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Topic: Demand Flexibility

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[Episode #188] – Getting to a 100% Clean Grid

Dec 21 2022

How much of a role might wind, solar, nuclear, transmission, power plants equipped with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, or direct air capture of CO2 play on a 100% clean power grid? Which mix of those technologies would provide the cheapest pathways to a clean grid?

And once we have met 90% of the need for grid power with clean generation, what will we need to meet the last 10% of the demand for grid power? Will it be ‘overbuilt’ wind and solar? Dispatchable geothermal, hydropower, and bioenergy generators? Seasonal storage using hydrogen or batteries? Conventional fossil-fueled plants with CO2 capture? Or might it be some mix of flexible demand technologies? Or some or all of the above?

For that matter, how certain can we even be about modeling the possible solutions years or even decades ahead? Are there solutions that might play a large role in the future but that we can’t yet model very well? How confident should we be that whatever the solutions turn out to be, we will end up with not only a grid that is completely free of carbon emissions but also one that is fully reliable?

In this episode, we speak with a senior researcher at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has been researching and modeling grid power for many years. In this quite technical discussion, we review two new NREL reports that address these questions and show that producing a 100% clean power grid is not only technically feasible by a variety of pathways but also commercially feasible and ultimately, cheaper than continuing to run the fossil-fueled power grid we have today.

Geek rating: 9

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[Episode #63] – Pathways to Deep Decarbonization

Feb 21 2018

Mini Episode

As energy transition proceeds we’ll need to move well beyond decarbonizing electricity generation and into transportation and space heating powered by renewables. But we’re only beginning to figure out the pathways by which we might do that, and since each region has its own particular sources of renewable energy and its own particular needs for energy, the solutions may vary quite a bit from place to place.

When do we figure out how to decarbonize space heating and transportation? What sorts of challenges will we face in adding those loads to the electricity grid? How much additional generation, transmission, distribution capacity, and storage will we need? How will we manage such a grid? And what if, once we have transferred some of those loads to the grid, it actually starts to look cheaper to not electrify everything? Our guest in this episode has studied such questions for years, and has some surprising insights into how deep decarbonization might actually evolve.

Geek rating: 3

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[Episode #60] – Demand Flexibility

Jan 10 2018

Mini Episode

Demand response and demand flexibility—shifting demand to intervals where electricity is abundant and cheap, and away from when the grid is constrained or power is expensive and dirty—can help keep prices down, optimize the grid overall, and help us integrate more renewable supply into grid power while displacing more fossil fuels. Until recently, this has mainly meant doing simple things like turning off loads during the on-peak intervals of time of use rates. But now new technologies are coming to the grid, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the so-called Internet of Things, which could let us moderate loads and operate grid assets in a much more intelligent, precise, and dynamic fashion, taking grid optimization to a new level and reducing the need for peaking resources.

But this is all quite new, and how we’re going to implement it, and what it may require, largely remains to be seen. In this episode we’ll talk with Sara Bell, founder of Tempus Energy, and get a little insight into how some early pilots of these technologies are working in the UK and South Australia. We’ll also get an inside view of her campaign to revise the design of the capacity market in the UK, so that it actually benefits consumers in accordance with the law, rather than distorting markets in favor of fossil fuel incumbents.

Geek rating: 8

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