[HN Gopher] The operative system for a decarbonised, decentralis...
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The operative system for a decarbonised, decentralised, digitised
energy system
Author : snickmy
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-03-22 10:40 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nicolabortignon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nicolabortignon.com)
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| With you on decarbonised, can at least get behind digitised, but
| why decentralized? Two significant functions of the electrical
| utility business are clear natural monopolies, transmission and
| distribution. Markets and competition on the generation side have
| proven to be very difficult to manage, e.g. in California with
| Enron and the recent Texas ice storms.
|
| It seems like a situation where there is a clear central
| authority, and one that in many places historically has been
| government-owned and at least in theory democratically
| accountable to the people. So why not let the utility company
| manage storage, transfers between different houses, etc.? What's
| the upside of a bunch of connected microgrids?
| phicoh wrote:
| I wonder if it makes sense to separate the generation of power
| from the sale of power to consumers (and of course there is a
| separate transmission/distribution network as well).
|
| The transmission/distribution network is natural monopoly so
| that needs to be regulated.
|
| Generation of power can be free, to allow different techniques
| to optimize.
|
| However, the companies that sell power to consumers should be
| regulated. There can be many of those companies but each
| company should be required to have a plan in how to provide
| power even in adverse conditions (and with significant
| penalties if they fail). Then those power companies can
| contract enough generation capacity to have redundancy and sell
| the excess capacity to industry.
| EGreg wrote:
| That's what we said about phone companies. They were the
| canonical example of natural monopolies and packet switching +
| VOIP dropped the costs down to nearly zero. We videoconference
| across continents instead of $3 a minute audio that ties up the
| lines.
|
| Energy generation and cell signals should be decentralized. We
| have 5 transformers in the USA that -- if they go down -- the
| entire grid goes too. An EMP or Carrington Event can take out
| long running power lines. A Chinese "stuxnet" can sabotage
| nuclear reactors etc.
|
| See video for more info:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Well electricity takes the lowest resistance path (read
| shortest).
|
| I have solar panels and my neighbor uses electricity to heat
| their home. So my solar panels heat their house, but the DSO
| gets to charge the neighbor as much as if the electricity would
| come from across the country for transmission. If we'd move the
| meter a bit further we could share. Plus the energy company I
| sell to and they buy from charges something as well.
|
| If we could cut out two middlemen the I would earn the same but
| their bill would be about 25-50% smaller. Which incidentally
| you could invest in on-prem batteries and I would use their
| battery energy to heat my home during the night. Little
| microgrid community. Scale that up to a neighborhood and the
| effects start to add up quite nicely.
|
| But I do agree with you that integrated grids that span large
| areas are essential for grid stability and increase the odds of
| clean energy is being produced at all times needed.
| phicoh wrote:
| At the end of the day, the capacity of the grid has to be
| such that you can deal with the worst case situation. So the
| grid has to handle the case where it is cold and your solar
| panels are off line.
|
| This means that your neighbor would still have to pay for the
| grid even if they would directly get electricity from you.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| You might save 25% on your bill, but put the meter any
| farther up the line and wait for a natural disaster to hit,
| for example. Get a quote to have you and your neighbor's
| pole, transformer, etc. fixed up and then figure out what you
| saved. Heck, you can probably just wait to replace you and
| your neighbor's transformer and see.
|
| Keep putting your meter further up the line, to get the
| economies of scale needed so your microgrid can have
| lineworkers, engineers, meter readers (for all your own
| meters, you have to portion costs out to the individuals in
| the grid)... congratulations, you just made a new utility
| company.
| snickmy wrote:
| Imho, there are couple of important underlying reasons why we
| see a centralized grid as a well functioning one.
|
| It is a mature system. Having been operating in the space for
| over 100 years, it is true that the current grid systems are
| extremely well operated. Yes, even the Western NA and the ERCON
| (Texas one). They have a very complex system of ancillary
| services in places, order value of generation based on
| conditions, etc, etc.
|
| It is also true that having a multi time zones footprint (and
| multiple geographies) allows for interesting properties. For
| instance, Denmark energy produced through offshore wind
| turbines is sent to Norway (equivalent to LA - SEATTLE
| distance) to be transformed into hydro storage.
|
| So why do we need decentralisation? First of all, there are
| places where a central grid don't exists. You can think about
| Africa, but also some rural areas of US. Having the traditional
| grid reaching those places is simply not economical feasible.
