Engelmohr, a St. Louis architect with an impressive set of green credentials, her husband, and her two children are embarking on a year-long “waste diet,” and are challenging you (and me) to do the same:

The Waste Diet is a campaign to encourage people to reduce their Household landfill waste. Our household is committing ourselves to not sending any waste (or very minimal waste) to the landfill for the entire year of 2008. We are challenging every household in the country to try it for at least one day, one week, one month, or one year. Join us in our quest for less waste.

Do you know how much waste your household produces? I decided to measure ours and in one month alone, we sent over 240 lbs of waste to the landfill! I’m not so proud. We also generated over 100 lbs of recyclable waste including glass bottles, plastic, metal, aluminum, cardboard, etc at our local recyclers. Let us know how much waste you send to the landfill and what you are committing not to do in 2008 (click on “The Challenge” tab for more info).

If we can do it, so can you. Our household is comprised of a family of 4 who live in a suburban town in the Midwest. My husband and I have full-time 8-5 jobs and our 2 children attend the local public elementary school. We have a dog and 2 cats. We live in a 4 bedroom house on a suburban infill site about 1/4 acres. We own 2 gas-guzzling vehicles and use electricity to run a plethora of convenient appliances. We do, however, live in a brand new green home (see “About Us” for more info about our green home) which is the inspiration for our quest. This will truly be a challenge for us. Our hope is to find environmentally friendly waste solutions while not drastically changing our lifestyle in the hopes that we’ll offer ideas and inspirations to others.

Take The Waste Diet challenge. Measure your household landfill waste for one month and send us your results along with your “Waste Diet” goals for less waste in 2008. Click on “The Challenge” tab for more info. We will post stories and results on our website www.thewastediet.com We want to hear from you!

I’ll be trying to follow Maren’s example, and tracking her success. Check out her website for more information.

In a new piece in the Arizona Daily Star, reporter Tom Beal talks about those issues. As we’ve previously argued here, here, and here, energy storage has a big role to play in enabling solar and wind to compete with the big boys — coal, gas, and nuclear.

The engineers that actually operate the grid on a minute-to-minute, day-to-day basis know that intermittency is a technological problem that must be solved one way or another if solar and wind are to generate more than a token percentage of our electricity. Storage needs its own day in the sun, and now that sun is in the limelight, maybe storage will finally get some respect as well.

Full piece below the fold:

There is a shadow over the bright future of solar power in Arizona, cast by the clouds that blanket our metropolitan areas when our demand for electricity is greatest.

They call the problem “intermittency,” and it could have its biggest impact midafternoon in midsummer, when we’re all running our air conditioners to counter the heat.

Whether those solar panels are part of a big power plant or distributed across the rooftops of Phoenix and Tucson, they will lose their power source just when the electric grid needs it most.

If Arizona is to become “the Saudi Arabia of solar energy,” it needs to find ways to keep the electrons flowing through those summer storms and during the total lack of sunshine at night.

Scientists say we simply need to expand our vision of what constitutes a storage battery to include lakes, caverns, tanks of heated liquid and fleets of parked electric cars. In the future, we might use solar power when it’s not in demand to compress air and store it underground, releasing it to spin turbines when the clouds come by.

Other solutions include fleets of privately owned electric cars whose batteries can be plugged into the electric grid or bi-level lakes where water is pumped uphill when power is plentiful and run downhill through turbines during peak demand. Add to that the proven solar technology of solar troughs, which use mirrors to focus the sun’s warming rays on liquid-filled pipes that in turn heat and vaporize gases that power turbines.

Scientists say a mix of these strategies will be needed if solar is to become a dependable solution to our urgent need to find power sources that don’t give off greenhouse gases.

The solutions are a few years off, but so is the problem. Arizona’s utilities aren’t generating vast amounts of power from renewable sources right now because of solar’s other impediment — high cost.

Still, the intermittency of renewable power sources is already a technological problem, said Tucson Electric Power spokesman Joe Salkowski.

At its Springerville power plant, where coal is burned to produce 760 megawatts of power, TEP adds another 4.6 megawatts to the same transmission lines from a photovoltaic array. Even at that low level, said Salkowski, “we feel that hiccup” in the operation of the coal-fired generators when clouds pass by.

