Why should we build transmission across and between continents, and put in place markets to buy and sell electricity to address climate change? Why not just put solar panels on rooftops or batteries in garages?
Continent-scale grids and markets already exist in a lot of places, they just have to be made more robust. Europe shares electricity from top to bottom and east to west, and has transmission interconnects to both the UK and northern Africa.
In North America, Quebec hydro electricity helps keep the lights on in New York, and wind energy from the Great Plains helps the great coastal cities of America sparkle in the night.
In China, hydro, solar and wind generated electricity crosses from the far north and west of the country to cities like the 50 million inhabitant Pearl River Delta on the heavily populated southeastern coast.
A lot of this transmission is going through aluminum core high-voltage direct current transmission lines. HVDC is much more efficient than high-voltage alternating current transmission, losing about 3% of the energy for every 1,000 kilometers or 600 miles, and it does that when it goes underwater or when it’s buried as well. It carries more energy too. Aluminum is the dominant metal used in transmission due to its light weight, and is the most common element in the earth’s crust so there are no critical minerals constraints to worry about. HVDC is the new pipeline for energy, with hundreds of lines often thousands of kilometers long planned, being built or in operation.
Why is all of this transmission north, east, south and west a good thing? Well, you may have heard critics say that the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time. That’s true in any given location, but it’s a lot less true the bigger the region you consider. Sunshine, for example, tends to be strongest in lower demand afternoon hours and absent in high demand evening hours. But running a transmission line or three a few timezones to the west means evenings can run on sunshine too.
While heavy industry will be a lot more energy efficient as it electrifies, especially with heat pumps which are currently capable of replacing 45% of industrial heat requirements, it still needs a lot more energy than the average household. Bringing electricity from further away to power manufacturing plants, steel mills, aluminum plants and cement kilns 24/7/365 is necessary. Ditto all ground transportation as it electrifies in the coming decades.
Similar logic applies to hydroelectric projects in the far north of continents above the equator, and massive solar farms in the sunny south. Bring electricity from where it’s being generated to where it is needed at any given time. Reverse the flow when the opposite is true.
That’s what HVDC interconnects like the United Kingdom’s currently operating eight do, and most of the seven under construction will be two-way as well. Some will be one-way, like the Xlink project which will bring sunshine and wind energy firmed by a bit of storage to the UK from Morocco 20 hours a day for a price a lot lower than the Hinkley nuclear power station that’s finally nearing completion.
Of course, it’s not enough to have transmission running long distances, enabling the free flow of electricity from areas of surplus to areas of demand requires markets where buyers and sellers can establish contracts. Those agreements will be for the next 15 minutes, the next hour, the next day and longer, just like current regional electricity markets.
And they’ll be markets for more than just basic electricity. There will be day-ahead reserve markets that wind and solar farms expecting lots of generation 24 hours ahead can bid on by running a bit below capacity but with the ability to turn it up as necessary. Right now the grid keeps ticking over at the right pace of 50 or 60 cycles a second and the right power because we have big lumps of spinning metal in coal, nuclear and hydro plants, but obviously the coal plants are going away. Keeping the cycles and power within the range that your oven or fridge likes can be done by solar and wind farms as well.
The Xlinks project from Morocco to the UK isn’t alone. There’s an HVDC cable being strung undersea from Greece to Cyprus to Israel to share electricity. There’s a proposed cable from Australia to Singapore, which hit a bit of a hitch when the two billionaires involved failed to see eye to eye, but is coming back to life now that the dust has settled. Another HVDC line has been approved to run fromGeorgia in the Caucasus on the east side of the Black Sea underwater to Romania, bringing the amazing renewables resource of far eastern Europe to the more populated part. Another is crossing the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Europe. And there’s an on again, off again HVDC connector that will bring even more hydroelectricity from Quebec to New York that’s on again.
The Association of South East Asian Nations is starting to build a massive regional HVDC interconnector set. They’re also being tied into China’s regional Supergrid and as noted likely into Australia as well. For that matter, there’s even an early-days effort to link Canada to Europe.
You can see why HVDC is the new pipeline. While the legacy molecules for energy crowd continue to think that the future will include ever more tubes and tankers carrying gases and liquids for us to burn, that’s not the case. Just as generating electricity with wind, solar and water is incredibly efficient and cheap, and using it directly for transportation and heating is incredibly efficient and cheap, transmitting electricity as electrons is also by far the optimal choice. Turning it into hydrogen and shipping that molecule, by contrast, is incredibly wasteful.
And to that point, the bigger the grid for electricity to flow across, and the more generation scattered across it, the less storage for electricity we’ll have to build. A recent study run by Chinese and African energy researchers found that an optimal sub-Saharan, twelve-country, 10,000 kilometer grid would reduce the amount of pumped hydro storage considerably, and at very reasonable costs. Similar studies are being published regularly in Europe, North America and Asia.
Lots of renewable wind, water and solar spread across continents and linked by HVDC will be delivering the vast majority of energy our economies need, it will be very climate friendly and it will be very lucrative for the people who build it.
As a reminder, here’s the short list of climate actions that will work:
- Electrify everything
- Overbuild renewable generation
- Build continent-scale electrical grids and markets
- Build pumped hydro and other storage
- Plant a lot of trees
- Change agricultural practices
- Fix concrete, steel and industrial processes
- Price carbon aggressively
- Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively
- Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuel
- Eliminate HFCs in refrigeration
- Ignore distractions
- Pay attention to motivations
"electric" - Google News
August 21, 2023 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/E3TUvP6
Big Electricity Grids & Markets Make Climate Change Sense - Forbes
"electric" - Google News
https://ift.tt/B87jJK1
https://ift.tt/KlZCjPX
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Big Electricity Grids & Markets Make Climate Change Sense - Forbes"
Post a Comment