| Secondly, while a country level grid is operated effectively,
| is not always efficient. There are plenty of energy
| transformation (from DC to AC, but also different voltage
| conversion, etc). And then there is the OMH low, and energy
| loss through resistance of the material used to transmit it. To
| be honest, is not that microgrids don't have loss, but there
| are definitely less conversions, and shorter distances to
| travel Thirdly is resiliency and robustness. If we push for
| smaller decentralised grids, we are pushing for an extra level
| of redundancy in the operations, for instance by increasing
| adoption of residential/neighborhood storage solutions. If one
| of those microgrids goes down, there are no chain reactions, or
| tip-over effects, which today are quite common in a centrally
| operated grid. Lastly, it's about innovations. Central grid
| systems have made us 'lazy'. Energy prices have been going up,
| but slowly enough that we haven't been really bothered by them
| (boiling-the-frog effect). In markets where the traditional
| grid was not as present/robust, innovation has moved way
| faster. For example, is no surprise that the majority of
| residential storage solutions companies are based in Australia,
| where they are experimenting with multiple chemical compounds
| (zinc, bromine, titanate, etc) as well as different
| architectures (ie. Hydrogen)
| tablespoon wrote:
| > First of all, there are places where a central grid don't
| exists. You can think about Africa, but also some rural areas
| of US.
|
| I'm guessing those areas in the US are more _wilderness_ than
| "rural." The US has been working on rural electrification for
| more than 80 years:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act.
| According to that article, 90% of farm homes were already
| electrified _62 years ago_.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Centralization also produces economies of scale that
| decentralized systems will NEVER attain.
| gioscarab wrote:
| > It needs to supports, out of the box, cloud connected or wifi
| enabled (wireless lan connected) devices. When the physical layer
| of devices in the home don't offer Wireless connectivity,
| hardware communication modules needs to be adopted to bridge the
| existing connectivity.
|
| The protocol the OP wishes for exists already, it is called PJON:
| https://github.com/gioblu/PJON
| Glench wrote:
| For anyone wanting to read more about the need for and benefits
| of electrifying everything (the ones in the home being cars,
| clothes dryers, stove/oven, heating/cooling, water heaters, etc)
| check out https://rewiringamerica.org
|
| They have a lot of technical details of how much carbon it would
| reduce, how many jobs it would create, how much it will cost, and
| how to do it on the time-scale necessary to stay below 2 degrees
| warming. It's really inspiring.
| ars wrote:
| This relies on pie in the sky impossibilities.
|
| They want rooftop solar. Where I live the roof points in the
| wrong direction and solar would not work. It's also shaded by
| other homes and trees.
|
| In large cities with apartments rooftop solar won't even come
| close to providing enough energy for all the apartments.
|
| I will stick with my environmentally friendly gas dryer and
| oven, and will avoid the bad for the environment electric
| version of those.
|
| Maybe when the last carbon and natural gas power plant shuts
| down I'll consider switching, until then switching to electric
| would harm the environment.
| philips wrote:
| I think the idea is to replace gas appliances as they break
| with electric. Why? Buying electric replacements is an
| investment towards decarbonization: when that last gas
| electric plant shuts down your electric appliance is powered
| by solar/wind/nuclear "automatically".
|
| It seems like a pretty reasonable stance to take to
| decarbonize given the 15 yearish lifespan of most appliances
| and the urgency of the problem.
| ars wrote:
| That makes no sense. For the entire life of the electric
| appliance you are emitting double or perhaps triple the
| carbon dioxide of the equivalent natural gas appliance.
|
| First switch the electric grid to not use natural gas and
| only then think about changing appliances.
| philips wrote:
| Do you have a reference for that?
|
| I think it is market specific depending on the makeup of
| your areas grid.
|
| As far as cost in many markets a heat pump is more cost
| efficient today compared to electric AC and gas furnace.
|
| https://www.breakthroughenergy.org/our-challenge/the-
| green-p...
| Glench wrote:
| Modern electric appliances are often more efficient than
| burning fossil fuels. For example, the electric motors in
| cars are just inherently a lot more efficient than gas
| motors, not to mention less mechanically complicated,
| quieter, etc. (One of the reasons that electric cars today
| already have the lowest lifetime cost of ownership.)
|
| At Rewiring America they found that electrifying all
| American cars, heating/cooling, appliances, etc would save
| 40-50% over fossil fuel equivalents just because of the
| inherent efficiency of electric machinery. This makes the
| problem of decarbonization 40-50% easier.
| Glench wrote:
| Are you paid by oil companies? lol
| carapace wrote:
| Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative
| agriculture. (This is different from large-scale industrial
| ethanol production.)
|
| You grow e.g. sugar beets, convert them to alcohol and some
| byproducts (that go back into the farm as feed and fertilizer),
| use the alcohol in generators and vehicles. You're operating
| within your solar budget, the atoms that make up the alcohol came
| from water and air so all your nutrients and trace minerals stay
| on the farm and the fuel is carbon-neutral (all the carbon
| released when you burn the fuel originally came from the air in
| the form of carbon dioxide, not from underground fossilized
| carbon), and it can be done with simple off-the-shelf tech that
| has been around for literally thousands of years. You don't have
| to scrap your ICE cars and trucks, you can modify them to work
| with alcohol as fuel (some cars it's a software mod!) and the
| exhaust is not poisonous.
