Nearly two dozen researchers critique a proposal for wind, solar, and water power gaining traction in policy circles.
 
On Monday, a team of prominent researchers sharply critiqued an influential paper arguing that wind, solar, and hydroelectric power could affordably meet most of the nation’s energy needs by 2055, saying it contained modeling errors and implausible assumptions that could distort public policy and spending decisions (see “Fifty-States Plan Charts a Path Away from Fossil Fuels”).
 
The rebuttal appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same journal that ran the original 2015 paper. Several of the nearly two dozen researchers say they were driven to act because the original authors declined to publish what they viewed as necessary corrections, and the findings were influencing state and federal policy proposals.
 
The fear is that legislation will mandate goals that can’t be achieved with available technologies at reasonable prices, leading to “wildly unrealistic expectations” and “massive misallocation of resources,” says David Victor, an energy policy researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and coauthor of the critique. “That is both harmful to the economy, and creates the seeds of a backlash.”
 

The startup, which sold big batteries for renewable projects and power grids, was founded by Jay Whitacre, a materials science professor at Carnegie Mellon who previously developed batteries for Mars rovers at NASA. It raised nearly $200 million from prominent investors, including Bill Gates, and venture capitalists at Kleiner Perkins and Shell. Perhaps most important of all, the company entered the market with a clear-eyed awareness of earlier missteps by battery startups. It took pains to avoid the use of rare materials. It relied on repurposed manufacturing equipment. And it identified niche markets where it might gain a foothold.
 
But on March 8, after failing to raise additional funding, Aquion filed for bankruptcy protection, cut 80 percent of its staff, and halted manufacturing. It was the latest of several stumbles for venture-backed storage startups. EnerVault, which was developing what are known as flow batteries, put itself up for sale after failing to find additional investors in 2015. Later that year, liquid-metal battery startup Ambri laid off a quarter of its staff. Around that same time, LightSail Energy, which was struggling to develop technology to store energy as compressed air in carbon-fiber tanks, pivoted to selling its containers to natural-gas suppliers. Taken together, these struggles have deflated hopes for the emergence of affordable and practical grid storage anytime soon.  
 
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Similarly, ref. 11 assumes that the capacity factor (i.e., actual electricity generation divided by the theoretically maximum potential generation obtained by operating continuously at full nameplate capacity) for existing energy technologies will increase dramatically in the future. As described in SI Appendix, section S2.5, the authors of ref. 11 anticipate that individual hydropower facilities will increase generation by over 30%. They explain this by saying, “[i]ncreasing the capacity factor is feasible because existing dams currently provide much less than their maximum capacity, primarily due to an oversupply of energy available from fossil fuel sources, resulting in less demand for hydroelectricity” (12). From ref. 12, it is stated that hydroelectric and geothermal capacity factors increase, because “[f]or geothermal and hydropower, which are less variable on short time scales than wind and solar, the capacity-factor multipliers in our analysis are slightly greater than 100% on account of these being used more steadily in a 100% WWS system than in the base year.” In addition to being inconsistent with their statement that hydropower is “used only as a last resort” (11), this explanation shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the operation of electricity markets and the factors determining hydroelectric supply. With near-zero marginal costs (free “fuel”), hydroelectric generators will essentially run whenever they are available; in those instances where they participate in merchant markets, they underbid fossil generators that must at least recover their coal or natural gas costs. The primary factor limiting hydroelectric capacity factor is water supply and environmental constraints, not lack of demand. Furthermore, there seems to be a mistake with the hydroelectric capacity factor adjustment: from EIA, it should only go up to 42%, not 52.5%.6

(...)grâce à un partenariat avec The Mobility House, Renault Nissan Alliance prévoit les utiliser dans une centrale de stockage de 100 mégawatts en Europe.
 
Le site de stockage d'énergie fournirait aux batteries lithium-ion usagées des voitures électriques une seconde vie pendant de nombreuses années.
 
Reuters rapporte que l'usine sera assez grande pour alimenter 120 000 maisons, ce qui équivaut à peu près à ce que produit une station utilitaire à gaz naturel ou au charbon.