It’s no threat to the grid yet, but TEP is currently supplying less than 1 percent of its power from intermittent, renewable sources. In the future, said Salkowski, “It’s a challenge we need to overcome.”

Olgierd Palusinski, of the University of Arizona’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, is working on a cure for the hiccups, and perhaps for the entire problem.

Working with researchers from Arizona State University and the University of California-Irvine, Palusinski is electro-plating metals into the extremely small pores of a non-conductive membrane, creating a storage battery that doesn’t need the wet chemistry of standard ones. It simply stores electrons.

If it works, it will be more efficient, smaller, less costly and longer lasting than a standard battery, he said. An array of the devices could store enough electrons to provide 24-hour power from solar, he said.

Ben Sternberg, a professor in the UA Department of Mining and Geological Engineering, proposes a survey of underground caverns where compressed air can be stored for days before its pressure is released to spin turbines.

Sternberg wants to employ the skills and imaging techniques he honed searching for oil and gas over the past two decades, to find appropriate places to sequester compressed air underground.

Tom Hansen, a vice president for research at TEP, said the anticipated phenomenon of power loss at peak demand during Arizona’s monsoon season is one of the biggest impediments to growth in solar generation.

And, he told a group of scientists at the UA last month, it could be their biggest research opportunity in coming years. UA scientists, already researching a variety of solar topics, want to use some of the solar research money given them by the Legislature earlier this month to attack the intermittency problem.

The electric grid can’t handle more than a 10 percent fluctuation in power without shutting down, said Hansen, and his company, along with other Arizona utilities, has been ordered by the Arizona Corporation Commission to generate 15 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025.

Solar is the best bet for meeting that goal, he said, and for supplying even larger levels of power in the years to come, as oil and gas supplies dwindle, and coal falls into disfavor as an energy generator.

The Arizona Corporation Commission knew of the intermittency problem when it ordered Arizona’s utilities to meet the 2025 goal, said Commissioner Bill Mundell, but dismissed the utilities’ argument that it would keep them from meeting the goal.

“We said, ‘Look, when you get close to the 10 percent and reliability is still a concern, some future commission will address it, but right now it’s a hypothetical concern,’ ” said Mundell.

Mundell is betting that technology will solve the problem well before the goal is met, and he predicts that, by that time, solar will also be a cheaper source of energy than others. The price of oil and gas is going up, he said, and some sort of carbon tax on coal burning is inevitable.

The basic technology for capturing sunlight for electricity is good and increasingly reliable, Hansen said.

TEP’s array of photovoltaic panels near its coal-fired plants in Springerville has been generating electricity for six years and TEP has had to replace only 150 of the 34,000 modules in that time. It costs the utility $5,000 to $10,000 a year to operate the array, Hansen said, and most of that cost is for cutting the grass.

Wind turbines are already competitive with natural gas for generating electricity, said Mundell, but the state has very few areas with sufficient, consistent wind. He said solar is the future.

“We should be the Saudi Arabia of the world for solar,” he said.

When we’re talking about our energy future, it is essential to look at the big picture. We should evaluate each fuel source — its pros, cons, and its potential for the future — in light of all the geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges we face. We should develop a comprehensive plan that maximizes energy potential, minimizes risk, and makes room for new technological developments.

There are two things we absolutely must not do:

1. turn reactionary decisions based on short-term situations into long-term policy, and
2. base our energy future on wishful thinking. Speaking of coal and CO2 sequestration …

Reactionary decision-making

In the early 1970s, this country had about 12 percent of its generating capacity in natural gas-fired power stations. Then the OPEC embargoes hit, and we legislated against using natural gas in power stations (the Fuel Use Act of 1979). The gas share of electric generating capability dropped to around 7 percent.

Then, after the Fuel Use Act was repealed in 1986, we went on a gas-fired power construction binge in the late 1990s. Today, we have more gas-fired generating capacity than we have coal-fired! However, because the price of gas is so high, those plants only account for about 12 percent of actual kilowatts generated. Hmmm … 1970: 12 percent. 2007: 12 percent.

