In this episode, Princeton professor and energy modeler Jesse Jenkins tackles the question of how we can build a decarbonized energy system that relies on inherently variable wind and solar power.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
If you’ve spent much time discussing clean energy on the internet, you’ve probably come across a disturbing piece of information: the sun, it seems, is not always shining. What’s worse, the wind is not always blowing!
It’s crazy, I know.
Unlike coal or natural gas or nuclear — “dispatchable” power plants that we can turn on or off at will, when we need them — we do not control solar power and wind power. They come and go with the weather and the rotation of heavenly bodies. They are, to use the term of art, “variable.”
Many people, bringing to bear varying levels of good faith, conclude from this fact that we shouldn’t or can’t shift to an electricity system that is based around wind and solar, at least not without occasionally shivering in the cold.
Is that true? Do we know how to balance out the variability of wind and solar enough that we can fully decarbonize the grid with them? This is probably the number one question I hear about renewable energy, the number one reservation people have about it, so I decided it’s time to tackle it head on.
To help, I called on longtime Friend of Volts, Princeton professor and energy modeler extraordinaire Jesse Jenkins. We walked through the basic shape of the problem, the different time scales on which variability operates, and the solutions that we either have or anticipate having to deal with it.
This one is long and occasionally gets a bit complex, but if you’ve ever wondered how we’re going to build an energy system around wind and solar, this is the pod you’ve been waiting for.
All right, I am here with Princeton professor and longtime friend of Volts, Jesse Jenkins. Jesse, welcome back to Volts. Thanks for coming back.
Jesse Jenkins
Hey, Dave. It's always good to chat with you.
David Roberts
Jesse, the reason we're doing this is that in the course of my research, I have come across some extremely disturbing information which I felt like I needed to share with you and the world as soon as possible. Apparently, the sun is not always shining and the wind is not always blowing.
Jesse Jenkins
Wait, what?
David Roberts
I know this changes everything, so we're going to have to talk through this.
Jesse Jenkins
Oh, man.
David Roberts
But seriously, I don't mean to make too much light of this. This is a subject about which people say lots of dumb things, but it is at its heart, I think, a perfectly valid question, a perfectly valid area of concern. In fact, it is the central area of concern about renewable energy. It is the central question to answer, which is the term that used to be used is intermittent. Renewable energy, wind and solar are intermittent, I think. Now the preferred term of art is variable, but I think probably the most accurate terminology for our purposes is non-dispatchable.
It just means we don't control it; we don't turn it on and off. It comes and goes with the weather.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, I prefer just weather dependent. Right. I think it makes more intuitive sense to people. Like you said, it's solar and wind power, so it depends on the weather. That is not shocking, but also defining of what the resource is.
David Roberts
Also dependent on the turning of the planets and the solar system.
Jesse Jenkins
That's true.
David Roberts
But anyway, people know what we mean. We don't control them. A lot of people, I think, especially people who are coming, who haven't given a lot of thought to the clean energy transition and are starting to grapple with it for the first time, I think intuitively run up against this question early on in their thinking, which is "how do we deal with this?" So, I want to take those questions as good faith questions and talk through answers to them to the extent we have answers, to the extent we do know how to deal with it, to the extent we do have the tools to deal with it, and the extent to which it remains to some extent unsolved.
I want to start with a couple of really big picture questions before we hone in on the details. I think the first big one to ask is just what greenies, what climate people seem to be recommending, and what we seem to be doing, at least in the early stages, is shifting from an electricity system based on dispatchable power plants that we can turn on and off at will to a system that is fundamentally based on non-dispatchable weather-dependent power plants that we can't turn on and off, which, as we're going to talk through, raises a whole host of issues and problems to solve.
So I think the first thing to address is just why do that at all? Why take on that trouble? Why not just shift from dirty dispatchable energy to clean dispatchable energy like nuclear, hydro and geothermal? Why take on the burden of dealing with variable energy at all?
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, it's a great question, and the reality is that now the reason is that wind and solar are really, really cheap. That wasn't the case a decade or two ago. And we sort of set off on this path supporting wind and solar and other clean energy technologies in different countries, not sort of knowing exactly where the cost declines would travel. And what we've seen is that basically, in the west at least, the cost of building new large scale nuclear power plants, which is our sort of most mature and previously scaled carbon free generation technology, they've only gone up over the last couple decades, and we can talk more about why or that's probably a better subject for another podcast.
Just observe that that is a factual statement. In other parts of the world, like China and South Korea and UAE, where they're used to building large scale civil works projects, they've been able to build nuclear plants at a reasonable expense. And it's a big part of the mix for those countries. But what we've seen is a tremendous decline in the cost of wind and solar power. And what we chalk that up to is what's known as experience curves. I know there's a great Volts cast in the archives on this topic. You can go back to listeners.
But the idea is that as we scale up and deploy basically any technology, but in particular wind and solar at scale, we drive a whole set of processes kind of centered around innovation and competition that lower the cost of the technology. And that's done through economies of scale, either in manufacturing or production of the technology itself. It's done through incremental innovations and sort of improvements that just get more efficient and better at producing and building these things over time. It's done by learning, by doing sort of tacit knowledge. The skilled workforce develops and the engineers of the processes develop over time.
And all of that drives the cost of technologies down as we build more of them. That's true for ships and flat panel TVs and aircraft and also for wind and solar. And particularly true for wind and solar because they are very small modular technologies that are repeatedly built both in manufacturing and in installation characteristics that make them well suited to not just learning, but rapid learning or rapid experience curves. The sum product of that is that wind and solar are the cheapest way to get electricity, period. Not just clean electricity, but electricity in most of the world today.
Solar is the cheapest in most of the world. And if it's not, it's probably wind, with a few exceptions. And so that's the main reason to rely on it. It's a cheap source of both clean and abundant electricity.
David Roberts
Right. So this would be something that the market would be pulling people to do anyway. These set of problems around variability would be problems that we would be trying to solve regardless because people want cheap energy and here's cheap energy. And so, people are going to figure out how to maximize their use of the cheapest energy available. In large part, this is being driven by forces that are not directly related to climate change. Obviously, we need to do it as fast as possible because of climate change, but this is not, as I think many people naively think when they first encounter it, something that we're taking on just because of climate change.
It is because this prize is out there, this super, super cheap electricity. And if you can run your widget on super cheap electricity, you're going to want to figure out how you can do that.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, I mean that's true. Now, I think it's important to remember that we supported wind and solar when they were expensive alternative energy technologies. That's what we called them back in the mid-2000s, right? And we supported them for a variety of reasons. Right. Because of climate change. Yes, but actually originally because of energy security concerns that were sparked by the Arab oil embargoes in the 1970s. And that's what drove the early era of solar and wind development in the US, Denmark, Japan, and other countries that wanted to get off of imported fossil energy.
We still burned a lot of oil in power generation at that time. And so, finding alternative sources of electricity was important for energy security. That has come back to the fore of our attention, of course, with the invasion of Ukraine and Russia's unprovoked invasion there, which sparked Europe to really dramatically reorient on a rapid pace away from imports of fossil fuels, gas, coal, and oil from Russia, which they were very dependent on. And it shot the cost of natural gas and gasoline here in the US. Where we, yes, produce more fossil fuels than we consume. So we're sort of physically energy secure, but we're still connected to these global energy markets.
And so when a dictator on the other side of the world decides to invade his neighbor for no reason, that drives up the cost of gas at the pump and the cost of natural gas for our heating here in the US, like, overnight. So there's a bunch of important reasons to pursue these fuels. They also, of course, have no air pollution. Right?
David Roberts
Air pollution. Yes. Let's throw air pollution in there because the science on air pollution, as you and I know, just gets worse and worse and worse. The evident damage of it gets worse and worse.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah. And not just mortalities but also it makes us dumber. There's a lot of clear indication that particulate pollution, actually it affects our cognition, it affects our hearts, it affects our lungs, it impedes development of young children. I mean, it's just nasty stuff. And so if we can produce energy that's made from a domestic resource, like the abundant wind and solar that we have across the United States and other countries, that we can do so affordably and that we can do so without any air pollution, those are all really good reasons to rely on wind and solar and to want to tackle the associated challenge of dealing with their variability and weather dependence.
David Roberts
One other general level question. This is something else I think people kind of come to intuitively and there are not great straightforward answers out there, which is and this is a variant of the first question, but I think importantly different. A lot of people want to say there are times when the sun will not be shining and the wind will not be blowing, i.e., there will be times when renewable energy output is at zero and demand will still be there. So you'll have to have backup resources capable of satisfying all that demand. But if you have to have 100% backup, why not just make the backup the main thing?
