back to article The US grid is ready for 100% renewables, says DoE

The Biden administration is confident in the US's ability to demonstrate its power grid can run entirely on clean power, so it's giving the Department of Energy $26 million to stand up projects to do this. The announcement from the DoE said money from President Joe Biden's 2021 infrastructure bill will fund the endeavor, known …

  1. IGotOut Silver badge

    The US

    is pretty well known for not being able keep the lights on with fossil fuels, so good luck on this one.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The US

      As the US is more used to the unreliability, actually I imagine it's uptake will be less of a concern.

      If you want reliability, get a generator, has been the mantra of pretty much the entire US system.

      The balkanisation of it's component companies and contradictory regulatory regimes is also a serious barrier to any kind of change that certain UK based orgs found out the hard way when it bought it's way into the North Eastern US.

      Still, getting the House, Congress and Presidency on board for POSSIBLE change is welcome; for leaving things as the status quo would merely be inviting failure. Evolve or die.

  2. toejam++

    The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia can store up to 24 GWh of power, with maximum output around 3 GW. China has numerous pumped storage facilities with output in excess of 1 GW. So a minimum of 10 MW of output seems a bit low, unless they're really pushing for storage that is directly adjacent to renewables to cut down on transmission line costs.

    1. veti Silver badge

      I think that is the answer. The idea seems to be for every wind or solar installation above a certain size to have its own dedicated battery (or other storage) backup.

      Which sounds expensive to me, but what do I know.

      What I'm looking forward to is how the US military is going to zero its carbon emissions by 2050. If they can do it, truly we all can.

      1. Duncan Macdonald
        Joke

        Simple - start WW3 - by the time all the nukes and bio weapons have finished there will not be anyone left to produce carbon emissions.

      2. MachDiamond Silver badge

        veti,

        All good points. Where will the battery cells come from for all of these grid level storage battery packs? Where will all of the raw materials come from before that? EV makers such as Ford are already under productions constraints due to limits in securing battery cells. Battery back up on a grid scale is also monstrously expensive.

        The military isn't going to be zero carbon, ever. The vehicles they drive around on bases right now just to move one or two people from A to B are fuel wasters. You'd think they'd at least have a fleet of hybrids by this point.

        The city I live in has a bunch of F-150 pickups that get driven around by works supervisors that don't have a need to haul tools or materials. The code enforcement witch trundles around in a giant SUV although at her size, a stout vehicle is necessary. The PD just bought several new SUV's although they did get V6 hybrids this time around. The surplus military troop carrier makes up the difference in fuel usage although they don't seem to drive it around much anymore with how fuel prices have shot up. It's not the sort of town where heavy artillery is needed.

        1. gandalfcn Silver badge

          Battery tech is advancing rapidly, and that is with all Luddites trying to spread spread alarm and despondency and discourage R&D.

          1. OhForF' Silver badge
            Mushroom

            Advancements in battery technology is nice but i don't see the military depend on batteries charged by wind or sun.

            They are more likely to look into small (ideally mobile) atomic reactors to get carbon free energy.

            1. gandalfcn Silver badge

              Indeed. Look at Core Power

          2. codejunky Silver badge

            @gandalfcn

            "Luddites trying to spread spread alarm and despondency and discourage R&D."

            I dont see people trying to discourage R&D. I see people complaining about the deployment of stuff that doesnt work and isnt ready for deployment in critical areas of peoples lives. Germany is suffering this currently.

            1. gandalfcn Silver badge

              Re: @gandalfcn

              Germany is suffering from Luddites, i.e. the rejection of nuclear and regression to coal. Thanks for proving my point.

              1. codejunky Silver badge

                Re: @gandalfcn

                @gandalfcn

                "Germany is suffering from Luddites, i.e. the rejection of nuclear and regression to coal. Thanks for proving my point."

                I do agree with this. Panic over nuclear was unfounded and this is a time when diversified energy or at least a secure supply of fuel can make a massive difference to a country.

                I am wondering if we will see a correction or likely over correction in Germany however as they were the opposite of Luddite. They ran head first into green energy and found themselves subsidising both 'green' and fossil fuel just to keep the lights on and that was before the invasion. Instead of diversifying energy supply they (and us) were increasing dependence on gas while playing with these monuments to a sky god.

                ""I see people complaining about the deployment of stuff that doesnt work" Pray elaborate?"