Also in the ’70s, we were on a path to replace a significant amount of coal capacity with nuclear. Then Three Mile Island occurred. All the planned nukes were canceled, and we were back to relying on coal. Not only that, but the economics of the Clean Air Act of 1990 encouraged utilities to switch to western coal, because even though it had less energy per unit weight (a lower-quality fuel than most eastern coal sources), it was low in sulfur and less expensive, even when transportation costs were factored in. Power plants representing tens of thousands of megawatts switched to western coal, because it was cheaper in the short-term (based on regulated utility economics) than adding sulfur dioxide scrubbers or other alternatives.

So now we not only use much more coal, we use lower quality coal, with poorer efficiency, that emits more CO2.

The result of all these jumps and starts is that despite some interesting cycles in the trend lines, our energy source mix today looks remarkably like it did forty years ago.

Wishful thinking

The truth is that once you factor in the cost of reducing — or perhaps “managing,” or “containing” — CO2, coal ceases to be the low-cost option for electricity production. With the coal and sequestration song and dance, however, it looks like we’re going to repeat history: the power industry is rallying around CO2 sequestration as the savior of coal and believes we’re going to solve our environmental and energy issues in one fell swoop.

It works only if you consider just one part of the overall problem. It’s not just that there are huge technological challenges, or significant efficiency and economic penalties imposed by separating CO2, compressing it, transporting it, and injecting it deep into the bowels of the earth. No, as serious as those issues are, that’s not what makes me, a chemical engineer, nervous.

Here’s what makes me nervous: for the first time, instead of taking out large quantities of stuff from the earth, we will be deliberately putting in large quantities of stuff — stuff we don’t want. And we’re putting it in deep, injecting it into the subsurface of the earth where the sun don’t shine, so to speak. (This process is very different from landfilling, which is a surface operation.)

Plus, we are substituting a solid material (coal) for a gaseous material (CO2). Fundamentally, technologically, geologically, and ecologically, this is no apples-to-apples switch. These huge volumes of vaporous material will have to be monitored and contained for, well, forever. Kind of like spent fuel rods from nuclear plants.

Yes, sequestration makes coal similar to nuclear power. There is a residual waste stream that has to be managed beyond the timeline of quarterly reports and into forever. That’s not a timeline that corporate America does well. And we’re talking about a huge volume of CO2, as opposed to nuclear waste, which is, relatively speaking, small and easy to monitor and can be put where we can see it. Set aside for the moment the profound legal issues surrounding sequestration. Are today’s sequestration sites tomorrow’s sets for the 21st-century Poltergeist movie?

Short-term decisions have long-term consequences

We have to recognize that the energy mix of the ’70s does not serve us well in the 21st century. It is also true that coal isn’t going away any time soon, and it behooves us to find more intelligent ways to use it (more about that some other time). Unfortunately, the electricity industry does not make revolutionary changes, and I might argue that, at least in my lifetime, it has hardly made any evolutionary changes. Because of its institutional structure, the best move King Coal can usually muster is to tread water and hope it all blows over one more time.

Why is this? One reason is that environmental regulation proceeds on a piecemeal basis rather than a holistic one. We legislated against natural gas after the OPEC embargoes. Then we pinned all our hopes on natural gas and built capacity like crazy people. Then all the nukes were canceled based on one accident, during which, by all accounts, the safety systems actually behaved the way they were supposed to, avoiding a truly calamitous event. Now sequestration is the answer. We keep regulating, legislating, and reacting to one-time events or one type of pollutant with short-term measures.

Instead, we should evaluate the problem holistically, and ultimately pay for a solution designed for the long haul.

Sequestration will not be the single savior for the coal industry, let alone the planet. We must look beyond single saviors and formulate a realistic policy that is not overly reliant on any one fuel, technology, or supplier. The question is whether we can look beyond simplistic solutions, muster the political will, and formulate — and implement — a coherent energy policy to keep our nation’s economic engine running and our lights on.