Again, why go to the trouble, you know what I mean? This idea that because they are variable, they require basically 100% redundancy with non-variable resources strikes a lot of people as sort of crazy. Like, why don't we just build the non-variable resources and skip the first step? So what do you say to the 100% backup hang up?
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, so the reality is you don't need 100% backup. You do need a sufficient amount of what I call firm capacity available. It's capacity that you can use whenever you need it for as long as you need it. Which makes it a really important complement to weather-dependent resources like wind and solar, as well as to we'll get to their role later, but to energy limited or time-limited resources like batteries or demand flexibility, which are key parts of the puzzle as well. And so you need a certain amount of firm capacity. It's a pretty significant amount.
But the reality is it's not 100% backup. You don't need one for one, because there actually are really no times when there is no wind or solar across a large area, unless you're talking about maybe an island grid that really has no geographic diversity. But yes, there's nighttime and there's winter, but generally there's some wind somewhere, right, at all times. And so you don't need 100% backup. So that's the first thing. And the second is that, again, for all the reasons I just went through, we want to rely as much as we can, again, not all the time, but as much as we can on wind and solar.
Because the fuel is free, the cost of installing them is incredibly cheap. And when you have wind and solar, you displace other dirtier fuel-consuming resources like natural gas or coal, and that saves money and it saves lives and it improves energy security. So all of that is the sort of main value add of wind and solar. I call them fuel-saving variable renewables, because when you've got them, you don't need to consume other fuels. And it turns out that if that's the kind of grid you're building, then there are pretty cheap sources of standby capacity that don't cost very much upfront and are perfectly fine to pair with also very cheap wind and solar to play that backup role. I mean, the one example is combustion turbines.
David Roberts
We should say that it's also unlikely that a trough in renewable supply is going to overlap with a peak in energy demand. Those peaks in energy demand tend to be during the daytime.
Jesse Jenkins
That's true today, although I would worry more about that in the future as we electrify heating when the demand is likely to peak in the winter overnight. And so it may be more likely that we do line up one of those periods, what the Germans call Dunkelflaute — You have no solar output or very little solar output even during the daytime because it's winter, it's very cloudy, and then you have a prolonged period of a big, high blocking high that sits across a wide region, a weather front that limits the wind output that can occur both in the winter and the summer.
And so, it is a challenge and it's something we have to plan our renewables-based grids to be resilient to. But again, that's why we don't depend entirely on wind and solar. We need a portfolio or a team. The way I describe it is there's a couple of metaphors. One is you need a balanced diet in your day-to-day life. And the fact that starches or wheat is cheap, right, as a cheap way to get calories, means that the bulk of your food pyramid or whatever is going to be from those sort of cheap sources of calories, rice, starch, all the sort of staple crops.
But of course, you also can't subsist entirely on those staple crops. You need a balanced diet of different things, playing different roles and combining with each other in a way that gives you a balanced diet. So the same thing's going on in the grid. We have imperfect substitutes here for each other. They all produce electricity just like all foods produce calories, but they have other characteristics as well. And just like starches and staple crops are the staple of our diet but not the exclusive makeup of our diet, wind and solar can be the staple of our energy diet as well, but have to be complemented by other things.
And so we just need to be clear about that. No one's saying only use wind and solar power all the time for everything. We're saying these are cheap, clean, energy secure ways to produce electricity that are scalable across most of the world. And so they're going to play a really central role, a star role in our overall energy mix.
David Roberts
People might be aware there is some controversy about — there are people out there who want 100% renewable systems versus people who want some nuclear or natural gas with CCS involved. But the argument there is not whether you need balancing resources to balance renewables, right? Even the people who want 100% renewables acknowledge you need storage and hydro and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They acknowledge you need resources to balance variable renewables. It's just an argument over which resources. Right? And we'll get to that later.
Jesse Jenkins
That's right. And I should just say before we dive into solving the renewables challenges, it is worth noting that it's a big diverse world out there and we have countries that are situated in vastly different ways in terms of their geography, their population density, their available renewable resource potential. And so there are going to be parts of the world that can't rely on wind and solar as the dominant source of their energy mix. Places like North Korea or Japan or the UK.
David Roberts
I was just in Iceland, which gets 100% carbon-free electricity with zero wind and solar. It's hydro and geothermal.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah. So we should acknowledge that up front. And I'm not saying like this is the solution for the world, it just is for a big chunk of the world. And even in places like Japan or the UK, which are pretty dense and limited land area, they can rely on renewables for a good chunk of their energy needs. And they're trying to do so because of the energy security, affordability and climate clean air benefits that they offer. So it's a piece of the mix. Whether it's the dominant majority or not, it depends on the local circumstances. Some parts of the world are probably going to need nuclear power or geothermal or other more energy-dense resources to complement or even fully supplant wind and solar because of local resource constraints.
But that is going to probably be the exception, not the rule.
David Roberts
Okay, so I want to hone in a little bit on the timescales here. I'm going to run through and we'll sort of proceed in the discussion from the first of these to the last. So I'm going to run through real quickly the different timescales of variability because renewables are variable, but they're variable on several different timescales which pose distinct problems. So let me just run through this real quick. So at the shortest level, you have variable in terms of seconds or minutes. So you can think of something like clouds drifting in front of the sun that causes a slight dip.
There are those constant slight dips in the wind and the sun. And so you need something that is balancing in terms of near instantaneous short-term balancing. Then second, you have what you call minutes to hours. So you think of like ramping. So for instance, the sun goes down at the end of the day. You go from 100% solar resource to 0% solar resource relatively quickly over the course of an hour or two. That's a different kind of intermittency. And then you go up to hours and days. Here you get to what are called diurnal cycles. Overnight, for instance, the sun goes down at night and occasionally the sun and the wind will flag for a couple of days and then come back.
So there's the hours to days cycle. Then you get up to weeks. You can have weeks of unusually high demand or unusually low renewables. And then beyond that, you have what's called seasonal variability. So there can be entire seasons or years where solar insulation is unusually low or wind is unusually low. So at each of those timescales, you have a distinct problem to be solved in the electricity grid. And we have I think it's fair to — I mean, tell me whether you think this is fair or too crude.
I think that is roughly also the order of easiest to solve to most difficult basically. But we can get into that. But let's start at the normal second to second, cycle to cycle variability of wind and sun. What's our solution there?
Jesse Jenkins
Well, here's where it's important to remind folks that the electricity system is a pretty unique supply chain, in that supply and demand have to be balanced every millisecond instantaneously, basically, in this market. So if you're consuming electricity somewhere out there, someone has to be producing it at the exact moment that you're consuming it. That's true for every location across the entire grid all the time, which is different than, say, like Amazon's supply chain, where there's a package in a warehouse somewhere, it may or may not go out to get to you when you ask for it. It'll take anywhere from a day to five days right, to get to you.
David Roberts
It's the ultimate just in time delivery.
Jesse Jenkins
It's like Amazon Prime on steroids. So, yeah, it has to be balanced everywhere. Supply has to equal the demand in real time. And there's actually really significant physical implications if that doesn't happen, because you have a whole bunch of generators and induction motors that are actually synchronized with the alternating current frequency of the grid. That means that in the US, every 60th of a second, the grid's frequency is reversing back and forth. And the motors that are spinning to generate that electricity and the motors that are induced to spin by that electricity to do useful things like run industrial processes and other things are all synchronized with that frequency.
So they're spinning at 60 Hz as well.
David Roberts
What a wild thing it is that it works.
Jesse Jenkins
Oh, yeah. I start my classes like this just to remind ourselves that this is like the craziest continent scale Rube Goldberg machine that we've built with incredible physical tolerances. And it just works. Yeah. So that's important to remind ourselves because it's not like there isn't variability in that system already, right? Demand goes up and down. You can flip on a light switch or plug in your EV, or flip on an electric kettle, whenever you want. Right. You don't have to ask the grid in advance. You just do it. And that's true across millions of consumers all over the continent.
And power plants, transmission lines, they fail sometimes. Substations go down, transmission lines fail, generators break. And so not only do you have small changes in demand from your light switch, but you can have big changes in that supply and demand balance that happen pretty much instantaneously.
David Roberts
And this is a good distinction to mark here, which is the distinction between predictable variability and unpredictable variability, which are very different.