                Gonna answer both of your comments in this one. Do you remember the push for low energy light bulbs? Government picked the winner, the CFL slow to warm up bulb. The one worth having as we now know is LED but the gov poured money into subsidising the other product. The French restricted orders of EU vaccine based on what the EU ordered from Sanofi, theirs didnt work and was abandoned.

                Governments suck at picking winners just as the majority of us do, the market provides the solutions. So R&D is good and gov supporting some is acceptable but the deployment of technology that doesnt work in a critical part of our lives is a problem. Germany was the prize of going green, and now its the example used as a warning against the technology. The UK needed energy in winter and so had to go back to coal.

                So after vast investment, huge cost to the tax payer, large increases in energy costs (before the invasion) energy insecurity (after the invasion) what we have discovered is the technology is not ready for prime time. In the UK the temporary 'patch' was fracking to hide the costs of green madness. We would also have had energy security if we kept it domestic but it upset greenies to frack.

                Germany fell back to relying on the dirtiest coal because they had the green madness. They feared the lights going out in a few years anyway because of the green madness. They fear the lights going out this winter because of the green madness.

                1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

                  Re: @gandalfcn

                  Hmmmmm...

                  Germany has fallen back to coal because Putin's turned the gas off. If he hadn't invaded Ukraine then the Germans would be using the "sustainable"* gas and wouldn't need either nuclear or coal. They turned away from nuclear because of Fukishama, for which I would call them many things, but "Luddites" isn't one of them.

                  "the market provides the solutions" - I agree that this can happen; Google in it's early days was fantastic with loads of free stuff and loved by many as an example of the free market, but now they are seen as much as a problem as they are a solution. Ditto mobile phones - tech: good, walled garden: bad. I think that overall, though, you're correct about the marked thing and I struggle to think of things that governments have done well that private industry wouldn't have done as well. Maybe the Post Office telephone network in the UK qualifies - it was (is?) massively over-engineered, resilient, reliable and manages to cram 40mb/s down copper twisted pair that's been in the ground for 50 odd years.

                  *I suspect the Germans had a major hand in the EU classifying Gas as "sustainable" for investment purposes.

                  1. gandalfcn Silver badge

                    Re: @gandalfcn

                    Germany has fallen back to coal because it abandoned nuclear, it did that before Putin, so stop lying

                    1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

                      Re: @gandalfcn

                      Chill out, read some facts and stop making it personal.

                      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/germany-reactivate-coal-power-plants-russia-curbs-gas-flow

                  2. gandalfcn Silver badge

                    Re: @gandalfcn

                    ""the market provides the solutions" - I agree that this can happen" Who posted that

                    1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

                      Re: @gandalfcn

                      ""the market provides the solutions" - codejunky in the post I was replying to.

                  3. codejunky Silver badge

                    Re: @gandalfcn

                    @Headley_Grange

                    "Germany has fallen back to coal because Putin's turned the gas off."

                    If I remember right Germany fell back to coal when they shut down the nukes too. But yes Germany is highly reliant on gas due to green madness. Using technology that works isnt an issue but unreliables are obviously not reliable and need gas as a backup. Without it the illusion of unreliables being viable vanishes, the lights go out.

                    "They turned away from nuclear because of Fukishama, for which I would call them many things, but "Luddites" isn't one of them."

                    Personally I go with 'nuts' but its up to them.

                    "Google in it's early days was fantastic with loads of free stuff and loved by many as an example of the free market, but now they are seen as much as a problem as they are a solution"

                    But are google seen as a problem? I know the governments and their green eyes are all over google but for the rest of us is it an issue? Google is highly popular and their products chosen over rivals. Not that there wont be bad actors out there I agree, but again the market provides the solutions.

                    "*I suspect the Germans had a major hand in the EU classifying Gas as "sustainable" for investment purposes."

                    That is a fairly safe bet. Their attempt to get the rest of the EU to conserve gas to help them out didnt go down well though.

                2. gandalfcn Silver badge

                  Re: @gandalfcn

                  "They ran head first into green energy" No it did not, so drop the bs. That is the propaganda the likes of cfact spread. It ran head in sand away from nuclear. If Germany had not abandoned nuclear there would have been no problem. You position is the same as those who claimed the Texas blackout was due to "the green madness" whereas it was the opposite. Sensible green vs FF madness.

                  "I see people complaining about the deployment of stuff that doesnt work" Pray elaborate?" Your responses were not only irrelevant but prove what you are.