The foundation of our vision of a coherent energy policy (articulated in the book Lights Out and discussed elsewhere on Gristmill) are as follows:

1. Conceptual:
   
   • Shift emphasis and money into the right side of the value chain and away from the left side — in other words, don’t focus as much on reducing consumption, but on managing consumption.
   • Update the grid.
   • Give consumers the tools to see/feel/understand/act on their consumption habits.
2. Technological:
   • Left Side
     • Use nuclear to meet demand and manage CO2.
     • Limit coal to “intelligent” coal.
     • Fund a massive development program for storage.
     • Continue to commercialize “renewables.”
     • Limit liquefied natural gas to strategic imports for distributed power networks.
   • Right Side
     • Enhance effectiveness of microgrids and drive that process from a market/consumer perspective.
3. Regulatory/political:
   • “Backstop” the backbone of the nation’s electricity infrastructure.
   • Unleash the power of technology and competitive consumer choices (the power of the market) on the retail side.
4. Financial: Make sure that financial engineering never displaces systems engineering.
5. Global: Secure all of the supply lines affecting our domestic electricity infrastructure.
6. Social: Make electricity visible, understandable, and part of our everyday discourse.

And then there’s the personal — see Think: Less!

In the past several weeks, several announcements suggest that this situation has indeed come to pass. Here’s what’s going on: the Kansas Department of Health and Environment turned down a permit for 1400-MW of coal-fired power based on emissions of global warming gases. This is arguably the first time a coal plant has been denied for this reason. Let’s repeat the state: Kansas. It’s not California, Florida, New York,or Oregon. Kansas has historically been a coal-friendly state.

Another story revealed that even in Montana, a coal-producing state (or at least one with significant coal reserves), coal plant permits are being fought by bipartisan coalitions, and that electric utilities concede that these groups are effective. In other reports that cross our desks regularly, we note that more than 10,000 MW of coal plants recently have been canceled or postponed around the country.

No doubt many are of you are cheering! But there are trade-offs in all things — especially in energy, environmental, and economic issues. As enthusiasm for coal wanes, it grows for nuclear, even among some that have fought tooth and nail against nuclear in the past. However, there’s a problem. The fastest any nuclear plant can come online, given regulatory and financing hurdles, is around 2015. Meanwhile, electricity demand continues to grow. As much as the rewewables camp wants to believe it, solar and wind are not going to supply all or even most of the necessary power anytime soon. (We strongly believe in renewable energy, but also believe that we need energy storage to make it work on a scale that will be able to replace a significant amount of fossil fuels.) So what’s going to replace coal as the dominant fuel for electricity production?

First, we believe and hope that we will see a continuing and accelerating push for demand-side management and efficiency (long-overdue, we might add), but in areas where new power plants must be built, they will probably be fired by natural gas. The U.S. is expected to be importing an increasing amount of that natural gas as LNG (liquefied natural gas) from distant countries, many of which aren’t exactly our geopolitical best friends. (Countries with large natural gas reserves include Algeria, Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, and Trinidad and Tobago.) According to the Center for Liquefied Natural Gas, LNG currently contributes about 2.8 percent of U.S. gas consumption, and DOE projections forecast it to jump to about 16 percent by 2030.

Our message here isn’t that one power generating option is so much worse than another; they all have serious problems in the context of balancing supply, demand, price, and environmental impact. Rather, the message is that natural gas prices are exorbitant and expected to remain so as long as petroleum inches towards $100/barrel. The message is that electricity rates will continue to go up and the only practical means of containing the impact will be to reduce consumption. The message is that one methane molecule is equal to approximately 20 carbon dioxide molecules, and that industry experts estimate that approximately 2-10 percent of the methane used for electricity is released into the atmosphere between the well and the power plant. Finally, the terror premium inherent in the price of natural gas and petroleum affects electricity prices. When LNG is used for power generation, electricity is held hostage to the same geopolitical vagaries that destabilize petroleum markets.

Here’s our humble suggestion: Add that “terror premium” and the costs of defending global shipping lanes to the price of electricity generated with LNG. Defending our shipping lanes should be of increasing concern to us all. In just the past month, there have been several pirate (yes, pirate) attacks, one in which the United States Navy intervened to help North Korean sailors. (See the BBC, Chosun, Wired, and the International Maritime Bureau.) Plus, the highest concentrations of pirate activity are around, you guessed it, some of those same countries listed above — the ones with large natural gas supplies.