Jesse Jenkins
Exactly. So there's a certain amount of this variability and uncertainty that already happens in the grid. There's sort of demand changes that are both predicted and also errors in those predictions. So we have demand forecast errors every day that are off by several percent right, from what we thought the demand was going to be. And we have what grid operators call contingencies sort of the unplanned forced failures of certain grid equipment that we have to be ready for at all times. Because if you lose a 1000-megawatt substation with a big factory on it, like an aluminum smelter, or you lose a generator, a big coal plant or a gas plant complex, or a nuclear power station, instantaneously, you have to rebalance that because if supply and demand get out of balance, the inertia of the grid physically responds.
So it's a little bit like if you remember playing on a merry-go-round at a playground where you could sort of have a couple of friends on it and you're spinning it around and then somebody jumps off and all of a sudden the rotational inertia is the same, but the weight is different. And the merry-go-round speeds up really fast, right, because there's less mass to move around or somebody jumps on and it slows down, right? And that's the same thing that's happening on the grid in aggregate is if you add load, is what the electricity system calls demand because it acts like a physical load on the force that the generators have to induce to create the electricity. It slows those generators down just a little bit and they have to work a little bit harder or you have to add more supply.
One of your friends has to come run up and help you push the merry-go-round as more people get on. And the same thing, the opposite happens. If supply exceeds demand, it gets easier to push, just like when somebody jumps off the merry-go-round. And so the generators all speed up and so do all the motors that are connected to the grid. And what's challenging here, again, is that the tolerances there are incredibly narrow. So just a 1% deviation in that speed of the grid is enough to trigger devices to disconnect to avoid damaging themselves because they spin up.
If you have a generator that's designed to go a certain speed and it starts to go faster than that, it can start to throw turbine blades out at very high velocities and self-destruct a whole building, right? A whole very expensive generator that you don't want to blow up. And same thing with industrial equipment, right? If they start moving too fast or even too slow, they can cause damage. So we have these protection devices that will trip offline devices as the frequency gets out of this very narrow range. And that can also cause a cascading failure because if you lose one generator because the frequency is too high or too low, then you'll start to lose the next generator and then the frequency will drop even more and then you'll lose the next generator and it'll go even lower.
And so you get these cascading failures. And the grid operator's job, really the number one job is to avoid that outcome at all costs, right? To make sure that this crazy Rube Goldberg machine is resilient to those kinds of scary unplanned contingencies. So we always have enough backup generation, enough flexibility what we call operating reserves or contingency reserves or spinning reserves — lots of different names for these products — of basically backup generators that are there able to increase their output if they're already producing or decrease it very rapidly or that are offline but can start up quickly to step into the gap when something occurs.
And that's how we keep this crazy system running right now. So there's sort of a physical response of inertia as you turn on or off devices and then we have all of these sort of cascading markets of different paces of response time that we have backup capacity waiting for from seconds to minutes to half hour, hour long kind of startup times. And that system of redundancies is how we keep the grid running today. And it will be the same set of solutions and some new ones that will come in to help augment what we do today.
That'll help us deal with the variability that we now are adding from wind and solar to a system that is already variable and has dealt with variability since its very beginning.
David Roberts
Right. It's fair to say, though, that we have a lot more.
Jesse Jenkins
Yes, we will have more.
David Roberts
The second to second variability, for instance, is going to be a lot more from a wind and solar based system.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, it adds a new source of forecast error. Right. Because your wind and solar is now also variable with the weather and we get better at forecasting that the closer to real time we get. But there are still errors in those forecasts. And certain power plants, coal plants, nuclear plants, others are slow to react to changes. And so we actually commit them to operate a day ahead of time. Usually we give a day ahead schedule for the next 24 hours and that predicts the sort of average demand over the course of each hour that we're trying to meet.
And so generators get turned on and are ready to meet that demand based on the forecast. And if the forecast is wrong a day ahead, then we need to deploy those flexibility resources at different timescales to cover the surpluses or deficits that we have in the system. And again, that's already how it works. We're just going to do more of that. And in some ways, we're going to be reducing the conventional sources of that flexibility. Because right now we get most of that flexibility from hydro and fossil power plants that are committed and operating on the grid but are held back from operating at their maximum or minimum levels to have some flexibility to ramp up or down quickly.
So the less of that we have because we're shutting down those plants to make room for wind and solar when they're producing, the more alternatives we need or we end up actually having to curtail wind and solar output in order to keep a minimum amount of those fossil generators online to maintain reliability. So that's the first option is you just curtail the renewables. But of course that's wasting free energy. And so we'd like to have other ways to take advantage of the wind and solar and still manage that short term variability. And that's where things like batteries and synchronous condensers and capacitor banks and other devices that we can add to the grid to augment their flexibility on those short timescales come in.
David Roberts
Is it safe to say that with those options, especially batteries, do you worry as we get closer to net zero, closer to a 100% carbon-free system, do you worry about this second to second variability or do you think basically with batteries, we basically have that problem solved and can handle that?
Jesse Jenkins
It's very low on my worry list. And that's not because it's not something that somebody has to worry about. It's just that I think there are very good control engineers and power engineers and grid operators out there solving these problems already. And we've known about these problems for decades. And so there are a lot of solutions already out there. And so pretty much everything is figured out in this space, I would say, with the exception perhaps of the physical inertia that really immediate microsecond, microsecond response that we get from the physical spinning mass of all of these interconnected generators.
Beyond that, the next line of defense is what we call frequency regulation or frequency reserves. Those are the ones that sort of move up and down on a second by second time scale to track a control signal. They say go up a little bit, go down a little bit to sort of keep things balanced out. And a few years back, maybe about a decade now, some of the grid operators in the US opened those markets up to batteries and particularly lithium-ion batteries —
David Roberts
Grid services.
Jesse Jenkins
Yep. And it turns out that lithium-ion batteries are incredibly good at this job because you don't need very much battery capacity, right?
You don't need a bunch of energy in the tank to be able to do this because it's generally about neutral, right? You're sort of going up and down and up and down and up and down around a middle point. And so you can maybe only have 15 or 30 minutes of full power discharge capability. And that's still enough to provide frequency regulation because you're really only charging discharging on few second to minute long timescales and they're incredibly fast. So the power electronics responds really quickly to the control signal and it can flip from full on to full charge very quickly, much faster than a physical generator could do, even a hydro generator, which traditionally were the fastest response.
And so when PJM and other grid operators opened up these markets in around maybe 2009, I think, to storage, we saw the first commercial scale deployment of grid connected batteries and they basically ate the entire market because they're just the best way to do this.
David Roberts
Yeah, there's not much left of that market in places where it opens up. It's pretty easy to cover those needs.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, you only need probably a few thousand megawatts of frequency regulation nationally. So that's like a few nuclear power plants worth of capacity nationally. And we have built that and a few hundred megawatts usually per grid region. And so the batteries just came in and you built a few grid batteries and they have taken on that role very capably. And the market is sort of full.
David Roberts
Is that what they call synthetic inertia?
Jesse Jenkins
No. So that's the next challenge. So yeah, this is frequency regulation, which is on the sort of second by second timescale. That initial response of the physical inertia is like milliseconds that just happens instantaneously because again, all of the devices are interconnected and physically synchronized. And so when the demand goes up a little bit, all the generators kind of lean into it a little bit and produce a little bit more and vice versa when the demand drops. And so that is where we currently depend on the physical inertia of generators who are connected to the grid and producing power.
And we get that for free. It's not something we pay those generators for, it's something that they just physically have provided for free. And it's been ample and well in excess of the amount that we generally need with rare exceptions like islands or micro grids where it's much more challenging to keep enough inertia. And so we haven't been paying generators for that. It's just sort of a bonus that we get from having these synchronized generators online and grid connected inverter based resources, which includes wind, solar and batteries and fuel cells and any other kind of direct current device like that electric chemical device.
They're not synchronized spinning masses of copper and steel like generators are and so they don't provide that physical inertia. And so synthetic inertia is basically a computerized control strategy to make those inverter based resources act like a physical inertia device would and to sort of automatically compensate based on local measured characteristics. This is too fast to send a control signal out even from a centralized dispatch. It has to be locally metering what's going on, and directly responding to the local conditions without knowing what's going on in the rest of the grid. And so you are basically designing control strategies to use the power electronics in an inverter to change the reactive power production or consumption of the battery or the solar panel or the wind farm, which can, if you do it right, can tune it well, can simulate and replace the physical inertia that you get from the system.
This is something that, again, people have been working on for decades in the lab. We've done lots of experiments. It's one of those ones that grid operators are very reluctant to deploy at scale and rely on in a field experiment because if it goes wrong, the grid goes down potentially. And so it's one of those ones like, it probably would work if we were willing to just jump off the cliff and try it. But for obvious reasons, this is an incredibly conservative industry. And so there's been various small scale deployments to try to see how it works.
