Climate Change and Renewable Energy News and Discussion

tphuang said:

Long term, China does not need to import more natural gas or coal.

I also don’t see why you would run these plants intermittently like you are stating here. You operate these plants for the months when renewable production are low and demands are high. That could be 6 months of the year. Any excessive energy can be stored in ess.

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Yes, backup power plants (coal, gas, methanol, ammonia) for when renewable production is low will really only apply during the winter months in North America, Europe and China.

And during the summer, there will be a large surplus of very cheap (or free) electricity, and it makes sense to convert this to Hydrogen, and then to methanol or ammonia. During the winter, this will be burned for heating or into electricity.

Also, operating backup power plants for the winter will be more like 1-3 months of the year, depending on the country. Source below, which is a worst case scenario which doesn't account for constant nuclear generation to comprise 10-20% of overall electricity generation.

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"Lowest cost 100% SWB (Solar, Wind, Battery) systems will typically require just 35-90 average demand hours of battery energy storage, depending on regional climate and geography"

Source

AndrewS said:

Yes, backup power plants (coal, gas, methanol, ammonia) for when renewable production is low will really only apply during the winter months in North America, Europe and China.

And during the summer, there will be a large surplus of very cheap (or free) electricity, and it makes sense to convert this to Hydrogen, and then to methanol or ammonia. During the winter, this will be burned for heating or into electricity.

Also, operating backup power plants for the winter will be more like 1-3 months of the year, depending on the country. Source below, which is a worst case scenario which doesn't account for constant nuclear generation to comprise 10-20% of overall electricity generation.

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"Lowest cost 100% SWB (Solar, Wind, Battery) systems will typically require just 35-90 average demand hours of battery energy storage, depending on regional climate and geography"

Source

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I don't think nuclear will exceed 10% electricity generation.

Also, another thing people miss is that < 50% of China's NG import is used in power generation. The majority of it is used for heating and feedstock into refineries and for industrial usage. Some of the latter can directly be replaced by H2/methanol/ammonia. They do need to find a solution for heating.

For summer, do consider that China typically use the most power in summer time. That's also when they have droughts recently and low hydro power. So, I could see a scenario where you need to run backup power for 2 months in winter and 3 months in summer. If you over-generate power, then you can always store the additional in ESS.

As long as you have enough ESS in the system, a smart grid & efficient power modules, these things are all resolvable.

I'm a big fan of methanol and ammonia, because you can produce it in the middle of nowhere completely off grid, transport it in liquid form to where you actually need it. Even if you loose some efficiency vs hydrogen, the flexibility is hard to beat. You don't have to build these costly UHV lines

I will add my 2 cents. Renewables and green fuels on a scale of China's grid has never been done before, China is in uncharted territory here. It's not impossible and I'm confident that China will eventually figure it out, but there's going to some major hiccups on the way. Do note that the electrical grid is one of the most complicated things that humans have ever built. I guarantee you that you're gonna find some unique challenges that running a terawatt scale grid on 90% wind/solar/hydro, batteries and green fuels that we haven't even thought of yet.

I think that having the power of Siberia 2 pipeline is a good backup plan just in case. Again, there will be major hiccups or black swans events, it won't be smooth sailing all the way. Things like some massive drought cutting hydro-power generation massively, some massive heatwave, a extremely powerful typhoon season knocking out a few dozen gigawatts worth of offshore wind, War, geopolitical events cutting China off from her sea lanes or imported fossil fuels like what's happening in the Red sea, the economics of green hydrogen/ammonia/methanol might not work out the way China hoped, green hydrogen proving to be extremely difficult to store/transport then expected, some major worldwide black swan event like COVID completely fucking up the world economy etc etc.

If things go perfectly, then great, power of Siberia 2 is reluctant by the mid 2030s and will costs a lot for nothing much but still can be used to wean China off of coal and imported LNG via sea lanes faster, used for petrochemicals and sold off to other countries. If a black swan event does happens, this pipelines might be the difference between China winning a war or having some really nasty consistent blackouts for years like we see with South Africa.