(...)grâce à un partenariat avec The Mobility House, Renault Nissan Alliance prévoit les utiliser dans une centrale de stockage de 100 mégawatts en Europe.
 
Le site de stockage d'énergie fournirait aux batteries lithium-ion usagées des voitures électriques une seconde vie pendant de nombreuses années.
 
Reuters rapporte que l'usine sera assez grande pour alimenter 120 000 maisons, ce qui équivaut à peu près à ce que produit une station utilitaire à gaz naturel ou au charbon.

Cet expert français de l'énergie solaire est venu donner une conférence sur le thème : « Energie solaire : présent et futur », un panorama complet de la situation de l'énergie solaire en France et dans le monde. Pourquoi une telle conférence à Néoules me direz-vous ? Pourquoi pas.

Europe's most liquid power market - the German/Austrian price zone accounting for two-thirds of trading volumes - is to be split next year. From October 2018, capacity on the border will no longer be unlimited and billions of euros in forward contracts need to be settled differently.
 
Background to this is Germany's changing power landscape with rising renewables - especially wind in the North and the nuclear exit mainly impacting the industrial demand centers in the South. This shift creates a growing regional imbalance and grid bottlenecks within Germany.
 
According to one TSO, the German grid was already near breaking point last winter. For next winter, the regulator has more than doubled the winter reserve capacity with over 10 GW of power plants needed to keep the grid stable.
 
The much needed expansion of the grid is lagging behind with new cables delayed due to local resistance and unlikely to be finished before 2025. Plans to lay the cables underground have also pushed up costs with grid operators estimating some 50 billion euros to make Germany's power grid fit for the future.
 
Because of the bottlenecks within Germany, surplus power often flows in loop flows through Poland and the Czech Republic into Austria. A complaint by Poland to European regulator ACER triggered the process back in 2015 with Germany and Austria now finally agreeing on the details of the congestion management.
 
GERMANY, AUSTRIA AGREE ON 5 GW CROSS-BORDER CAPACITY
 
With Germany guaranteeing almost 5 GW of capacity on the Austrian border there will be still plenty of power flowing south into Austria, but the end to the ‘unlimited open border’ reduces the need for German winter reserves and cuts costs.
 
Traders say that the price impact from the split is limited on the German side, but bullish for Austria. Trading volumes may also be impacted with some suggestions that uncertainty about the split has already shifted volumes from exchange-trading to the OTC market.
 
Most importantly, some traders have started to think about the 'unthinkable' - a potential split of Germany. Something the government in Berlin wants to avoid at all costs.
 
DENMARK COMPLAINT TO EC FORCED SWEDEN PRICE ZONE SPLIT IN 2011
 
The price zone split with Austria will help, along with the installation of phase-shifters on the Eastern borders and an agreement with Denmark to guarantee rising flows on the equally congested Northern border. The Denmark deal is important as Danish complaints to the EC have previously forced Sweden to accept a price zone split.
 
Germany's power grid has become the focus of its energy policy as the weak spot of the energy transition. Berlin has already restricted wind turbine growth in the North and won't lift its offshore wind targets until the grid can deliver the power to Munich or Stuttgart. With grid fees also rising there is new conflict ahead between regions inside Germany about who pays the bill for the 'Energiewende' - that's German for energy transition.
 

The European Commission has accepted a recent agreement between Germany and Austria on the split of their common power bidding zone, but only as a temporary fix until a wider arrangement of zones in the EU has been agreed.
The agreement looks set to be implemented, with the split to take place on 1 October 2018, even though Eastern European regulators have hit out at it.
Eastern European states want the zone split to happen to reduce transit flows that serve German-Austrian trade via their territories ( read ICIS Briefing here on German-Austrian bidding zone split ).
However, the split arrangement that German and Austrian regulators agreed last month will only marginally reduce trade between the two countries, with at least 4.9GW of commercial cross-border capacity still to be available.
Regulators in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia said the capacity seems unreasonably high and the German-Austrian agreement does not meet EU standards due to a lack of transparency and a lack of coordination with other affected countries.