I’m gladly surprised by the interest received for Part 2 of my ´Energy Challenges’ article. Unfortunately, there is too much interesting information so the article has ended up being too long. For your convenience, I´ve split in three subparts. Same as in part 1 (LINK), I will try to offer the conceptual solutions to each of the challenges and my plan is to publish further posts on real cases. In saying so, please feel free to suggest projects that you know of or questions regarding my proposed solutions.

 

Challenge 1: Matching Supply with Demand

 

To give you an idea of the magnitude of the supply and demand mismatch in the UK in 2015, the average utilisation rate of power plants was 48%. A simplistic way of understanding this figure is that on average at every moment half of the power plants in the UK are not being used.

 

Demand side solutions

Source: Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit

 

Regulating demand has been on the energy agenda for a long time and we have seen things, such as different tariffs depending on the time of the day or between weekends and weekdays, in response. However, current incentives are far too weak to encourage any significant change of habits.

 

The only realistic scalable solution is a combination of Demand Side Response (DSR) and energy storage. DSR is a voluntary scheme that users (homes and businesses) sign up for that rewards them for not using electricity at certain times, thanks to smart meters and deferred start equipment this can be automatized (I will publish some interesting examples in the future). This has been common among high energy consumption businesses for decades but we are now seeing ways for consumers to participate and benefit from such schemes. A very interesting way of doing so is the one applied by upsideenergy in the UK, that uses storage devices already existing in people´s homes to provide demand side response services, this way consumers don´t need to do any forward planning to benefit.

 

Supply side solutions

Source: Volker Quaschning, HTW Berlin

 

In general, our electricity supply TODAY is formed roughly by 4 types of power plants based on the timing of their usage:

 

1-      Volatile renewable energy (e.g. wind and solar): Most governments consume these ones first as the fuel is free, they have low operation costs and there is less control over their output.

2-      Base load plants (e.g. Nuclear): These are power plants that have significant start-up time and costs but if they run at a continuous output they generate very cost efficient power.

3-      Load following plants (e.g. Coal): These are power plants higher variable costs but relatively low times and cost for start-up and changing their power output.

4-      Peak power plants (e.g. gas or Hydroelectric): These are the fastest plants to start-up and with the most flexible power output.

 

 

Fortunately for us, the FUTURE looks very promising for cleaner alternatives using energy storage. We are seeing examples such as wind as baseload (Denmark) or Nuclear as load following (France). Those promising examples when combined with Solar power plus energy storage could supply the whole world energy demands 100% carbon free (see study by Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland).

 

Regarding utility scale energy storage, there are currently plenty of cost efficient technologies ranging from pumped hydro (the excess of electricity is used to raise water to a dam) to lithium ion (the same batteries found in laptops or electric cars). Most of these technologies fulfil the speed requirements to be considered Peak Power Plants.

 

In a few days, I will post part 2.2 regarding how to solve the energy losses challenge