But nowhere in the world that I'm aware of is relying substantially on synthetic inertia today. Again, with the exception, maybe, of small micro grids. I should say that there's a dumber, simpler and slightly more costly solution that we can fall back on, even if that doesn't work, which are called synchronized condensers, which is basically a generator without the turbine, without the spinning prime mover that are just spinning hunks of copper wires in magnets that are on the grid and are synchronized. They consume a little bit of electricity to spin around and stay synchronized. So they do use up some variable, some of the energy production, and they do cost money because they're basically half of a generator, the magnet part without the turbine.
But these have been around for a long time, and they're used in certain locations to buffer short term variability from, say, starting up a steel mill, electrical steel mill or aluminum smelter. That is this big new demand that comes on very quickly. They've been used in that context and to support the voltage at certain little pockets in the grid where it's been hard to do so. And I recently read a thesis a dissertation from University of Melbourne PhD student who modeled this as an option without any synthetic inertia in the grid, but a minimum physical inertia requirement and found that it would add to a fully decarbonized system about 1% or 2% to the cost of that system, if we only relied on synchronized condensers to do the job.
So, again, these are mature technologies we know how to build. At worst, they add a couple of percent to the system. At best, they're free, because all of these inverter connected devices that we're adding can perform the same role as physical inertia via synthetic controls. And again, that's more perspective at this point, but I think it's an imminently solvable challenge.
David Roberts
Okay, so this is the super short-term variability. Let's call it a solved problem, at least as these things go. So let's move up a little bit. Then you get big ramps, ramps in the morning when the sun comes up and goes down. Occasionally wind will die down quickly. What do you do about these sort of minutes to hours midday variability?
Jesse Jenkins
So I'll say what we do now and then what we could do, which would be better. Right now, again, we rely on fast-acting thermal or fossil power plants to play that role.
David Roberts
Mostly natural gas, right?
Jesse Jenkins
Mostly natural gas. Sometimes diesel, internal combustion engine reciprocating engine generators. So what we do is we commit a bunch of generators that are ready to act when the sun is about to set, and they are operating at their minimum stable output level, which is not zero. So generally, they don't get to just sort of sit there and park at zero. They have to be on at somewhere between 40 and 60% of their output, usually, or 30 and 60% of their maximum output is as low as they can go. So during the middle of the day, when the solar is at its maximum, many of these are shut off, but then they start to get recommitted in the afternoon hours, right before this evening ramp and run at sort of crouch there at their minimum output level and then ramp up really quickly as the sun sets to compensate.
And so gas turbines are really good at this. They're really fast to respond. I mean, they're, what, run jet engines, right? I mean, jet engines are basically gas turbines. And we derived our gas turbine generators from jet engines. So the fastest ones are as fast as a jet fighter. They're literally the same engine. We have one here at Princeton in our central plan as an aero derivative gas turbine. It's the same. It's used in like an F-16 fighter. So they're really fast to respond because they can handle a dog fight. But then you also have bigger what are known as frame combustion turbines and combined cycle power plants that usually also use these frame turbines connected to a second steam generator, so they use the hot gas from the combustion turbine as the steam generation source for a steam turbine as well.
David Roberts
That's combined cycle.
Jesse Jenkins
That's why we call them combined cycle, because they combine a Brayton and a Rankin cycle, a gas and steam turbine.
David Roberts
So we don't want to do this. We can't do that in a fully decarbonized grid. I mean, you can, I think, keep some fossil plants online and use them very, very rarely. But I don't think you could do that on a day-to-day in a decarbonized system.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, I mean, theoretically you could do this with a hydrogen turbine or something like that, but you would probably consume way more hydrogen than you want because hydrogen is a very expensive fuel to produce. And so, yeah, you don't want to keep doing this on a day to day basis. But I want to add that, again, we do this now. And this is how we keep the grid running even when California gets nearly 100% of its electricity during the middle of the day from solar and wind. The downside is that because you have to have those generators running at their minimum level before they can ramp up, because it takes between 30 minutes and several hours to turn on once you call on them.
And like a combined cycle power plant takes the longest of the gas generators. The air derivative turbines can maybe turn on in 30 minutes, but generally they have to be sort of on and parked and ready for that ramp. And you need some of them just sitting there, even for the unforecasted variability. Right. We know that the afternoon ramp is happening, but —
David Roberts
They're displacing wind and solar while they're sitting there —
Jesse Jenkins
Exactly. And so that limits the ability of wind and solar to displace their fuel consumption because they're on, not because they're the cheapest generator to meet demand at that hour, but because we know we need their flexibility for the ramping periods or the contingencies that we're waiting for. So it would be great if we had a really fast way to flexibly produce or consume energy to match the variability of wind and solar. And fortunately, there are lots of good ways to do that too, batteries being the first and most significant new source of that kind of hourly flexibility. But also the demand side can be called upon much more as well.
David Roberts
We should note that batteries in this capacity are way faster than the turbines.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, once again, they can do that frequency regulation on a second by second basis. So they surely can deal with the sunset. And yeah, they don't need to be committed. They can sit there, they're on the grid all the time. They can go from fully discharging to fully charging or back. So they actually have twice the ramping capability. Right. Because if you have 100 megawatts of battery, it can switch from being 100-megawatt consumer to 100-megawatt producer, giving you 200 megawatts of ramping in that battery and they do it in a second, right. From one to the other. And so they're really good at this.
And we're already seeing them deployed at gigawatt scale in a lot of markets in the world, particularly those with high solar penetrations, because this daily cycle is so predictable. You get really cheap power during the middle of the day and really expensive power in the evening ramp and so they can make money arbitraging that spread, buy low and sell high.
David Roberts
Yes. And you also mentioned demand shifting, which is just trying to move large sources of load under that curve when solar is producing all this energy away from the times of sharp ramps.
Jesse Jenkins
Exactly. You mentioned at the beginning that we're shifting from a system of dispatchable generation to one of variable or nondispatchable generation. Well, we're also hopefully shifting from a system of nondispatchable demand, constant demand that doesn't know what the price of electricity is and just keeps consuming no matter what to dispatchable or flexible demand. Because power electronics are cheap, computing power is cheap, controls technologies are very sophisticated and it would not be very hard to wire up a whole bunch of HVAC controls and hot water heaters and EV chargers to be much more flexible on both minutes to hours to even daily timescales.
There's a lot of flexibility in an EV, right? I mean, I have a 300 miles range EV. That's enough for five to seven days of driving in my typical driving pattern. So not only can I shift which hours during the night or daytime, if it's plugged in at home during the day, that I consume energy, but I can even choose which days to consume, right? I can shift from Monday to Wednesday or Wednesday to Saturday, right? And that's probably the most flexible of these loads. But think about a hot water heater. That's just a big thermal battery.
It's a big insulated tank of water and when you charge it and heat it up or not, it is quite flexible. You can do it right as you're drawing down the hot water, or you can preheat it and get it above the desired temperature. And there are even more sophisticated ways to do that. Parts of the world that traditionally relied heavily on hydro or nuclear power, where you had the problem of too much generation overnight: What those parts of the world did way back in the 50s through to today is they have ceramic brick heaters that heat up a big ceramic brick when the power is cheap, and then let that brick reradiate heat into your house during the daytime right when —
David Roberts
Thermal storage!
Jesse Jenkins
It's cheap —
David Roberts
We love thermal storage.
Jesse Jenkins
And again, this is not Sci-fi. This is like they do it in Quebec and the UK and they've done it since the 60s. So we could be building big thermal batteries in everyone's home whenever we put in a new HVAC system, right? It could just be part of the HVAC design, is that you have a big hot water tank or a big hot brick tank.
David Roberts
We also get to what I think is one of the most fascinating questions and I think unexplored as yet questions in this whole area, which is when you are talking about big industrial loads, how much of that load is shiftable, how much of big industrial load could be shifted? I don't think there's been a ton of exploration of that to date. And I think we're going to be finding out soon what the answer to that question is.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, and actually, I have a paper that we just resubmitted this week. After revisions on this, we can provide a link to the working paper in the show notes on what we call demand sinks. So these are consumers that are extremely flexible in when they decide to consume and will basically match their consumption to the availability of low-cost power. And since wind and solar are the cheapest way to make low-cost power, that will mean they can sync up their output to wind and solar. And so we actually offer four different categories of demand in that paper to try to help kind of talk through the options here.