Adding the “terror premium” into the cost of importing LNG is one way that renewables, domestically sourced natural gas, nuclear plants, and even advanced coal plants (there are far better ways to use coal than those proposed by plants that are currently on the drawing board) can compete. If our electricity prices are going to be high, they might as well be high for good reasons — support for domestic, renewable, and carbon-free sources of electricity.

St. Louis-based The Doe Run Co. received kosher approval for its sodium sulfate, a salt commonly used in the manufacturing of starch, which it extracts from the recycling of lead-acid batteries, the company said Tuesday.

“Though none of the sodium sulfate we produce is contained in food, it is used in making an industrial, corn-based starch that goes into papermaking or cardboard production,” Lou Magdits, Doe Run’s director of raw materials, said in a statement.

Doe Run’s sodium sulfate is also used in the manufacturing of other products such as glass, powdered laundry detergent and carpet freshening products.

The Doe Run Company’s Buick Resource Recycling Division (BRRD) adheres to kosher processing procedures for the sodium sulfate process. Kosher is a term used to describe products made in accordance with Jewish law. Suppliers of Kosher-certified products require certifications at all steps in the manufacturing supply chain.

BRRD, located in Boss, Mo., is the world’s largest single-site lead recycling facility, processing more than 13.5 million lead-acid batteries annually. Battery recycling yields about 1,200 tons of sodium sulfate per month.

Based in St. Louis, The Doe Run Company is a privately held natural resources company.

Many of you might be aware that Doe Run has had run ins with environmentalists over the years. According to this article, at least, they’re on the right side of the law (okay, Jewish halakha law).

Two weeks ago, Jason moderated a panel at “Investing in Energy Storage Technologies,” a conference in New York City sponsored by Financial Research Associates, LLC. Unlike most industry conferences on storage (meetings where we all sit around preaching to the already converted), bona-fide, real-life energy tech investors attended this one. Plus — and here’s where it gets exciting — there were actually two presentations that together could very well signal the increase in interest and investment needed to commercialize energy storage technologies for our electricity grid.

First, American Electric Power Corp. (AEP), one of our country’s largest electric utilities, has announced a program to install up to 1,000 MW of energy storage devices over the next 13 years. Most of it is based on a relatively new technology called the sodium-sulfur battery. AEP has been demonstrating this technology at the 1.2-MW scale at a facility adjacent to a substation. Now that it has gained some confidence in them, the utility plans to install 6 MW worth of these devices by 2008, 25 MW by 2010, and 1000 MW by 2020. This is an unprecedented commitment to energy storage for electricity infrastructure in this country. AEP’s main interest is in ensuring that distributed energy at non-utility sites can be smoothly integrated into its electricity production and delivery system.

Second, as some of you already know, a piece of legislation is circulating in Congress titled The Energy Storage Technology Advancement Act of 2007. The act comes with a funding commitment of $150 million, which would be appropriated to cost-share technology demonstration projects. With respect to the electricity grid and distributed generation, this means the federal government seeks to facilitate the transition of storage technologies from R&D to commercialization. A discussion of the act was hosted by Brad Roberts, chair of the Electricity Storage Association, who had just testified to the relevant Congressional committee the week before.

The bill represents a quantum leap in commitment; until now, the federal government has supported energy storage with a meager R&D budget of around $10-15 million. Of course, compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to support just one coal technology, integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), it doesn’t seem like much. But it’s a huge step in the right direction.

Of course, it’s a long way from a bill introduced in the House to real money in the lab, but we’re excited anyway.

So, who stands to benefit the most from these developments? We believe renewable energy proponents do. Large-scale wind and solar, in particular, cannot compete against nuclear and fossil fuels for electricity generation without commercial storage. Their intermittency and unpredictability will ultimately prove formidable barriers to renewables achieving more than 5-10 percent penetration on the grid, or competing without significant direct subsidies. Energy storage converts an unpredictable resource, one that utilities are essentially forced to adopt, into one that can be scheduled into the markets.

So, the AEP move and the House bill may signal a real turning point for energy storage. We’re not holding our breath, but we are definitely keeping our fingers crossed.

Ahh, price. That magic number at the nexus of supply and demand. The problem with price in electricity markets is that it is not determined by supply and demand, as in a free, deregulated market — even in those states where there was, supposedly, deregulation.

