always what it is predicted to be.  Humans are creatures of habit, but occasionally we break our routines enough for system wide to deviate from its predictable pattern.  Electricity supply is similarly not necessarily what we ask it to be.  Generators sometimes cannot provide as much electricity as they are expected to, for a number of reasons.  Sometimes maintenance periods can run over and a unit that was expected to be online cannot be synchronized to the grid.  Sometimes faults develop during generation that reduces the power output of the unit, or more severe, a unit trips and all of its power is lost.  Because this system of backup already exists, the marginal cost of additional backup is considerably reduced – the backup required for wind is already largely present for dealing with the loss of existing generation.

Last time I introduced one of the common arguments against the economic feasibility of wind generation was due to it requiring 100% backup.  I proposed three reasons why this may not be the case.  We will look at the first of these today and elaborate on it:

1)  Wind generation is dispersed and the power is aggregated (averaged) across lots of turbines. 

Even across a single wind farm, there is considerable smoothing of the combined output of power compared to one turbine alone, as wind is a fluctuating property and prone to gusts and sudden lulls.  Scaled up to country level, wind generation is smoothed even further – the wind is always blowing somewhere, and this reduces the volatility of the fluctuations between absolute extremes.  There is therefore never zero wind generation, so there is never a 100% backup requirement.

It is true that weather systems can occasionally encompass a whole country (e.g. low pressure systems during the winter sitting over the whole UK create very cold, still conditions, combining low wind with high demand), and this will create a high demand for other generation to meet the shortfall.  This is in fact one of the areas in which I research – these events are rare, but can lead to some significant challenges.  The short answer is that there are a number of solutions to this – using renewable generation as backup instead of fossil fuels (such as biomass energy), relying on more interconnection of electricity systems between countries, energy storage etc.

In order not to digress too much I will have to talk about ways of dealing with variability another time.  Sometimes it’s a real struggle to keep these issues blog post length. 

The most important question to ask when adopting a technology is perhaps “is it technically feasible”? If it is not, we are wasting our time.  After that, our concerns quickly turn to economics; if we choose a particular technology, how much value and service will we get for our investment in it?

Apart perhaps from hydroelectric power, which is already fully exploited in most countries, wind energy is one of the most established and commercially mature renewable technologies.  Over the past 20 years, turbine design has advanced considerably, with bigger, better turbines able to capture larger amounts of the wind resource for a given wind speed. 

The primary concern about wind generation from a technical standpoint is the variability of wind generation.  To an extent this is predictable (and reasonably reliable over a year), but requires additional generation to cover occasions where wind generation changes.  If wind generation cannot be balanced, the system operator is forced to hold back wind generation by feathering the aerofoil blades to reduce the amount of energy they extract, or stop them completely by applying a brake to their rotation. 

An often-misunderstood concept of the nature of wind energy is that it requires dedicated backup from fossil fuels; in other words, if we install 1GW of wind turbines, we need 1GW of coal or gas plant, because at some point the wind won’t be blowing (i.e. wind needs to be backed up 100%).  This is used to support the argument that installing wind is therefore expensive, and won’t save carbon. 

This last statement is completely illogical, and does not follow from the initial premise.  Even if it was true that wind generation required 100% backup, it would not mean zero carbon saving – savings are still accrued during windy periods.  The problem is more accurately one of the expense of having dedicated backup.

However, the 100% backup argument, while sounding like a logical premise, is refuted by an established body of evidence from a number of authors referring to something called capacity credit.  Robert Gross’s UKERC study reviews some 56 studies into this, all concluding that wind energy does indeed provide value to the system and does not require dedicated megawatt for megawatt backup.

There are a number of reasons why the capacity credit argument holds true:

1) Wind generation is dispersed and the power is aggregated (averaged) across lots of turbines. 

2) Electricity systems already require balancing and backup.

3) Variations in wind are to an extent predictable, and not instantaneous.

Once these arguments are thought through qualitatively, it is not surprising that the quantitative evidence supports this and the dedicated backup argument falls down.  I will dig a little deeper into these three statements in my next few posts.

I’ve finally got around to something that I’ve being to for a long time… upload my research poster!  The poster has been done for a long time now, it’s just that uploading it has been at the bottom of the list of a long things to do for a while, and it didn’t look like that list was ever going to diminish to the point that I’d get it done.

If you’re unfamiliar with my research it should give you an overview of what it is I do and why it’s important.  I’ve tried to cut down the jargon, but the language is still a bit stuffy and techy (hey, it is an academic research poster), but I’ve tried to explain all of the important terms so hopefully it’s reasonably accessible. 

Ok, last post  in this series.

We’ve now covered the problems with carrying on as we are in terms of generating electricity (basically, we can’t!), and have tackled two of the three technologies that can help us deal with this challenge.  Finally, a little bit wiser hopefully, we are on to the technologies I originally wanted to discuss… renewables.

There are a huge number of renewable technologies, including:

·         Onshore wind

·         Offshore wind

·         Biomass

·         Tidal

·         Solar PV

·         Solar CSP

·         Wave

·         Hydro

In the UK we are blessed with one of the best wind, wave and tidal resources in Europe, all forms of renewable energy that can be developed and exploited to our benefit.  Renewable energy is a broad field, and not one technology, but an umbrella term for many different technologies with different respective advantages and characteristics.

Their common benefits are that they utilize naturally replenishing resources, rather than finite fossil fuels, or finite nuclear fuels.  Their fuels, the wind, the waves, the tides, are all free.  They are zero carbon, and provide a huge potential opportunity for manufacturing, innovation and growth.  Anything else about them has to be said individually, as they have different characteristics that offer different drawbacks and benefits.  To avoid cramming this all into one post, I will have to tackle these individually at one point or another in the future.  For now, suffice to say these can work in a very complimentary way, and many technological developments can help some of their potential drawbacks.