Also, I think that Russia is in a weird position that they can switch positions and pivot to the West at any time, due to their close proximity to Europe. A lot less likely now due to Ukraine but I think that having physical infrastructure in place will help bind Russia to China even more closely even with a government that might lean towards more towards Europe. Sort of like how Russia was trying to gain influence with Europe/Germany via Nordstream. Even with a pro-western government in place, Russia can't afford to snub China when there's multiple billion dollar pipelines running the majority of their fossil fuels imports to China.

tphuang said:

I don't think nuclear will exceed 10% electricity generation.

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For the larger nuclear plants, I would agree.
But there should be a wave of smaller modular reactors coming, which would add a lot more capacity.

tphuang said:

Also, another thing people miss is that < 50% of China's NG import is used in power generation. The majority of it is used for heating and feedstock into refineries and for industrial usage. Some of the latter can directly be replaced by H2/methanol/ammonia. They do need to find a solution for heating.

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I thought almost no natural gas was used for power generation? And that it's all heating and industrial use?

tphuang said:

For summer, do consider that China typically use the most power in summer time. That's also when they have droughts recently and low hydro power. So, I could see a scenario where you need to run backup power for 2 months in winter and 3 months in summer. If you over-generate power, then you can always store the additional in ESS.

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My guestimate is that during the summer, there will be so much spare daytime solar electricity than you won't need to use any hydro electricity at all, if only you could store that daytime solar electricity for later use when the sun has set. There's models that you only need 4 hours of ESS, which means you wouldn't need to use backup power like coal, ammonia or methanol.

There's a large bunch of assumptions and models here, but the key ones are that:

1. electricity storage costs are still very high in comparison to the electricity production cost.
2. Solar provides 50% of the overall electricity consumption during the summer.

tphuang said:

As long as you have enough ESS in the system, a smart grid & efficient power modules, these things are all resolvable.

I'm a big fan of methanol and ammonia, because you can produce it in the middle of nowhere completely off grid, transport it in liquid form to where you actually need it. Even if you loose some efficiency vs hydrogen, the flexibility is hard to beat. You don't have to build these costly UHV lines

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A lot of the ESS and backup power for individual homes and corporations will actually be handled by their individual purchases of Battery ESS.

It will be interesting for me to see whether the local grid operator or the solar/wind farm end up with larger ESS, I would think the latter, but that's an interesting situation.

As for NG, IIRC, 1/3 of it was used for electricity generation, hence <5% of China's electricity needs are from NG. So if you want to be optimistic about NG, you'd think that they can substantially replace coal with NG. There are some new NG power plants coming online. On the other hand, all these renewable projects for Hydrogen mean you won't need as much NG for producing methanol or ammonia going forward.

Coal consumption is still huge in China. how much of that gets first transferred to NG is debatable. It seems like the pace of coal -> solar/wind is pretty fast due to the low renewable costs. The pace of coal -> NG slowed down because NG prices were so high for 2022.

SMR is unknown at this point. We'd have to see what the economics look like. The solar and offshore wind economics look so good right now, that I'm not sure how well nuclear can compete

tphuang said:

Also, another thing people miss is that < 50% of China's NG import is used in power generation. The majority of it is used for heating and feedstock into refineries and for industrial usage. Some of the latter can directly be replaced by H2/methanol/ammonia. They do need to find a solution for heating.

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Heat pumps for anything below 200 Celcius like building heating etc... For hot industrial processes electrical solutions that can reach thousands of Celcius degrees exist. Be it radiative, inductive, resistive, etc... Such as these:

As far as I understand, some alloys require carbon to be present and/or oxygen to be not present during smelting. So it might be hard to fully electrify metal smelting. But I think such applications that electrification is infeasible could be served by synthetic fuels manufactured using captured carbon or atmospheric methane (which humans are a huge culprit of).

tphuang said:

A lot of the ESS and backup power for individual homes and corporations will actually be handled by their individual purchases of Battery ESS.