|
| - - - -
|
| Here's a video of Vaclav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting
| 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate - what
| we can learn from historic energy transitions".
| https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk The presentation is IMO very
| interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts
| in energy use would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283
| )
|
| We use too much power. And when I say "we" I mean mostly the USA
| but the rest of the world is ramping up rapidly. Unless there's a
| miracle (like clean fusion generators that kids can make in the
| garage out of chicken wire, tires, and ducktape) the only
| physically realistic way to de-carbonize fast enough to really
| matter is a drastic reduction in power use.
|
| This is possible, and we can (I believe) maintain our quality of
| life, but we have to start now and work quickly.
|
| The good news about that is that our systems are enormously
| wasteful so there is a lot of "low-hanging fruit" when it comes
| to reducing power usage through increasing efficiency.
|
| The bad news is we are still going to have to make changes, pay
| for them, and yeah, make some sacrifices as well.
|
| - - - -
|
| In re: software to manage local grids efficiently, IMO that's not
| interesting. It's covered already. If you need fancy real-time
| dynamic "smart" manager software for your local micro-grids
| you're almost certainly doing it wrong.
|
| Put something like Factorio in front of your grid as a UI and
| scenario planner and let the local kids run it. "Energy Club"
| ggpsv wrote:
| That is the hard truth that we are reluctant to accept.
|
| Countries in the global north consume way too much energy, and
| countries in the global south consume way too little. This what
| Jason Hickel suggests in his book Less is More [0].
|
| [0] https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more
| rini17 wrote:
| Just a bunch of buzzwords. Is there any estimation what is the
| overhead to ensure reliable continuous electricity supply in
| microgrid? In some places even a week-worth amount of energy
| storage is required, that means oversized batteries or fossil
| fuel backup generator anyway. As compared to grid that has many
| sources in many places and can more easily use them effectively.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Good article. But I think there needs to be something like a
| sustainable fuel also because using batteries for long-term
| storage does not seem feasible.
|
| So things like oil from algae, digesters for methane, ammonia,
| and ethanol are all interesting. Maybe even just buried
| pressurized hydrogen. Maybe potential kinetic even.
| melling wrote:
| "Co2 emissions from electricity generation account for 45% of
| world energy-related emissions."
|
| We've been talking about climate change for 3 decades now.
|
| I wonder how much time we could have bought ourselves if we had
| immediately embraced nuclear power
| IngoBlechschmid wrote:
| In 2019, just about 10 % of the global electricity came from
| nuclear power. Hence replacing fossil sources by nuclear
| would entail large-scale construction of new nuclear
| reactors. However, we then run into the problem of peak
| Uranium (our reserves are thought to last for about 140 years
| at the current rate, but this would shorten to about 14 years
| if we increased nuclear by a factor of ten). (New kinds of
| reactors might alleviate this problem, but they are not
| actually available now. Of course, they might be if, as you
| suggest, we started on this course earlier.)
|
| In any case, nuclear power is today not economically viable
| -- wind and solar are cheaper by a factor of 2 to 3 (computed
| over the full lifecycle, but excluding the indefinite storage
| costs of nuclear waste).
| snickmy wrote:
| Honestly quite a bit, but, unfortunately the response time of
| Nuclear power is not the fastest available. It takes hours to
| get the process going, or to shut it down, and unfortunately
| an energy grid needs to have a demand-supply net of 0
| (usually plus/minus 1.5%) or the appliances connected might
| face some irreversible damage. This means that, while Nuclear
| could have been a great answer to a good chunk of the energy
| demand (sorry cannot estimate how much), we would have
| probably still needed a lot of the traditional fossil fuel
| source fo generation.
|
| The other aspect to always keep in mind, when looking at a
| system as mature as the energy grid is COSTS. Most likely the
| economy of nuclear doesn't work out compared to the
| alternatives available. (that's why policies and incentives
| are needed to move away from fossile fuel)
| adflux wrote:
| When you try to dismiss nuclear, what alternative "clean
| energy" can you "turn on" when experiencing increased
| demand in energy? Can you turn on the sun or the wind?
| snickmy wrote:
| There are two aspects to consider here:
|
| 1- what is the response time and the cost for alternative
| generation: Biomass is a valid 'on demand' alternative
| here. Geothermal + Tidal, while still intermittent are
| more predictable (like the Sun) hence it's easier to
| design ahead. Which is quite useful when it comes to
| deployment You can read more here: https://courses.edx.or
| g/assets/courseware/v1/95ea4a6731bff7e...
|
| 2- what other demand-respond can be achieved/deployed
| (i.e.: storage and demand side response). For instance
| hydro is a very good solutions here, malten salt storage,
| and hydrogen are upcoming technologies. More on
| flexibility here: https://courses.edx.org/assets/coursewa
| re/v1/416cc82fc233d20...
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