The grid storage situation would absolutely be better with more nuclear.
Aside from that, I agree with pretty much everything you wrote (I’m a cleantech consultant, I also do these kinds of analyses a lot). It’s very well thought out.
I would add a few extra variables that might be worth considering.
There are a lot of other things we’re going to need to transition away from fossil fuels in ways that are very energy intensive and, at present, very capital intensive to do any other way. (Right now, that means early plants need 24⁄7 power to be even close to viable even with subsidies). Chemicals, as well as liquid fuels for shipping and aviation, are the big obvious ones for me. Any substitute will be more electricity intensive but we should be able to get capex down over time. Possibly to the point that it makes sense to tolerate lower utilization rates when electricity is abundant, enabling overbuilding and reducing grid storage needs. But in any case these shifts will change when and where we consume a significant fraction of world energy use.
There are some early-commercial-stage solar technologies that can plausibly better spread production across the day and year, reducing daily storage requirements somewhat.
We’re going to build a lot of Li-ion battery vehicles anyway, that will add up to an equivalent of 1-2 days of energy storage. I know people don’t want to shorten their own battery lifetimes, but using some of that for V2G, or being at all smart about how and where we build and implement charging infrastructure, could make a lot of sense cost-wise.
Consumer-level IoT and real-time pricing as forms of demand response could help with the duck curve.
The trajectory for PV is clearly that as-generated daytime power is going to get very cheap relative to grid power today, which means considerations for storage in another decade are likely going to be dominated by capex rather than round-trip efficiency.
I would also add that thinking of a fixed $/MT price/value for CO2 emissions abatement is not optimal, given how much easier some sources of emissions are to abate than other. If you can cut the problem in half but have no idea how to make the other half feasible, do it ASAP and you’ve doubled the available time to fix the remainder plus you can then better concentrate investment on the problems that turn out to still be hard in a few more years. You always go to war with the army you have, but in this case the enemy doesn’t fight back. I, for one, think years of overly complicated policy regimes and attempts at forecasting future tech trajectories have made this whole space a lot more complicated, and a lot more expensive to address, than it needs to be.
Direct air capture is too expensive, sure, but if CO2 mitigation costs from biomass usage are competitive, you don’t need to get CO2 emissions down to 0. In any case, we’re not at the point of total mitigation being plausible yet.
There are some early-commercial-stage solar technologies that can plausibly better spread production across the day and year, reducing daily storage requirements somewhat.
Do you mean solar-thermal with molten salt energy storage?
Not specifically, though I do agree that thermal storage is worth pursuing, especially in cases where what you need is actually heat, whether industrial process heat or, in areas where is makes sense, district heating. I’m less convinced about the economics of it when we’re talking about storing heat to then make electricity, but we’ll see.
What I had in mind were some emerging technologies that can help reduce the efficiency penalty solar panels have in suboptimal conditions and outside peak daylight hours. Perovskite PV is one example which could also get pretty cheap given how it’s made and what it’s made of. Another that’s still very early and expensive is something like metamaterial waveguide films that basically work like CPV, without lenses, mirrors, or tracking, which can boost efficiency under any conditions and if good enough, can also make it feasible to use more expensive high efficiency multijunction cells.
From another angle, one that’s been around a while but hasn’t been very practical until recently, there are waste gasifiers that makes syngas or hydrogen. Obviously we want to minimize production of all kinds of waste, but the fact remains that there’s a lot of stored energy in discarded non-recyclable plastics and biomass, and these systems can capture over 50% of the energy content in waste that hasn’t been sorted, while separating out the inorganics (glass, ceramics, metals) for recovery and recycling. We’re starting to see some municipal use cases as well as hazardous waste use cases. And depending on the application the syngas can be use to make dispatchable electricity, or in some cases to make synthetic hydrocarbons my coupling it with a Fischer-Tropsch process. It’ll never be more than a small fraction of the total electricity mix, but stable, cheap piles of garbage and a 100 MT/day gasifier might be great where the alternative is multi-day or seasonal energy storage.
Eh, concentrated PV solar used to seem like a good idea, back when panels were expensive, but now all that stuff is more expensive than the actual solar panels. You physically can’t increase incident light per surface area using a thin coating without tracking, so that solar metamaterial thing seems questionable from a basic physics perspective. But maybe you can explain how it works, exactly?
People have tried to do IGCC, but for power generation, gasification just isn’t competitive with boilers. For stuff with higher water content than coal, it’s even worse. Some people are working on wood gasification but that’s just to make “renewable” plastics.
For sure, panels and land are cheap, and there’s no good reason to increase $/W just to gain efficiency. Except sometimes on rooftops where you want a specific building to gain maximum power from limited space, but you obviously wouldn’t use CPV with all the extra equipment in that kind of application.
