How we created a roadmap for integrating renewable energy
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- Опубліковано 17 сер 2022
- The Integrating Renewable Energy programme was initiated out of necessity in the face of mitigating climate change. The programme's aims were to deliver a framework for understanding technical, market and policy requirements for integrating renewables across a wide range of scales, resource types and contexts.
After six impactful years, the Oxford Martin Programme on Integrating Renewable Energy is coming to an end. Co-Directors Nick Eyre, Sarah Darby and Malcolm McCulloch share reflections on their journey, including the trials and triumphs of bringing together a truly interdisciplinary team.
Special thanks to Eleanor Buckley (Communications Officer and Project Manager) for producing this video.
Oxford Martin School,
University of Oxford
www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk
UPDATE: I spent a little time on your website and found it to be much more balanced than the impression I got from your promotional video. So I must now add that commentary below applies to your promotional video.
II find it hard to believe that a prestigious organization like yours approached thischallenge in such an unscientific way. You started with an untested assumption then built a program to confirm your conclusion.
Your least cost conclusion for solar is absurd. You are confining your cost analysis to the price of tying the panels to the grid and assuming that under all circumstances everywhere on this planet they will deliver nameplate power. Capacity Factor needs to be taken into account and it's geolocation specific.
Furthermore the introduction of intermittent power to a grid is disruptive. You can't externalize the cost of changing and adapting a grid to accept 100% renewable inputs then compare that to existing inputs which are well adapted to the grid. There is a very high cost to adopting wind and solar to a grid and that cost increases dramatically as you phase out other sources of power. Even though the installed cost of a solar panel is quite low when a significant amount of your energy comes from solar panels on your grid the cost of adapting your grid to accept that power overwhelms the cost benefit of that cheap solar.
There is another obvious omission in your discussion, how every point on Earth needs to deal with night. Please don't say wind.
That's not a guaranteed firm power.
People will die if you only rely on wind as your backup to solar. When you start adding things like grid scale battery storage, not only do things get very expensive but the environmental benefit of doing so diminishes. In fact your assertion that 100% renewable energy is sufficient is only true if you confine your consideration to small regions on the Earth, where you have all the magic elements of capacity factor for wind, capacity factor for solar and hydro in abundance.
So, globally this 100% renewable initiative of yours is really only a partial solution. What will the other 80% of the globe do?
You made no mention of firm nuclear power. Why not? Are you ideologically hampered?
We have, maybe, another decade of wasted money and environmental desecration wrought by the build out of ridiculous wind and solar power plants (WASPPs). Before 2030, advanced nuclear power plants (NPPs) from at least 3 manufacturers will be operational.
With 2 to 4 years build programmes and capable of mass production, earnings from 24/7/365 low-carbon electricity generated by these plants exceed, by several times, those from WASPPs. Inevitably, commercial investment will be drained from WASPPs and the tortuous decades of wasted effort and engineering talent involved in technologies like this, will be at an end.
The route to net-zero could not be simpler: Advanced NPPs combined with electrolyser plants will generate all of the low-carbon electricity we consume, with more than enough spinning reserve and standby capacity on line at all times. The grid will operate just as it did, at virtually 100% effectiveness - just like the good old days.
The combination of NPPs with electrolysers means that those supplying grid electricity will be able to load-follow demand by switching generation between grid supply and hydrogen manufacture. This creates no technological issues with electrolysers, as they can respond to load changes in fractions of a second. When the plant combos are not being paid for electricity, they'll get value from hydrogen sales and possibly a grid-service remuneration for load-following.
Maybe treble the 300 TWh of supply we currently use will be needed for electricity and green hydrogen manufacture to decarbonise some heating, much, if not all, of transport and many industrial processes. With cost-effective green hydrogen available, carbon capture from cement manufacture and the like can be invoked to manufacture synfuels, plastics, etc..
230 Rolls-Royce UK SMRs, sited at existing nuclear industry and fossil fuel power plant sites, can supply 900 TWh/year for their 60 years design life. At £1.8 billion each, that’s £414 billion - Equivalent to £6.9 billion per year.
The subsidies alone, on the UK’s current capacity of WASPPs, is ~£12 billion per year. They are killing-the-poor machines and a criminal scam of unprecedented proportions, prolonged by charlatans suckering energy-inept politicians into, what seems, a never ending, year after year, round of good money after bad.
Nuclear waste is an issue. Nuclear accidents happen. Increased instability, both climate and social, tends to produce disasters, the fallout of which incurs transgenic damage that is irrecoverable.
'The deformed animals that owners called mutants were most likely victims of infectious disease suffered in the womb,' the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.