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I would expect cars to be the main ESS system for households.

For a car, I would expect a maximum of 10 KWh as the average daily electricity consumption for driving. Then add an absolute maximum of another 10KWh for the average daily electricity consumption for a house.

That's only 20kWh of consumption which is likely a gross overestimate for most of the world and particularly for China.

If a household has a single car with a battery of 50 kWh, there's more than enough spare battery capacity to balance out electricity supply during a day.

Most cars in China are already using LFP batteries, and if you run the numbers, the latest batteries will outlast a 15 year lifespan of a car, even with battery usage doubling due to its use as a household ESS system.

Remember the battery in the car has already been paid for.

tphuang said:

It will be interesting for me to see whether the local grid operator or the solar/wind farm end up with larger ESS, I would think the latter, but that's an interesting situation.

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It makes sense for the solar/wind farm to have the ESS. Remember you have losses during the conversion process into the storage system and then out again. Overall, say 30% for pumped hydro or 10-20% for a battery

These losses are significantly greater than transmission line losses, so it makes sense to have these losses at the source where electricity is cheap, rather than at the end of the transmission line where electricity is expensive.

In addition, it allows for a large number of solar/wind farm operators to deploy ESS systems to match peak evening demand when electricity is expensive.

These types of ESS deployments will be faster and cheaper than equivalents at the end of a transmission line.

tphuang said:

As for NG, IIRC, 1/3 of it was used for electricity generation, hence <5% of China's electricity needs are from NG. So if you want to be optimistic about NG, you'd think that they can substantially replace coal with NG. There are some new NG power plants coming online. On the other hand, all these renewable projects for Hydrogen mean you won't need as much NG for producing methanol or ammonia going forward.

Coal consumption is still huge in China. how much of that gets first transferred to NG is debatable. It seems like the pace of coal -> solar/wind is pretty fast due to the low renewable costs. The pace of coal -> NG slowed down because NG prices were so high for 2022.

SMR is unknown at this point. We'd have to see what the economics look like. The solar and offshore wind economics look so good right now, that I'm not sure how well nuclear can compete

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Nuclear has the advantage of guaranteed availability and is competitive with coal in China.

So at nighttime when there is no solar and variable wind, nuclear/coal sets the lowest baseline price, assuming that battery storage costs are still comparatively high. Nuclear will also benefit from evening peak demand when electricity is expensive.

The last time I looked, the marginal cost of nuclear electricity production is like 2-3 cents/kWh. That's competitive with wind and also solar in places which aren't too sunny.

The rest of nuclear electricity cost is the repayment portion of the upfront construction cost, and you'd be looking to repay all of this with say a 25 year bond.

Afterwards, that leaves another 25 years of operation to 50 years @2-3cents/kWh

SMR construction in China depends on the success of the pebble bed reactor program. There is also the Linglong One but I doubt that will be as cost effective.

750 MW solar tower completed the installation of its 11960 heliostats.

2023 list of hydrogen projects and the list is huge. This is galvanizing all the sparsely populated provinces up in the north that receive minimal precipitation and have a lot of wind


MingYang has now signed up with IBCLNG to produce green hydrogen


I'm telling you, this green hydrogen is going to be a great industry for China. Not just in the hydrogen they produce, but also the electrolysis, all the solar/wind installations and supported equipment, plant converting hydrogen to ammonia/methanol and then all the fuel cells, hydrogen transport...

It's a great thing to get ahead of this early

And they all get to sell this stuff to Europe

MingYang also celebrating its aquaculture in action. Each unit catches 10000 fish, which makes the offshore turbine even more economical

do some math, each fish brings in $5 in revenue. Each catch brings in $50000

you bring it in 3 times a year, that's additional $150k in revenue generated by each turbine.

read this, the economics of offshore wind in China is pretty hard to beat.