In fact, we’ve long argued that deregulatory initiatives, as they were designed and implemented, had nothing to do with what most people understand as “deregulation” at all. Johnston points out that retail price controls, artificially induced competition on the wholesale side, and same old-same same-old metering does not a free market make. As Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute says, “Just calling something a market does not make it a market.”

According to a study quoted in the NYT article, conducted by the former Washington state utility regulator, rates in deregulated states run about four cents a kWh higher than in regulated states. Although each situation is different, there are several reasons that the cost of power in “deregulated” states has been going up so dramatically:

• Because many of these same states have tougher emissions regulations, they embraced cleaner-than-coal gas-fired power plants and have, therefore, been the victims of the escalating cost of natural gas for fuel.
• As pointed out in the article, they artificially reduced prices during competition through “mandated” controls.
• They did not put in place tools (smart metering) with which consumers can see/react to their electricity usage.
• They have deregulated the wholesale market but not the retail market, so there’s a gap that suppliers can take advantage of.
• They forced their utilities to divest their generation assets and allowed stranded cost recovery. Initially, the utilities got through that OK in terms of financial health, but now there are serious costs looming (fuel, transmission, global warming) and unless the regulator wants to see the utilities go belly-up, rates have to rise.

Plus, keep in mind that when experts talk about consumer prices being reduced through competition, they mean that “average” prices across all consumers will decline. Ninety percent of consumers can pay a higher rate, while 10 percent pay a lower rate — they buy the most electricity and, like all bulk purchasers, enjoy the steepest discounts.

What Johnston doesn’t mention is the role that electricity storage — or rather, the lack of it — plays in the marketplace. Electricity is not like other commodities, at least not today, because we don’t have a way of storing it in the same way that wheat, corn, or even natural gas and oil can be stored. The product is unique in that sense. Electricity is produced for immediate, “on-demand” use, so the market for electricity is not like other markets.

Also, the transmission system has not been upgraded to enable power to be easily moved in response to market signals (as opposed to emergency transfers). Because there are still so many “constraints” and “transmission loading relief” requests, any benefits from electricity markets is squelched. A robust system of electricity storage would allow a more responsive and “real” electricity market to emerge.

Real markets only work when consumers have information on which to make decisions. Today, at the residential and small-user levels, there is no way to respond to higher prices (which would moderate load which would moderate prices). Only 15 percent of the country has an “advanced meter” on their home or business, and these were mostly designed for the utility to shed meter readers (these meters can be read remotely). The really advanced meters — two-way communication devices that help the utility understand and control load and usage patterns — have not been widely adopted, except for a few areas of the country. With no ability to respond to rising prices — say, changing the thermostat — consumers cry foul and turn to regulators to keep prices down.

Which brings us to yesterday’s announcement by Tucson Electric Power (TEP) that they have received a $100,000 federal grant to study the problem as it relates specifically to solar power. Under the grant, they will “evaluate how effectively solar energy systems can replace traditional utility generating resources.”

TEP will also evaluate “the true costs and benefits” of the almost 400 photovoltaic (PV) systems their customers have already installed in their service area through their SunShare program.

Read more here: “TEP Wins Federal Grant to Evaluate Solar Energy Systems.”

While there’s been a lot of talk about coupling energy storage to solar (and wind) power, there are additional reasons for addressing our lack of storage capability. In fact, storage technologies can act as a “shock absorber” for the whole grid and can help address some of the key challenges facing the industry, including efficiency, reliability, and security. Simply put, energy storage is good for the grid.

The current electric power system is built around a central tenet: electricity must be produced when it is needed and used once it is produced. Bulk energy storage technologies break this antiquated linkage by allowing operators to produce and store electricity for later use — as one would in other commodity markets.

Bulk energy storage also benefits all of us by creating a reserve that could be tapped in case of national emergency, much like the petroleum reserve. After all, our entire economy — including our national defense capability — runs on electricity. If key parts of the grid are taken out, and there is no electricity reserve at the ready, what happens then?

Emergency back-up power more often than not means diesel generators, and as we saw during the blackout of 2003, many diesel generators either couldn’t get up and running or ran out of fuel before the lights came back on.