The metamaterial thing (or to a lesser degree even just other advanced optics, like GRIN lenses) is that you can make thin films that behave, electrically, like non-flat optical elements. Metamaterials can give you properties like anomalously high or low absorption coefficients and refractive indexes, negative refractive indexes, and highly tunable wavelength specificity. In some designs (see: Kymeta, Echodyne and their sibling companies) you can make electrically reconfigurable flat, unmoving antennas that act like a steerable parabolic dish. The “how” involves sub-wavelength-scale patterning of the surface, and a lot more detail than I can fit in a comment.
And I don’t mean IGCC, I agree about that. I have spoken with several dozen companies in the waste gasification space, their technologies vary quite a bit in design and peformance, but at the frontier these companies can extract ~50% of the chemical energy of mixed organic wastes (with up to 20% water content) in the form of syngas (~30% if you have to convert back to electricity and can’t use the extra heat), 2-4x what you get from a traditional incinerator+boiler (which are about 10-12% energy recovery).
I understand physics and material science as well as a grad student, you don’t need to explain basic diffraction. What I’m asking is how these metamaterials increase solar power output. Are they increasing the light that hits the solar panel? Where would that light have otherwise gone, if not for the metamaterial thing?
I’m also confused by why waste gasification would be more energy-efficient than boilers. Are they comparing the chemical energy content of syngas to electrical power generation at 30% efficiency, or something? Gasification uses more energy input than burning stuff. It’s better to convert methane to syngas and burn coal than vice-versa. And biomass is further in that direction, it’s better to gasify coal and burn biomass than vice-versa. This is a basic fact and any startup who won’t admit it is either delusional or lying.
Sorry, got it. Sometimes it’s hard to guess the right level of detail.
First point: The comparison to make is “An area covered with solar panels” vs “an area covered with a metamaterial film that optically acts like the usual CPV lenses and trackers to focus the same light on a smaller area.” The efficiency benefit is for the same reasons CPV is more efficient than PV, but without the extra equipment and moving parts. It will only ever make sense if the films can be made cheaply, and right now they can’t. The usual additional argument for CPV is that it also makes it viable to use more expensive multi-junction cells, since the area of them that’s needed is much smaller, but we may be moving towards tandem cells within the next decade regardless. In principle metamaterials can also offer a different option beyond conventional CPV, though this is my own speculation and I don’t think anyone is doing it yet even in the lab: separating light by frequency and guiding each range of frequencies to a cell tuned to that range. This would enable much higher conversion efficiencies within each cell, reducing the need for cooling. It would also remove the need for transparency to make multi-junction cells.
Second point: I’ve talked to the people operating these gasification systems, not just the startups. The numbers are all consistent. Yes, gasification costs energy, and gasifying coal would not make sense (unless you’re WW2 Germany). But the process can work with any organic material (including plastics and solvents), not just fossil fuels or dry biomass and the like, as long as the water concentration isn’t excessive (I’ve been told up to ~20%), and consumes a bit less than half the energy content of the fuel. The rest is what you can get from the syngas, most of which is in the hydrogen, and fuel cells are about 60% efficient if you want to use it to make electricity. That’s where the 30% number comes from. There are plants doing this using agricultural waste, MSW, ASR, construction waste, medical waste, hazardous waste, food waste, and other feedstocks that otherwise either have little value or are expensive to dispose of.
You can certainly make Fresnel lenses that focus light, but without some sort of active control, it’s not physically possible to focus light from an unknown direction onto the same spot. That would be a thermodynamic law violation by focusing blackbody radiation. So what’s the advantage of this metamaterial stuff over Fresnel lenses? (Those work well enough, but of course aren’t quite economically practical.)
Also, that metamaterial company you mentioned, their website shows regular solar panels with this metamaterial coating on them, not a system that focuses light onto smaller PV panels.
I’m of course aware of the split-spectrum solar proposals using diffraction gratings, but that’s another thing that died off with the fall in PV prices.
Coal gasification typically has exergy efficiency <50%. You can get ~60% exergy efficiency, but biomass would certainly be worse than coal. Some plastics might be similar, I guess, but for wood you’d be looking at maybe 1.6x the losses, so something like 36% exergy efficiency from biomass to syngas. Then with 60% conversion to electricity you have ~22% efficiency, worse than boilers & steam turbines and with higher capital costs.
Yes, some simulations of wood gasification have given better numbers, but I don’t trust them. Coal gasification is much better understood, it’s used on a large scale in China, we know how it performs in practice, and we know biomass gasification is worse.
Combined cycle gas turbines can do 60% efficiency, and fuel cells are more expensive than those, so you probably wouldn’t use fuel cells.
