=energy =technology =economics =europe
I previously wrote a post on grid energy storage from the perspective of implementation in America. This post is focused on what the cost of reliable power in western Europe with 0 usage of natural gas would be.
These are averaged costs across multiple sources, assuming
- renewable
power from wind & solar costs $0.06/kWh (yes, they're more expensive than in
America)
- 16 hours of storage is required for consistent supply from
wind & solar
- 12 hours of average storage use per day
All costs are per kWh, in the format "X / Y" where X is my favorite current design and Y is what I consider the best design.
coal
$0.07 / $0.06
with
$65/ton CO2 tax: $0.13 / $0.10
Standard ultra-supercritical coal
power. Europe has enough coal reserves for decades. The main problem is
environmental: CO2 emission, mercury pollution, ash disposal, etc. The lower
value with a CO2 tax involves different designs to make coal power somewhat
dispatchable to allow for more wind & solar usage.
biomass
$0.09 / $0.08
This is collecting biomass and burning it in boilers as a replacement for
coal. Biomass is more expensive than coal, so this is more expensive if CO2
emission isn't valued. (Yes, I'm aware of
IGCC, and that's significantly more expensive.)
This is for
on-purpose biomass production; smaller amounts of byproducts have lower
costs. Land availability would be a major issue if energy from biomass was
scaled up greatly.
power tower solar thermal
in
Australia and Egypt: $0.10 / $0.055
in central Europe: $0.16 / $0.10
Despite the economic failure of the big projects such as
Ivanpah,
there's been significant progress in reducing heliostat costs: they're down
to ~$100/m^2. The potential cost reductions I imagine here are in the
non-heliostat sections.
A big problem with concentrated solar power
is that it's more affected by clouds than PV solar, because diffuse light
can't be focused. So, the economics of this vary greatly with location. A
place with lots of sunlight, few clouds, and available water is needed for
this to be viable.
Note that the higher costs for this involve more
wind/solar usage and more storage.
adiabatic CAES
$0.14 / $0.11
Compressed energy storage is cheaper when combined with
power from natural gas, but we're assuming that no natural gas is available.
In that case, I like the
Hydrostor approach
- by which, I mean the combination of:
- excavating
a shaft down to perhaps 600m
- stoping of hard rock to create caverns
- lining the caverns with concrete
- digging a water reservoir on the
surface
- connecting the reservoir to the underground caverns to maintain
constant pressure
- compressing air with turbines
- storing the heat
from compressed air in a fluid
- storing the compressed air in the
underground caverns
(Hydrostor specifically has some
other design choices which I consider suboptimal.)
Implementing this
in a timely fashion would involve a massive expansion in mining, with a
per-person excavation rate comparable to coal mining in China.
nuclear
$0.14 / $0.07
Why has nuclear gotten so much more expensive? Mostly, it didn't - it just
didn't get cheaper.
Real US construction productivity hasn't been
increasing, and as a result, construction costs have increased. There have
been some small technological improvements, but they've been cancelled out
by a small decline in institutional competence.
Factories,
agricultural equipment, crop genetics, mining equipment, computers, and
semiconductors have improved. Most other things have not.
Reduction
in cost means not doing as much, and technological progress makes doing new
things possible, so for technology to reduce costs, the new stuff being done
must replace a greater amount of work. In the case of energy production,
progress involved better high-temperature turbines and natural gas
production replacing nuclear power.
So, you might say what we need is
improved nuclear plant designs, but every nuclear power startup's plan I've
seen would be >$0.20/kWh if it was implemented on a large scale, and many of
them would be unsafe. Significantly cheaper safe nuclear power would involve
things that I haven't even seen any company considering, and you really
shouldn't expect the basis of my lower estimate here to be implemented any
time soon.
Of course, at this point, costs really have increased
because tacit knowledge and supply chains have been lost, but the lack of
economic viability caused that.
lithium-ion batteries
$0.16 / $0.16
This is an
optimistic estimate for LiFePO4 batteries. Some estimates are substantially
lower, but those are by people who don't understand battery subsidies,
battery degradation, and/or battery manufacturing.
LiFePO4 would give
maybe 2000 cycles, limited by anode SEI growth. BloombergNEF battery prices
are greatly distorted by Chinese subsidies.
This would require a
massive expansion of battery manufacturing and lithium production.
flow batteries
$0.35 / $0.105?
The higher
value is for existing vanadium flow batteries. Regardless of current prices,
there's simply not enough vanadium available to use them for grid energy
storage.
The lower value is for a certain type of chelated
iron-chromium flow batteries with hypothetical low-cost membranes. A lot of
new chemical plants would be needed to make the organic chemicals involved.
Compared to CAES systems, flow batteries are more efficient and can be
smaller. So, these could be more distributed, which reduces transmission and
conversion requirements, and increases their value because they can provide
backup power in the case of power grid disruptions.