More specifically, however, storage benefits the energy consumer by providing a risk-management strategy, and it benefits the energy generator by making its assets more productive and efficient. As electricity demand continues to increase over time, existing generation assets must achieve greater efficiencies — for both market and environmental reasons.

The amount of electricity flowing through the grid at any one point is determined not only by consumer demand but by physics as well. The grid itself requires a certain level of electricity flow in order to maintain its integrity. Ramping power up or down without taking grid requirements into consideration risks destabilizing the grid and costs money. So, during off-peak hours, coal facilities ramp down their utilization rate while nuclear facilities provide the baseload power needed to stabilize the grid. As additional power is needed, coal facilities are instructed to increase generation to meet demand. (Whether you like coal or not, by capacity coal-fired plants represent the largest fleet of power facilities). This process is called load following.

Coal plants follow the load requirements of the grid by ramping up or down as needed. The problem with this is that it wreaks havoc on coal plant systems, lowers overall efficiency, increases O&M budgets with additional maintenance, and results in shorter life spans of critical equipment.

However, if coal plants were not required to ramp down during off-peak periods — nighttime — but could instead continue to generate power and store it for release during the day, these facilities would not be required to perform as much of the load-following role as they currently do. Instead, power generators can provide power in long-duration (and more efficient) discharges and then use stored energy to provide low-cost ancillary services such as load following and spinning reserves. This would increase a plant’s capacity factor, a measure of asset productivity, and reduce systemic stress and the costs required to address that stress. Utilized in this manner, large-scale storage helps offset the need for some additional peaking capacity, but is focused more as a system optimizer than generation replacement.

Coupled with storage, a generation facility can also gain much-needed flexibility during the critical scheduled “outage” seasons (when units are taken out of service for planned maintenance) of the spring and fall to avoid spot make-up purchases.

Other optimizing roles for storage include improving the economic and environmental profiles of fossil assets by reducing regular dispatch and cycling costs. Storage lowers the fixed-cost-per-unit output, improves the economics of these capital-intensive facilities, and helps them to run in a more efficient — both operationally and environmentally — manner that lowers overall per-unit production cost.

And, of course, coal facilities must also deal with their impact on the environment. Because emission limits (NOx restrictions, etc.) can constrain a power facility from operating maximally during peak times such as summer, they are often forced to operate at partial power. Unfortunately, when operating at partial power, plants are less efficient and have higher emissions per unit of heat input. Storage could help these facilities reduce their total emission per unit of output by shifting some production to the evening when the facility could run at its rated — instead of partial — generating capacity. And, by producing more power at night, air quality near the coal facility is improved since ozone-induced haze, a by-product of NOx, O2, and sunlight, is less likely to develop.

Everyone’s talking renewables. G8 leaders are talking about reducing CO2 emissions and increasing renewables; federal and state officials are talking about tough new renewable portfolio standards; many in the general public seem eager to embrace renewables as the only logical way to address global warming (although whether or not they are aware of the price of renewable energy remains unclear).

There’s a fundamental problem, however. The one thing no one is talking about is perhaps the one thing that would make the transition to renewables work, namely energy storage.

While it’s true that electricity itself cannot be stored, electricity can be stored in a different form … after all, that’s what a battery is.

The reason storage is so essential to renewables is the renewables are intermittent — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, and they are often located in areas far from population centers. Because the price of wholesale electricity varies throughout the day, when electricity is sold is just as important as how much electricity is sold. But if you can store the energy generated on a sunny or windy day and then inject that energy into the grid at periods of high demand … well, then you’ve got yourself a market. You’ve got both physical and economic control over your resource and the leverage with which to build increasing demand for your product.

So coupling bulk energy storage with renewable energy — especially remotely located wind farms — creates a more reliable market for the energy generated and a more attractive environment for investment. Perhaps most importantly, storage also begins to make renewably generated electricity behave, from a market and supply perspective, like electricity from baseload plants such as nuclear.

Before we expect too much from renewables and are disappointed by their failure to perform, we need to start talking about giving them the power they need to succeed. We need to be talking about storage.

Sources:

• The Energy Storage Council
• Pearl Street Power blog
• World Council for Renewable energy: “The case for energy autonomy: Storing Renewable Energies” (call for papers)
• Electricity Storage Association: papers and presentations