The grid storage situation would absolutely be better with more nuclear.
Aside from that, I agree with pretty much everything you wrote (I’m a cleantech consultant, I also do these kinds of analyses a lot). It’s very well thought out.
I would add a few extra variables that might be worth considering.
There are a lot of other things we’re going to need to transition away from fossil fuels in ways that are very energy intensive and, at present, very capital intensive to do any other way. (Right now, that means early plants need 24⁄7 power to be even close to viable even with subsidies). Chemicals, as well as liquid fuels for shipping and aviation, are the big obvious ones for me. Any substitute will be more electricity intensive but we should be able to get capex down over time. Possibly to the point that it makes sense to tolerate lower utilization rates when electricity is abundant, enabling overbuilding and reducing grid storage needs. But in any case these shifts will change when and where we consume a significant fraction of world energy use.
There are some early-commercial-stage solar technologies that can plausibly better spread production across the day and year, reducing daily storage requirements somewhat.
We’re going to build a lot of Li-ion battery vehicles anyway, that will add up to an equivalent of 1-2 days of energy storage. I know people don’t want to shorten their own battery lifetimes, but using some of that for V2G, or being at all smart about how and where we build and implement charging infrastructure, could make a lot of sense cost-wise.
Consumer-level IoT and real-time pricing as forms of demand response could help with the duck curve.
The trajectory for PV is clearly that as-generated daytime power is going to get very cheap relative to grid power today, which means considerations for storage in another decade are likely going to be dominated by capex rather than round-trip efficiency.
I would also add that thinking of a fixed $/MT price/value for CO2 emissions abatement is not optimal, given how much easier some sources of emissions are to abate than other. If you can cut the problem in half but have no idea how to make the other half feasible, do it ASAP and you’ve doubled the available time to fix the remainder plus you can then better concentrate investment on the problems that turn out to still be hard in a few more years. You always go to war with the army you have, but in this case the enemy doesn’t fight back. I, for one, think years of overly complicated policy regimes and attempts at forecasting future tech trajectories have made this whole space a lot more complicated, and a lot more expensive to address, than it needs to be.
Direct air capture is too expensive, sure, but if CO2 mitigation costs from biomass usage are competitive, you don’t need to get CO2 emissions down to 0. In any case, we’re not at the point of total mitigation being plausible yet.
Do you mean solar-thermal with molten salt energy storage?
Not specifically, though I do agree that thermal storage is worth pursuing, especially in cases where what you need is actually heat, whether industrial process heat or, in areas where is makes sense, district heating. I’m less convinced about the economics of it when we’re talking about storing heat to then make electricity, but we’ll see.
What I had in mind were some emerging technologies that can help reduce the efficiency penalty solar panels have in suboptimal conditions and outside peak daylight hours. Perovskite PV is one example which could also get pretty cheap given how it’s made and what it’s made of. Another that’s still very early and expensive is something like metamaterial waveguide films that basically work like CPV, without lenses, mirrors, or tracking, which can boost efficiency under any conditions and if good enough, can also make it feasible to use more expensive high efficiency multijunction cells.
From another angle, one that’s been around a while but hasn’t been very practical until recently, there are waste gasifiers that makes syngas or hydrogen. Obviously we want to minimize production of all kinds of waste, but the fact remains that there’s a lot of stored energy in discarded non-recyclable plastics and biomass, and these systems can capture over 50% of the energy content in waste that hasn’t been sorted, while separating out the inorganics (glass, ceramics, metals) for recovery and recycling. We’re starting to see some municipal use cases as well as hazardous waste use cases. And depending on the application the syngas can be use to make dispatchable electricity, or in some cases to make synthetic hydrocarbons my coupling it with a Fischer-Tropsch process. It’ll never be more than a small fraction of the total electricity mix, but stable, cheap piles of garbage and a 100 MT/day gasifier might be great where the alternative is multi-day or seasonal energy storage.
Eh, concentrated PV solar used to seem like a good idea, back when panels were expensive, but now all that stuff is more expensive than the actual solar panels. You physically can’t increase incident light per surface area using a thin coating without tracking, so that solar metamaterial thing seems questionable from a basic physics perspective. But maybe you can explain how it works, exactly?
People have tried to do IGCC, but for power generation, gasification just isn’t competitive with boilers. For stuff with higher water content than coal, it’s even worse. Some people are working on wood gasification but that’s just to make “renewable” plastics.
For sure, panels and land are cheap, and there’s no good reason to increase $/W just to gain efficiency. Except sometimes on rooftops where you want a specific building to gain maximum power from limited space, but you obviously wouldn’t use CPV with all the extra equipment in that kind of application.