                  "he technology is not ready for prime time." Sorry luvvy, but it isn't the tech it is the Luddites holding back investment. Of we had more nuclear, wind and solar we wouldn't be dependant on FF. Very simple to those capable of critical thinking.

                  "Germany fell back to relying on the dirtiest coal because they" abandoned nuclear, to claim otherwise shows a total lack of awareness or a total lack of honesty. GWPF are you? Cato? Exxon/Peabody/Koch? Morano? The Heartland Institute?

                  1. codejunky Silver badge

                    Re: @gandalfcn

                    @gandalfcn

                    "It ran head in sand away from nuclear. If Germany had not abandoned nuclear there would have been no problem"

                    Germany ran away from nuclear after Fukushima. And I agree that was a bad idea, I like nuclear as an energy solution. But even before that Germany subsidised lots of green projects and then had to subsidise fossil fuels to keep the power flowing. Knocking off the nukes was a bad idea but problems were showing before that.

                    "Your responses were not only irrelevant but prove what you are."

                    Thats a very quick deflection with no substance.

                    "Of we had more nuclear, wind and solar we wouldn't be dependant on FF. Very simple to those capable of critical thinking."

                    I think you are part right. Solar in certain parts of the world can work (Spain lost on a huge solar plant so its not easy) and nuclear obviously works. Wind doesnt have a good track record. Either way wind and solar require a lot of land for unreliable energy while a power plant (nuke or FF) occupies less and works.

                    ""Germany fell back to relying on the dirtiest coal because they" abandoned nuclear"

                    How much fighting has it taken to consider nuclear as green? The EU has only recently accepted nuclear and gas as green. Gas is needed to back up the unreliables. Germany could even consider fracking but they dont consider it green enough but want the gas.

                    In the end people want reliable cheap energy.

            2. gandalfcn Silver badge

              Re: @gandalfcn

              "I see people complaining about the deployment of stuff that doesnt work" Pray elaborate?

          3. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Luddites, or vested interests' astro-turfers and lobbyists?

            1. gandalfcn Silver badge

              And godbotherers

          4. adam 40 Silver badge
            Facepalm

            Luddites?

            When I were a lad, Luddites smashed up coal-powered steam engines!!!

            Luddites just want human--powered spinning wheels and looms!

            Get with t'program, brother!

    2. DS999 Silver badge

      Proof of concept

      Grid energy storage with batteries is still in its early days, so best to start out with smaller projects and try different technologies (some of which may not even be on the market, but are in the research stage) so you can figure out which work best in what circumstances.

      For instance, storage of solar power has different requirements than storage of wind power, and might not use the same technology or having the same siting.

    3. Nonymous Crowd Nerd

      24GWh supplied at up to 3GW

      So that's 8 hours at full capacity... So in the real world we could be looking at a couple of days in the dark, cold, windless days of winter.

      Speccing the capacity of the storage to cope with a challenging winter is surely the point of the whole exercise. And it's not going to be easy.

  3. Headley_Grange Silver badge

    The issue here isn't about which and whether clean* energy is reliable in terms of wind/solar availability - it's about how it's switched in and out of the the grid and how the grid is protected from failures of the clean sources. At the moment the grid's switching and protection systems are based on the power coming from huge spinning inductors and they are able to line-sense their various failure modes and differentiate them from the impact of load changes and thus protect the grid if things go tits up and also switch them in and out reliably and safely. Renewables like solar and wind tend to be behind electronic inverters and today's protection systems aren't set up to manage these. I think this is what the $26M dollars is for - not to provide more clean genration.

    From a reliability perspective it might be better to have generation more geographically and technologically distributed, but synchronization and load management will need to be addressed as more and more DC and asynchronous sources come online. HVDC is starting to get more advocates and there are a few systems running, mostly short-range interconnects, but I won't live long enough to see it become the standard for the UK grid.

    *clean energy means whatever the government wants it to mean. The EU recently classed natural gas as "sustainable" - interpreted as "green" by some. I think that nuclear is clean, but that's fighting talk in some communities. For the purposes of this post, and probably the article, we're talking about wind, solar, tidal/wave when it takes off and batteries - anything that's DC/asynchronous.

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      I would think a lot of the "sensing" is out of band with renewables (and battery storage) so it will have sensors in the inverters connected via fiber that send the status information alongside the electrical lines.

    2. david 12 Silver badge

      "Behind electronic inverters" is a red herring. It's just being used as a short-hand description for sources with low rotating mass and rapid connect/disconnect characteristics. It's not how it's connected that is important, it's what it's connected to.