So if we're thinking about the demand side, there's firm demand. That's the normal stuff that we're used to having where it wants to have three or four nines of reliability, we usually say, which is like 99.99 or 99.999% reliability basically all the time. And that's most of our current demands. Residential, commercial, lighting and cooking and refrigeration, industrial, most industrial loads, hospitals and other critical loads, and most heating demand today. And that's the demand we expect to serve. And if you don't, it's a big problem, right, that's when you're having rolling blackouts. Then we have interruptible demand or curtailable demands.
This is the sort of category of demand response that we have. So these aren't necessarily shifting their production, they're just stopping consumption when the price of electricity is really high or when they're being paid a lot of money to do so. And that's where things like aluminum smelters or industrial demand response contracts that they have with a whole bunch of industrial refrigeration warehouses or consumers with backup generators who can turn on and get off the grid when the price of power is higher than the cost of running their generator. That's a lot of the demand response we have today.
That's also where hydrogen boilers, other things could potentially play a role. So there's some new ones coming in that category too. Those ones, you don't want to call on those very often, but they can help you avoid building a bunch of generation that just sits there for that like half a percent of the hours of the year when you really need some backup because they can consume less during those periods for a few hours at a time. Then you have what we call shiftable demands. These are the ones we were just talking about where you can move around when you consume within a kind of hourly or even daily scale.
Flexible EVs, heating demand, data centers potentially can do this — something Google has explored, moving around in both space and time where they do the compute loads.
David Roberts
Yeah, Google is doing a ton of work trying to figure out how much of their compute load is shiftable.
Jesse Jenkins
Yep. Yeah, one of my former MIT classmates who I happened to see last weekend at a wedding was working on this with Google. Yeah, fun stuff to optimize, right? Great control problem to play with. Then things like agricultural pumping is another one that's often done already. Like California irrigation districts will shift when they pump their water into the canals and the reservoirs and things like that. So that's another tried and true demand. And so those demands, they meet their needs, right? It's just a question of when they do it. So it's different than curtailable or interruptible demands. And then this last category of demand sinks are the really price sensitive consumers who really can choose when to consume.
And this is where it's an interesting question which categories will emerge here? What we found in our paper is that in order to do this, you kind of need a weird combination of things. You need something that's highly automated because you can't have a lot of labor sitting around idle when you stop consuming. Right. Because that's usually too much of a cost. It needs to be very energy intensive, meaning a big chunk, if not the most of your cost of production is the cost of energy inputs. And it needs to produce something of value that isn't so valuable that you never want to turn off.
This is the current problem with crypto mining with bitcoin, is that the bitcoin prices are so high — or they have been, I don't know, they're all over the place now, so maybe they're lower now — that you want to consume even if the electricity is several hundred dollars per megawatt hour, $100 per megawatt hour, it means you basically consume 98, 99% of the time anyway. So that makes you more like an interruptible demand, not a flexible consumer. But if the price of the product is lower, where your willingness to pay is only ten or 20 or $30 a megawatt hour, then you want to concentrate to when the load is — or the power is cheap.
And then finally it has to be not very capital intensive because if you're going to idle your production and shift your consumption around to low price hours, you're going to have a low utilization rate for that capital, all that equipment. And so it can't be too expensive or you'll need to run it all the time. And that's where kind of direct air capture fails the test right now because it meets the other requirements, highly automated, totally energy intensive, but it's too capital intensive to run at anything less than maybe 95% of the time. So there are a few here that I think may work.
And one is, I think we share is one of our favorite technologies out there, which is resistance heating with thermal storage. Right. So Rondo or Antora, who you've interviewed on here I'm on the advisory board of Rondo Energy, I should disclose and big fan of what they're up to. But here you basically take in renewable electricity whenever it's available and you use a big thermal battery like the hot water tank or the ceramic bricks that we're talking about in the home to decouple —
David Roberts
Box of rocks.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, or a box of rocks or even just rocks in the ground covered up with dirt to decouple the constant heat demand of an industrial process from the variable input of the wind and solar. And that's a great option. Another option is to just install resistance heaters alongside gas boilers. So don't replace the gas boiler fully or at all, but run it in a hybrid mode, where when energy prices are cheap electricity prices are cheap, you switch off of gas to electricity, and when electricity prices are higher than the gas cost, you go back to gas.
And that makes it look like a very flexible demand sink. That was a technology we put in the model for the Net Zero America study and we saw like terawatts of that load in the final Net Zero system. Right.
David Roberts
So the system wants —
Jesse Jenkins
Wants that cheap renewable electricity if it can use it. Right. So if you can find a way to meet your constant energy demand for industrial heat while tapping into this cheapest source of energy, period, whenever it's available, that's a really valuable thing to do.
David Roberts
Yeah, I think that one's going to be huge in like a decade.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, I think so. I think the industrial heating is the biggest one that people largely are sleeping on. Although not you and I of course. And then the other one that's getting most of the attention right now I should say is hydrogen production from electrolysis.
David Roberts
Right? Yeah.
Jesse Jenkins
Where again today electrolyzers are pretty expensive so you probably want to run them at least 70% of the time. But that's still very flexible. I mean 30% of the hours is a lot of hours you can shut down. And as the cost of electrolyzers fall, which we expect they will just like solar and batteries did, probably by 50% over the next six years or so, then you can afford to run them at 30 or 50% utilization rate and then they're a really good flexible consumer. Now I want to add that both of these, any of these demand sinks, what we found in our paper, they don't really help the broader grid operate.
What they do is allow you to just tap into that weather-dependent but very low-cost clean electricity and make greater economic use of it and displace fossil energy consumption elsewhere in the energy system. But it's sort of additive to all the demands that we already are going to have in the grid and the flexibility that we need to handle those demands. So we added a whole bunch of demand sinks in our modeling and we found is that it didn't really reduce the amount of firm generating capacity or battery capacity that you wanted on the system, but it also didn't increase it much. It just sits there and soaks up that good cheap renewable energy when it's there —
David Roberts
But allows you to use more wind and solar.
Jesse Jenkins
Much more. Yeah, much more.
David Roberts
Okay, so we've covered seconds and we've covered minutes and hours and it sounds like on the minutes to hours thing, combining batteries and then all these demand, as you say, these various sources of shiftable demand. Do you think that the sort of ramping problem is solvable to solved? Let's say it's also low on your list of worries.
Jesse Jenkins
I think we have solved that problem in the sense that we know the technologies; they are not Sci-Fi, they can be deployed at scale now. They are not deployed at scale yet at the scale we would need. So in the next ten years or five years we are still going to have to rely on those gas turbines and things like that to do a good chunk of this. But over time, as we build more batteries, as we wire up more flexible loads and give them the incentive to participate in this demand shifting, as we get more interruptible consumers signed up, we'll be able to do more of this without relying on so much gas backup capacity.
And that's a good thing from a decarbonization perspective.
David Roberts
So then we get up to hours to days variability in terms of diurnal cycles, the sun going down every night in the sort of daily storage needs. What are our options there?
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah. So here we probably again, we rely right now on fossil generators, right. Ramping up and down. We can rely to some degree on lithium-ion batteries. They are most economic to operate for just the highest price periods for that sort of peak in the evening ramp, or maybe twice if there's a double peaking system in the morning too. And it's not a function of like physically you could slow the discharge rate and run a lithium-ion battery for 24 hours of discharge. You just have to discharge at a much slower overall rate than you could. And so, economically, batteries and given their cost today, are really best suited to somewhere between like two and six hours of duration.
David Roberts
Yeah, although that number has been edging upward, I feel like, for as long as I've been paying attention.
Jesse Jenkins
Right. Because the reason I'm emphasizing that technically they can do longer is that what limits that is not the technology per se, it's the economics of the battery.
David Roberts
I mean, you could theoretically just stack batteries to the heavens and solve all of this if you had infinite money.
Jesse Jenkins
If you've got ten four hour batteries, you've got a 40 hours battery. Or if you have one four hour battery that you discharge at one 10th of its rated capacity, you have a 40 hours battery. Right. So that's not rocket science. The problem is you need to make enough money every time you charge and discharge to cover your overall fixed cost of a battery. Right. So batteries make money off of kind of capacity contracts and flexibility services. So they're sort of paying for their standby ability, but also from buying low and selling high. Right. This sort of buy sell spread.
David Roberts
Right.
Jesse Jenkins
And the problem with any arbitrage play is that the more you buy low, the higher the low price gets. And the more you sell high, the lower the high price gets. And you're not the only one playing this game.
David Roberts
Everybody else is arbitraging too.
