Why is it necessary that wind+solar+storage systems be “sized to meet peak demand”? That’s particularly true if capital costs per kWh for constructing them are very low, fractions of operating costs of fossil fuel installations. Why not build them to be multiples of peak demand, thereby protecting generation from lack of wind or insolation on a portion of the generating footprint.
This assumes, of course, that adequate land is available to site these, which is why constraints upon land use is effectively a subsidy to fossil fuel generation.
HOW MUCH HYDROGEN COULD WE PRODUCE WITHOUT ADDING ADDITIONAL GENERATION CAPACITY?
There has been a lot of talk about making electrolytic “Green Hydrogen” using electricity from wind and solar power that would otherwise be curtailed. Less climatically helpful, there is also potential to use electricity from natural gas generators that would otherwise be idled.
Tyler Ruggles set out to answer the questions:
1. How much additional flexible load could we put on electricity systems before we would need to add more generating capacity?
2. In an economically efficient system, how would the fixed generation costs be allocated across fixed and flexible loads?
This study was published in Advances in Applied Energy under the title, “Opportunities for flexible electricity loads such as hydrogen production from curtailed generation”.
Tyler H. Ruggles, Jacqueline A. Dowling, Nathan S. Lewis, Ken Caldeira, Opportunities for flexible electricity loads such as hydrogen productionfrom curtailed…
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667 per centimeter : climate science, quantitative biology, statistics, and energy policy 