    3. gandalfcn Silver badge

      WQell, gas is better than oil or coal, so it is relatively green, and nuclear is a much maligned source. An interesting development is Core Power.

  4. Lordrobot

    Germans had to good sense to go back to Coal

    $26 million for the Demo... That's not infrastructure... That's Show Biz...

    Shouldn't the Politician claims at least wait for the Demo... NO of course not!

    Murica Zaggeration FIRST.

    Will they be using the same video studio for this thing as the Moon landing... or have they upgraded from VHS? ...you know... Infrastructure?

    1. gandalfcn Silver badge

      Re: Germans had to good sense to go back to Coal

      Texas proved renewables are more reliable than FF.

      Wind, solar and nuclear are the future so a grid needs to be ready for renewables not sit there with thumbs uo bums.

      The PRC built power, road and rail infrastructures and commerce and industry followed. It's called forward planning rather than Luddite obstructionism.

  5. CallumHibbert

    Narrator: It was not ready.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ""Americans do not have to choose between a clean grid and a reliable one as we move forward towards our goals of a net-zero economy by 2050," said US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. "

    No, that's because they aren't shutting down nuclear plants, coal-fired plants, or gas-fired plants yet. In other words, she said absolutely nothing.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      "No, that's because they aren't shutting down nuclear plants, coal-fired plants, or gas-fired plants yet. In other words, she said absolutely nothing."

      You must be from out of town. All of those things are happening. There are even some unintended consequences stemming from new regulations that will go into effect in a few years regarding coal power plants. Some of those operators are retiring the plants early as they hit the point of heavy maintenance since they won't be able to operate them long enough afterwards before they'd have to be upgraded to meet the new regulations and they are approaching EOL anyway. If they don't do the maintenance, the plants might not comply with existing regulations so it's not possible for the companies to just run them until the wheels fall off. It's making a few politicians look like the bad guys as warnings are already being sent out to large customers that there may be no way to serve their needs past a certain date. That's often going to mean a large employer shutting down and moving or just shifting production to someplace like Mexico where a "small payment" can smooth over emissions irregularities at the local power plant.

      1. gandalfcn Silver badge

        Or moving to a different state where they did some forward planning. Texas learned its lesson about relying on FF.

        And Germasny has learend its lesson about abandoning nuclear.

  7. Unindicted Co-conspirator

    What About The Transmission Lines?

    Something I never hear about when people are touting turning electricity for everything is how are existing transmission lines going to hold up under teh increased demand. Just look at California, the biggest wildfires have been caused by faulty and/or poorly maintained transmission lines. Adding more demand to the grid will only exacerbate these problems (can you say rolling blackouts?). Green is good but what about when things fail and burns everything to black?

  8. MachDiamond Silver badge

    No reports.

    I have yet to see that grid operators have been diligently working on doing exhaustive analysis to see if there will be any issues with removing large centrally located power plants with many smaller and variable inputs at random nodes. That bit South Australia in the buttocks and did a lot of damage.

    If you've seen anything, please post a link.

  9. Horst U Rodeinon

    We're from the Government. We're smarter than you!

    "Clean energy detractors have long argued that a transition to green energy simply isn't possible due to reliability factors, which Granholm said the DoE will prove isn't the case."

    Replace "DoE" with "CDC" and "Green Energy" with "Covid-19." Then you begin to understand the reluctance to trust anything uttered by a government official. Especially one from the current administration. These people make a box of hair look smart.

  10. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

    Ready for greenwashed power?

    Sure. Ready for 100 percent greenwashed power? Not a chance. Power usage is growing in leaps and bounds, as fast as greenwash power is going in, only now the older solar panels are reaching EOL and when they reach the end there's nothing to be done but replace them. When they get deep into it, they'll be replacing old worn panels as fast as they can make them. No, we'll be burning fuel for decades to come unless someone makes a quantum leap discovery on power generation.

    None of this addresses the amount of electrical storage needed, which has barely been touched. Heavy industry is going to need more than a Tesla Powerwall.

  11. adam 40 Silver badge
    Flame

    Can't you have both?

    The US of A is well-known for the cheapest solution.

    So - use the fracked gas when the sun ain't shinning or wind blowing. Just keep the freaking leaks of methane down.

    At all other times, use the cheaper solar/wind combination.

    Simples!

  12. bejugo

    Re: US power grid, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-renewables-electric-grid/

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