The metamaterial thing (or to a lesser degree even just other advanced optics, like GRIN lenses) is that you can make thin films that behave, electrically, like non-flat optical elements. Metamaterials can give you properties like anomalously high or low absorption coefficients and refractive indexes, negative refractive indexes, and highly tunable wavelength specificity. In some designs (see: Kymeta, Echodyne and their sibling companies) you can make electrically reconfigurable flat, unmoving antennas that act like a steerable parabolic dish. The “how” involves sub-wavelength-scale patterning of the surface, and a lot more detail than I can fit in a comment.
And I don’t mean IGCC, I agree about that. I have spoken with several dozen companies in the waste gasification space, their technologies vary quite a bit in design and peformance, but at the frontier these companies can extract ~50% of the chemical energy of mixed organic wastes (with up to 20% water content) in the form of syngas (~30% if you have to convert back to electricity and can’t use the extra heat), 2-4x what you get from a traditional incinerator+boiler (which are about 10-12% energy recovery).
I understand physics and material science as well as a grad student, you don’t need to explain basic diffraction. What I’m asking is how these metamaterials increase solar power output. Are they increasing the light that hits the solar panel? Where would that light have otherwise gone, if not for the metamaterial thing?
I’m also confused by why waste gasification would be more energy-efficient than boilers. Are they comparing the chemical energy content of syngas to electrical power generation at 30% efficiency, or something? Gasification uses more energy input than burning stuff. It’s better to convert methane to syngas and burn coal than vice-versa. And biomass is further in that direction, it’s better to gasify coal and burn biomass than vice-versa. This is a basic fact and any startup who won’t admit it is either delusional or lying.
Sorry, got it. Sometimes it’s hard to guess the right level of detail.
First point: The comparison to make is “An area covered with solar panels” vs “an area covered with a metamaterial film that optically acts like the usual CPV lenses and trackers to focus the same light on a smaller area.” The efficiency benefit is for the same reasons CPV is more efficient than PV, but without the extra equipment and moving parts. It will only ever make sense if the films can be made cheaply, and right now they can’t. The usual additional argument for CPV is that it also makes it viable to use more expensive multi-junction cells, since the area of them that’s needed is much smaller, but we may be moving towards tandem cells within the next decade regardless. In principle metamaterials can also offer a different option beyond conventional CPV, though this is my own speculation and I don’t think anyone is doing it yet even in the lab: separating light by frequency and guiding each range of frequencies to a cell tuned to that range. This would enable much higher conversion efficiencies within each cell, reducing the need for cooling. It would also remove the need for transparency to make multi-junction cells.
Second point: I’ve talked to the people operating these gasification systems, not just the startups. The numbers are all consistent. Yes, gasification costs energy, and gasifying coal would not make sense (unless you’re WW2 Germany). But the process can work with any organic material (including plastics and solvents), not just fossil fuels or dry biomass and the like, as long as the water concentration isn’t excessive (I’ve been told up to ~20%), and consumes a bit less than half the energy content of the fuel. The rest is what you can get from the syngas, most of which is in the hydrogen, and fuel cells are about 60% efficient if you want to use it to make electricity. That’s where the 30% number comes from. There are plants doing this using agricultural waste, MSW, ASR, construction waste, medical waste, hazardous waste, food waste, and other feedstocks that otherwise either have little value or are expensive to dispose of.
You can certainly make Fresnel lenses that focus light, but without some sort of active control, it’s not physically possible to focus light from an unknown direction onto the same spot. That would be a thermodynamic law violation by focusing blackbody radiation. So what’s the advantage of this metamaterial stuff over Fresnel lenses? (Those work well enough, but of course aren’t quite economically practical.)
Also, that metamaterial company you mentioned, their website shows regular solar panels with this metamaterial coating on them, not a system that focuses light onto smaller PV panels.
I’m of course aware of the split-spectrum solar proposals using diffraction gratings, but that’s another thing that died off with the fall in PV prices.
Coal gasification typically has exergy efficiency <50%. You can get ~60% exergy efficiency, but biomass would certainly be worse than coal. Some plastics might be similar, I guess, but for wood you’d be looking at maybe 1.6x the losses, so something like 36% exergy efficiency from biomass to syngas. Then with 60% conversion to electricity you have ~22% efficiency, worse than boilers & steam turbines and with higher capital costs.
Yes, some simulations of wood gasification have given better numbers, but I don’t trust them. Coal gasification is much better understood, it’s used on a large scale in China, we know how it performs in practice, and we know biomass gasification is worse.
Combined cycle gas turbines can do 60% efficiency, and fuel cells are more expensive than those, so you probably wouldn’t use fuel cells.