Jesse Jenkins
Exactly. And so we've seen this happen is that basically the price spreads start to collapse as you build more of these flexible demands and more of these batteries all kind of playing on the same price signals. And so that creates a race between the declining cost of these technologies and their declining value as you do more and more with them. And as long as the costs keep falling, or we develop cheaper lower cost per kilowatt hour of storage capacity batteries or storage technologies, then batteries can stretch to play a longer and longer duration role. And so, just to put some numbers on that, right now lithium-ion battery systems are probably $250 to $350 per kilowatt hour of capacity installed. If they fell to 100 ish dollars —
David Roberts
Isn't that DOE's stretch goal?
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah. So the pack costs are already falling below $100. So the actual battery pack itself, but you have to install it and give it cooling and power control electronics and wire it up to the grid and everything. And so the labor and the balance of system costs, just like for solar modules, which are only like a third of the cost of a solar system now at scale, the pack cost is a piece of it. And so we would need to get the pack cost down a lot more. If you want to hit the $100 per kilowatt hour total system cost level, you'd still need to probably a stretch for lithium-ion to hit that target.
But maybe lithium-ion phosphate batteries are looking like a better option to do that. Sodium sulfur batteries or sodium-ion batteries, sorry, are being introduced now as a cheap, low-range option for EVs. Well, EV batteries need to charge and discharge very quickly and they need to have a high enough energy density to give you a lot of range in a small package for not very much weight. None of those apply to a grid battery.
David Roberts
Yeah, right.
Jesse Jenkins
A grid battery can charge and discharge over hours, not minutes. And the energy density doesn't matter. The gravimetric density, the weight part, doesn't matter at all. The volumetric density only really has a small impact on the amount of space you need to put them, which can impact the installation costs and cost of the land.
David Roberts
So here you get into this weird because we're going to discuss later long-duration energy storage, where we're talking about days and weeks. So here you're getting into this weird sort of liminal space between —
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, diurnal storage.
David Roberts
lithium-ion batteries, which gets you up to whatever, six, maybe eight hours.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, maybe 16. Right. This sort of diurnal scale is what it seems like is necessary to manage most of the day-to-day variability of demand and solar and wind, which they have pretty pronounced daily cycles because the sun goes up and down every day.
David Roberts
So that's where you get into flow batteries and things like this, which are sort of like longer than short term, but shorter than long term.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah. So, iron flow —
David Roberts
I don't know how much of that space is going to be left. My sort of instinct is that that space is going to get eaten from below by lithium-ion and eaten from above by long duration and there's not going to be much of it left. But, what do you think?
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, I mean, it depends. It's sort of a race to market, I think, and which technologies kind of get to scale and get on that cost curve first because there's a lot of path dependency here, right. If you can get to market and scale up and start driving down your costs before another startup can, you may be able to edge them out of the market. And this is something that any of these startup battery companies need to keep in mind. Because lithium-ion and sodium-ion and all of the automotive battery technologies are coming like a freight train for your market, too, if you're in this diurnal space because there's going to be huge price pressures and competitive pressures from the auto sector to get a better, cheaper, lighter weight battery.
David Roberts
Yeah, this is such a key point. I want to underline this. You have lithium-ion batteries competing in this daily space with other flow batteries and things like that. But flow batteries are getting all their money in development and drive from this space. But lithium-ion batteries have the much, much, much larger EV market behind them.
Jesse Jenkins
Yes, it's probably two orders of magnitude bigger.
David Roberts
Yeah, so it's an unfair advantage.
Jesse Jenkins
It is. And I think it's really important to realize that if you're an investor and entrepreneur in this space, you should expect lithium-ion to just keep getting better, or sodium-ion or other substitutes from the automotive sector and that will help stretch them from four hours to six to ten and being economic in that space. And so, yeah, I do think you're going to see a shrinking market unless you're like a factor of two or more better than lithium-ion is today and you're going to get to market soon because lithium-ion will be half the cost eventually, you are going to be in trouble. And so there are plenty of solutions here.
David Roberts
There are lots of chemistries in the lab, you read the MIT press releases or whatever. There are lots of interesting chemistries competing for this space, but as you say, they're so far behind that they would have to be such an order of magnitude higher performance to get a foothold.
Jesse Jenkins
Some of them say they can and I think probably can. And so we'll probably get a half dozen of new diurnal ten to 24 hours kind of duration batteries, which are sometimes called long duration. Which is why I think it's useful to separate this diurnal timescale from the sort of multi-day or seasonal role, which is a whole different one, which requires an even cheaper battery or cheaper storage medium. But yeah, again, there are solutions coming here. Some of those flexible demands can even shift around on the order of days. Think about EV demand again. If we had ubiquitous charging at work or on the streets that you could drive and plug into a small low-level charger pretty much anywhere, then in solar-dominated markets, which is probably going to be most of the world soon.
It makes the most sense to charge your car during the daytime and not at night. Right now, because most people charge at home, the easiest thing to do is to just avoid that peak afternoon evening consumption and charge in the middle of the night, which is generally cheaper. But you could also charge during the daytime if you can plug in during the day. And if we shifted all of our EV consumption around, it could very well provide this sort of diurnal capability also because, again, you have multiple days worth of charge usually in your battery, and you can shift large fleets of EVs fractionally to produce a lot of storage capacity in aggregate.
And so I do think there's a lot coming in this space.
David Roberts
Right? You think diurnal is again solvable with technologies that are either here or on the near horizon.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, exactly. And maybe a little bit behind some of the shorter timescales that we're talking about, because we are talking about technologies today that are in Series B or C venture capital rounds and still need to get to market and produce at scale. But most of those are coming in the next two to three years, right. They're going to be producing at commercial scale soon, and we'll see what costs they hit and whether they can scale to gigawatt hours per year. But there's a lot of innovation, a lot of investment, and a lot of potential on both the battery or storage and demand side to fill that role.
And again, in the meantime, we've got gas turbines. And so it's important to remember in all of this, there's no reason to wait for these technologies to come forward. We're just going to keep building more wind and solar, maintaining our gas as we add these additional resources to augment them. And if all else fails, right, and we don't get there with these diurnal technologies, what it does is it just provides an economic limit on the amount of wind and solar that we can add, because we'll start curtailing wind and solar more than we would ideally. And that just reduces the amount of energy that those wind and solar farms can sell out of value.
And that also creates a race between declining wind and solar costs and curtailment or declining value of wind and solar. It's something I've talked about a lot in the past. Again, if wind and solar just keep getting cheaper, they can keep winning that race. But if they stall out of the way wind has appeared to over the last couple of years, and we'll see if it gets back on track, then the limitation in diurnal flexibility options will present an economic limit on the amount of wind and solar we can add. If solar just keeps getting cheaper, like, say, solar drops —
David Roberts
Which will then provide an enormous financial incentive for people to come forward with these solutions —
Jesse Jenkins
To do this, exactly. Yeah. So, think about if solar just got half the cost it is today, which is still achievable, right? That solar PV could decline by another 40 or 50% over the next five to ten years. If that happens, then you can afford to waste half of your solar production that you would otherwise need to sell today. Right. Because you just knocked the cost in half. Probably more than that, because prices are not evenly distributed. And then yeah, now you've created this huge amount of free energy during the middle of the day that somebody can come and arbitrage with a daily storage or demand flexibility option.
So, I think we're on a pretty inexorable path to solving that problem as well. Even though it's not technically solved today.
David Roberts
This seems like a good place to bring in transmission, which is another in the basket of solutions to variability, I think, on virtually all these timescales, really. I mean, transmission helps in all these ways, but I think in the diurnal timescale it is going to be the most sort of notable contribution, which is just the broader of a geography you connect up, the more smooth your overall profile is.
Jesse Jenkins
That's right, yeah. We haven't talked about the geographic nature of this, but again, what this is all driven by is the weather. That's what drives demand wind solar variability. And over longer timescales you tend to have to go over broader geographies to decorrelate the output. Right. So if you're just talking about those seconds to minutes, the clouds and the variability of an individual wind farm, you can go not very far away and get a solar farm or a wind farm that is not in the same cloud or not dealing with the same wind gust as it goes across the plains.
And you can balance those short term variabilities out over relatively small geographic areas. When it comes to hours to days timescales, you kind of need continent scale, not the entire US continent, but at least big chunks of it scale interconnection. And we do have grids that span continents, so that's not an impossible thing. In particular, if you go east to west, you see the timing of that peak demand shift as the sun sets right across the country. And so you can spread the solar and demand out in the evening hours. You can't get rid of the nighttime entirely unless you have a grid that spans the whole world.
