Renewable Energy, Economics, & Inertia

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Power is a word with many meanings. The Oxford dictionary says one of them is “energy that is produced by mechanical, electrical, or other means and used to operate a device.” But note that it is the fourth definition. Ahead of it come: 1. the ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality. 2. the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events. 3. physical strength and force exerted by something or someone.

Bloomberg Economics this week reports that the availability of electrical power has a direct correlation to a country’s economic wellbeing. It finds that “almost all Group of 20 countries have seen a rise in grid stress over the last few years. Those stresses include supply not keeping up with demand, volatile price swings, damages from climate impacts and losses in transmission.”

The increase in grid stress leads to a decline in government and business spending to acquire or maintain long-term assets. “Lower investment means lower economic growth in the long run,” said Maeva Cousin, chief trade and climate economist at Bloomberg Economics.

“The positive effects of electrification on growth holds true across geographies — from India and China to most countries in Africa — and across time, from the late 19th century to today. Typically, the richer you are, the more electricity you consume.” the report says.

Demand Has Outstripped Supply

Bloomberg relates the plight of ASML Holding of the Netherlands, one of a handful of specialty computer chip manufacturers in the world and a pillar of the Dutch economy. It plans a new manufacturing campus that would employ 20,000 people, but first it needs to get connected to the grid and there are 12,000 other business in the Netherlands clamoring for electricity at the same time.

Netbeheer Nederland, the association of Dutch grid operators, estimates that congestion issues are likely to continue for as many as ten years, even with grid operators investing €8 billion ($9.3 billion) annually. Demand for electricity has expanded because of electric cars, but far and away the largest driver of new demand is the construction of data centers.

The fastest way to make more electricity is by installing solar panels, but solar farms are part of a new utility model that puts the source of power at the edges of the grid, rather than in the middle. That means transmission lines are needed to connect them to the grid and that is where many countries are falling behind.

Renewables & Inertia

The world operates on AC (alternating current). Thermal generators spin at precisely 50 (or 60) cycles per second. They are massively heavy, which means once they get up to speed, they tend to stay at that speed because of inertia. Solar panels have no moving parts and therefore cannot supply that inertia to the grid, which was a major factor in the crash of the electrical grid in Spain earlier this year.

Statkraft is a Norwegian company that manufactures synchronous compensators. These machines weigh as much as 100,000 kg (2.2 million pounds) and spin at precisely the right speed to match the frequency of the grid. They are capable of absorbing excess electricity if there is too much or injecting power back into the grid if there’s too little. “If Spain had enough of these machines, the countrywide blackout could have been avoided,” Guy Nicholson, head of zero-carbon grid solutions at Statkraft, told Bloomberg.

Solar panels make direct current. Inverters then turn it into alternating current. But inverters, like solar panels themselves, have no moving parts, which means they cannot supply the inertia the grid requires to remain stable when generating capacity suddenly gets removed for any reason. There are so-called grid forming inverters, but so far few grid operators have added them to their power systems, primarily for economic reasons.

Bloomberg says the lack of investment in grid stabilization is a threat to the goals many nations have set to add massive amounts of new renewable energy to their grids. That brings us to a different kind of inertia — a lack of political will. The current US administration is expending a vast amount of political capital trying to browbeat other nations into backing away from their renewable energy goals.

They argue that renewables are not reliable, and to some extent, that is true. Absent synchronous compensators and grid forming inverters, their inability to respond to disruptions that might cause a grid to go dark is indeed an issue.

But let’s think about this issue for a moment. When the first automobiles were invented, people needed to use a crank to start them and had to shift gears manually. Over the course of time, the electric starter and the automatic transmission allowed ordinary people to operate automobiles without drama or physical strain. Like automobiles in 1900, renewable energy today is new technology. It has some drawbacks, but they can be managed — if there is sufficient political will to do so.

“Grid operators need to update the infrastructure,” said German Kuhn, a grid stability expert at Siemens Energy. “I wouldn’t say ‘refurbishing’ because that’s what you do when something is old and you just have to make it new. Now you have to change it.”

According to BloombergNEF, the 27 members of the European Union and the UK invest, on average, 70 cents in grids for every dollar spent on renewables. Spain ranks the lowest, with only 30 cents spent for every dollar. No wonder its grid collapsed! “Here’s the problem. Investments in the right infrastructure are not keeping up,” said António Guterres, head of the United Nations, in July. “That ratio should be one to one.”

For some years, researchers have been warning about the increasing risk of blackouts as the share of intermittent renewables rises and spinning turbines, from coal and nuclear retirements, are taken off the grid. But grid operators are only starting to work on fixes after tragedy strikes.

Blackouts in Australia in 2016 and the UK in 2019 led their respective grid operators to create incentives for the deployment of grid stabilizing technologies. The result is that both countries have added more solar and wind power. Spain is now following suit.

Existing turbines can be converted into synchronous compensators after the power plants they originally supplied electricity to are taken offline. Ireland has done that with a coal-fired generator and Germany has done so as well with a decommissioned nuclear power plant. “We have run grids for a hundred years with these synchronous rotating machines. Made them work pretty reliably and pretty well,” said Nicholson. “We are now changing the technology that the grid is running on.”

A complete synchronous compensator installation from Statkraft costs about $34 million, and Nicholson says the UK will need about 200 of them if it expects to transition to 100% renewable energy. Obviously that is a lot of money and the cost must be included when calculating the overall cost of renewable energy. However, the costs associated with a grid failure are enormous. “There’s been a mantra that renewables may be cheap, but the cost of integrating them is huge,” says Nicholson. “That’s actually not the case at all.”

Grid Formation & Political Will

Bloomberg suggests that governments must bear some responsibility for the lack of grid stabilization. It says legislation could create markets and regulatory frameworks that encourage companies to upgrade their grid equipment. Today the EU operates under rules approved in 2012 and has been working on an upgrade to the electricity network code for the past two years. Even when the rules are approved, the tender processes put together by grid operators are highly technical and may take up to 5 years to implement.

In Germany, the documents containing the technical specifications for grid stabilization machinery can be as long as 2,000 pages, according to Siemens Energy’s Kuhn. “The approval process should be shortened,” says Kuhn, with admirable understatement.

If thermal generation didn’t create emissions that poison the environment and make the planet hotter, we could continue using century-old technology forever. But it does, and so we have to transition to what is next. That means low and zero emissions energy sources such as solar and wind are essential if we wish to have the lifestyle electricity makes possible without destroying the environment that supports human life.

We will need synthetic inertia to stabilize our energy grids in the future, but most of all, we  need political will to overcome the inertia created by fossil fools like Chris Wright and the MAGAlomaniacs who would sacrifice great chunks of human civilization in pursuit of private profits. Between the two, overcoming resistance from oil, gas, and coal interests may be the bigger challenge.