But across the expanse of the United States or Europe or China, other big east to west countries, you can do a lot there. And wind fronts tend to be driven by these big synoptic scale weather patterns that span big areas. You'll see them talked about on the news. And we've got a high pressure front off of the Atlantic that's affecting the Northeast today. And those affect big regions, but not the whole country. So if you can connect from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma, right, it maybe has very different weather patterns going on. And you can deal with some of these even multi day kind of fronts potentially as well.
David Roberts
Okay, so we've got second to second, more or less covered. We've got minutes to hours covered, coverable, easily forecasted to be coverable. Then we've got hours to days, which is, as you say, the site of enormous activity right now. A lot of people working on those things and solutions either in hand or anticipatable relatively soon in the next decade. Then we get up to weeks and seasons. And I guess the first thing I'd ask is, is there a meaningful difference here technologically in terms of what we need between weeks and seasons? Are those going to be distinct categories?
Jesse Jenkins
Well, yeah, I don't know that there's a huge difference between weeks and seasons. I think once you're cheap enough to do weeks — so what we tend to see is that it's not that you're doing seasonal discharge. Like you're not discharging for months at a time. But what you might do is charge very slowly for weeks at a time in the spring or the fall and the sort of shoulder seasons, and then step in for five or seven or 20 days in the peak demand, low wind and solar period in the winter or the summer and during those Dunkelflaute or whatever.
David Roberts
Right. Once we're beyond days, we're just talking basically about long-term solutions. And here, as I understand it, this is the most difficult, least answered, least settled form of variability that we're dealing with here, which is just what is that resource that's not wind and solar, that when wind and solar are unusually low for weeks or seasons at a time, can step in for weeks and seasons at a time without generating carbon. So that's a head scratcher of a category.
Jesse Jenkins
It is. And this is what I call the — we published a paper, Nestor Sepulveda and I, back in 2018 on firm, low carbon resources, looking at this need. We followed that up with a later paper in 2020 on long duration energy storage. How cheap does batteries or other technologies need to be to actually fill that role? With a storage technology the answer is really cheap, like two orders of magnitude cheaper than a lithium-ion battery.
David Roberts
Right. So, lithium-ion batteries are not —
Jesse Jenkins
They're not going to do this.
David Roberts
— cheap enough to do this.
Jesse Jenkins
No.
David Roberts
But what can?
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah. So the options on the generation side and we can come back to the storage front in a minute, are, again, the default in all of these conversations is we just keep using fossil fuels for less and less and less and less of this job. Right. So if, again, we can't develop any other technology, all we can do is have some combustion turbines and diesel generators sitting around for that week.
David Roberts
Yeah, right.
Jesse Jenkins
That is not the end of the world from a CO2 perspective. Right. It would be challenging to maintain the gas and fuel delivery infrastructure for that. And it'll get more and more expensive to do than today. Right. So it won't be as cheap as today's gas turbines, but we run our models and they're pretty damn price insensitive to that cost, especially on the variable side, because you're not going to burn a lot of fuel in those power plants. Right. They're going to sit there, they're going to provide a lot of power when you need them. But because you only run them for a week or five days or 20 days, they don't burn very much fuel over the course of a year.
That means that even if the fuel is really expensive, like it's all synthetic methane or hydrogen that you produce from renewables in another period of the year, or you produce from biomass gasification or whatever, those could cost several times as much as current natural gas. And that still would be fine from a total economics perspective because you don't use very much of it.
David Roberts
So we could learn to live at peace with some marginal natural gas plants sitting around waiting on these periods.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah. Again, the things that we don't like about fossil fuels, whether it's gas or coal or oil, are all related to how much of it we burn, not how much capacity we have sitting around to burn it. Right.
David Roberts
That's a crucial point.
Jesse Jenkins
So all the pollution, all the fracking, all the fuel production, all the transportation, all the methane emissions from the fuel cycle, all that scales with how much volume we use, not the peak power output. And so it isn't the end of the world. If we don't get to a 100% carbon-free grid, we get to a 98% carbon-free grid and we run some gas turbines.
The thing that we're actually researching right now and I think is important to consider in that context, they call that the fallback plan. Right. We don't get any new innovation and we have to do this plan, which is unlikely. Then the thing I'm exploring with my group now is how much fuel storage or firm pipeline capacity or whatever do you need to make sure that you actually have the fuel around when you really need it? Because if you don't, then all that standby capacity is worthless.
David Roberts
That's a lot of infrastructure to maintain for a few power plants.
Jesse Jenkins
For backup use. As I said, it's very insensitive to variable cost of the fuel, but it may be much more sensitive to the capital cost of the fuel, of the equipment you need to secure the fuel supply. And because you're not using it very often, so you don't get to amortize that cost over a lot of hours. And so it may be that that becomes more expensive than we think if we start to account for all those additional things like the need to have onsite fuel storage or something.
David Roberts
Yeah, like maintaining the natural gas distribution system. Is this weird sort of like yes or no, on or off question. And if it's on then that's a shitload of money. And if it's off, you're saving a bunch. It's not really something you can half do.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, right now power plants, gas plants basically are non-firm consumers. So they just use the gas capacity on the pipelines when it's there and when it's not, they don't, generally, but if you're going to be the last resort firm resource, you better make sure your fuel supply is secured. Otherwise, you're useless and people will freeze to death. And that's not okay. So that's one option is we just figure out how to secure gas turbines running on either methane or synthetic methane or biogas or hydrogen or something, or —
David Roberts
Capturing and burying their CO2 or let's mention the Allam cycle real quick.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, well, so I would say that's not a great option for this very intermittent capacity role because that capital equipment to capture CO2, and to store it, is not going to be used at such a low utilization rate. So then we go into the next category beyond these sort of backup combustion turbines or fuel cells or something. And that's where you have gas with carbon capture or maybe coal, but probably not. And advanced nuclear and advanced geothermal. Even a gas plant with carbon capture is sort of in the middle. It's got fuel costs, so it's non-zero variable costs and has some capital costs.
So you want to run it maybe 40% to 70% of the hours of the year. And so it will do more than just fill in the standby capacity if you build that. It'll also supply some of our carbon-free generation and we'll need less wind and solar because of that. But that is an option. And then the final one. Geothermal and nuclear, both fission and potentially fusion are majorly capital intensive upfront cost, but very low if any fuel cost. And so if they are in the mix, we want to run them most of the time, not all the time.
They don't need to run base load. The term is there is no base load that we need to meet anymore. In a system with lots of variable renewables, what we need is something that can complement the variable renewables. So even geothermal or nuclear, it would make sense to couple with a storage option. So we've looked at coupling nuclear fission with thermal storage the way some of the new designs are going to do. We've looked at geothermal plants that both closed loop and enhanced geothermal can shift their production on daily or even weekly or seasonal timescales. So they just concentrate all their output in the best periods and store it up in the other periods.
So they will operate flexibly. I call them flexible base technologies, but they're going to be operating at 70% to 90% utilization rates, not standby. Again, those are with the exception of fusion, which still has some very serious engineering questions to work out. We know we can build nuclear power plants, we know we can build geothermal, we know we can frack wells. And we're starting to do the first hydrofracking for geothermal with enhanced geothermal technologies being built. Like right now. These are technologies that are right over the horizon and are well capitalized now by startups and by public sector support and are going to be built in first commercial scale projects over the next two to five years.
And so we'll see which of those start to look really viable. And by the end of the decade, I think we'll have this part of the toolkit worked out as well. And we'll really have an understanding of which ones of these are ready to scale and which ones aren't.
David Roberts
So the idea here is if you hit the Dunkelflaute, if you hit the period of low wind and solar, you just ramp up your nuclear and your geothermal and your carbon captured natural gas plants to compensate.
Jesse Jenkins
Yes. Or you have very, very low-cost energy storage, like what Form Energy is working on with very cheap iron air battery. Or you could do very large compressed air in big salt caverns that if they're big enough, get really cheap. Or you could store hydrogen underground.
David Roberts
These are long duration energy storage.
Jesse Jenkins
All of these are potentially sort of $1 to $10 per kilowatt hour type range of cost of storage capacity, marginal storage capacity. And if that's the case, then we found that they could displace much, if not all of that firm generation role and act as basically a firm storage option for those.
David Roberts
Interesting. So if we successfully develop and commercialize a few of these long duration technologies, we are reducing our need for clean, firm, reducing our need for nuclear and geothermal.
Jesse Jenkins
What we found is it's pretty difficult to fully eliminate it, but you could do a lot more with long duration storage and renewables and less — need, less firm.
David Roberts
Interesting. Give us a sense of — I think a lot of people are curious about this is, like, where are we on those long duration energy storage technologies? I mean, technologically they don't seem that mysterious, but none of them, as far as I know, are commercially used yet, except for pumped hydro.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, and pumped hydro is way too expensive for this role. It's a diurnal technology, too, that is really sized for and has the cost for daily or multi-hour kind of applications.
David Roberts
So we don't have long duration energy storage at a commercial scale —
Jesse Jenkins
No —
David Roberts
yet really?
Jesse Jenkins
Partly because we haven't had to. We have chemical fuel, we don't need it. We have diesel and coal and natural gas and that's our storage. Right? So what we're trying to figure out is a way to get by without those fuels. One option is really cheap electrochemical storage or alternative chemical storage, like hydrogen or synthetic natural gas stored in salt caverns or the way we store gas seasonally today. Those are all doable. But yeah, I basically say they're in the same place as all of the clean firm generation options, which is that there are multiple startup companies that have clear line of sight and are capitalized and are scaling and are trying to work it out.
And we'll know in the next three to five years which of those are real and which of those can't get off the ground. And so again, when I published our paper, when Esther and I published our paper, initially, it was very speculative, right? Which of these could take off? Most of the nuclear designs existed on paper. The Allam cycle existed on paper. We were just talking notionally about hydrogen with no policy support whatsoever. Right? And now you have strong public policy support in well capitalized companies in all of these categories moving forward. And so I think we're again in a good position to solve this problem.
It's not an unsolvable challenge.
David Roberts
Let's quickly just spell out what we mean by Allam cycle, natural gas, in case for the non-super nerds out there who are not following this. I wrote a piece in Vox about it three or four years ago, but I haven't heard a lot about it lately. But spell out what that is.
Jesse Jenkins
So, this is a technology that is commercialized by a company called Net Power, recently went public via SPAC. And I should disclose that I served as a consultant to the SPAC company as they were exploring that acquisition. And so it's now a publicly traded company that is building their first commercial project in the Permian Basin, West Texas. They're building another one. I got a couple of others planned and they have operated a pilot scale facility outside of Laporte, Texas to try to prove out the design. But what it does is it basically burns natural gas in a pure oxygen environment.
So it uses an air separating unit to get oxygen out of the atmosphere. And then when you burn gas with only oxygen instead of the air, you don't get any air pollutants. So you don't get — it already burns with very little no particulates. But all of the nitrous oxides, the NOx emissions that we get from gas power plants, the nitrogen comes from the air. It comes from partial combustion and high temperature combustion that dissociate nitrogen out of the air and combine it with oxygen and produce NOx. And so if you burn it in a pure oxygen environment, there's no nitrogen available to become NOx.
And so it produces power with no air pollution. And it produces a pure CO2 stream from that combustion that can be easily captured at 99.9% capture rate and then sequestered or stored. And so it has the potential to be a very low air pollution, basically no air pollution and nearly 100% capture gas power plant.
David Roberts
Really cool, really cool machine.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, I should say it doesn't eliminate the upstream impacts of gas supply chains, but everything from the power plant it can clean up. And so that's a huge difference from our current gas plants. It's also different from a post-combustion capture system, which bolts on to a conventional gas plant. Those have a harder time capturing 100% of the emissions. It takes a lot more energy to do that and they all add a lot of cost and reduce the efficiency of the process. The Allam cycle itself, it has some other complicated systems to it. It uses supercritical CO2 to run the turbines instead of water and it keeps it at a constant phase.
Long and short of it is it's much more efficient and compact than a combined cycle plant too. And so if this can be made to work — and again you have to show that it can work, work on a sustained basis at commercial scale — then it's a potentially much more affordable option and can capture much higher emissions levels with zero air pollution relative to a gas plant with conventional gas combined cycle plant with carbon capture.
David Roberts
As has come up several times already in our discussion, there are several contexts in which it would be very handy to have a couple of sort of low utilization natural gas plants hanging around. So, if you could build those in such a way that they are air pollutant-free and easily capturable CO2, it's a big help.
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah. And if you can site them in ways that where you can source from gas fields that have very low methane leakage and don't have to transport across big pipelines and don't use the distribution hour — there's a lot of upstream impacts to consider. But yeah, you could do it in a not zero impact, but much, much more benign system than our current gas plants.
David Roberts
And do you think of e-fuels? So for listeners, you can strip hydrogen out of the air with electrolysis and then combine hydrogen with hydrocarbons that you've captured elsewhere to create basically carbon-neutral fuels. This is how we're going to solve aviation fuels, probably how we're going to solve shipping, some form of methanol. There's a variety of these e fuels available and possible. Do you think of those conceptually as long term energy storage?
Jesse Jenkins
Yeah, I mean, you can think of them either as long duration storage or as firm generation. I mean, I think they're kind of a mix of the two because you're probably going to get some of their initial energy inputs from electricity, but maybe not all of them. So you can think of it in the extreme manner: We don't use any electrolysis. We get all of these from biomass and from methane reforming with carbon capture, other non-electrolytic sources. And then it just looks to the electricity sector like a fuel because it doesn't consume electricity to produce. It just gives you electricity.
David Roberts
Right.
Jesse Jenkins
On the other extreme: It's a full round trip electrochemical process. You use electricity to produce the fuel, you store the fuel, you burn it back into electricity. What's interesting is that they sit in between and that they're part of a much larger fuel system that is predominantly used outside of the electricity sector and has input options besides electricity. And I think that's also a big advantage because just like lithium-ion batteries are going to kind of coast on the much larger EV market for batteries, it means there's more things you can do with these long duration storage options.
You can power ships and you can power industrial processes and you can use them as chemical feedstocks as opposed to an electrochemical battery that can only do electrical storage. And so I think those are pretty viable options to kind of eventually play the role of a long duration firm generation/storage option. And the long duration electrochemical battery makers need to keep an eye on that market too because it could be coming for the other side of your market. They do know this. I mean, I've talked to several of them that they're keeping an eye on hydrogen and e fuels and other things.
But that's the other route is that we just burn these fuels occasionally. But again, that comes back to that fuel supply assurance question that I raised before, which is the piece we're researching now.
David Roberts
Yeah. How do you set up an entire infrastructure to create fuels that are only used marginally or used?
Jesse Jenkins
Well, see, this is where I think those ones have an advantage in the sense that you would use them in other sectors, right? You would use these fuels to produce jet fuel or to produce shipping fuel or as a feedstock for petrochemicals or others. And so you could sort of tap into that larger, more established and more constantly used fuel system the way that power plants today tap into the natural gas system. It would be smaller probably than today's gas distribution system, but it could be similar in that it's sort of a multi-use fuel network and reaches economies of scope and scale because of that.
So it is an option, one that we see in our kind of multisector modeling that we do. And I think whether you see that as a generation option or as a storage option or some hybrid in between, it certainly fits the role of a firm resource and can be our potential backup kind of source.
David Roberts
Stepping back here, we've walked through the time cycles of intermittency from seconds all the way up to seasons. And basically what you're saying is that in all those cases there are options either available or in development. It's probably safer to say that the seconds side of things is more solved, there are more options. We're more ready for that. And when you get up to the seasons level of intermittency we're a little bit more out in the future. We're a little bit more theoretical. There's a lot of stuff in the lab. There's a lot of competition that needs to be had, but there are options there as well.
So one thing you could take from this is just, "oh, variability is nothing to worry about." And yet people see California having problems. People see high renewable energy penetration systems starting to run into these problems. So how do we square those two stories in our head, this idea that we know how to do it, yet even at relatively low penetration, we're starting to run into tensions and problems.
Jesse Jenkins
Okay, Dave, do you ever encounter challenges in your day-to-day life? Do you have writer's blocks?
David Roberts
I'm a podcaster. It's all easy.
Jesse Jenkins
You need to figure out what to make for dinner for your kids. Do you just throw up your hands and cover your head and go back to bed? Of course not, right? You wouldn't get through your life if you did that. Also, some of those challenges, you don't solve them the first time you sit down to do it, right? But these are challenges, not barriers or impenetrable walls that we can't pass, right? These are not rules of nature or fundamental limits. They are challenges. They have costs to overcome them. Those costs change as we apply innovation and ingenuity to solve them in new creative ways and as technologies improve and they take time to solve because this is a big system and we're trying to rebuild it as we use it.
David Roberts
And some experimentation and failure along the way.
Jesse Jenkins
So I think we just have to keep in mind you can take these challenges very seriously, and we should, and the industry does. And you can see them as solvable, and we should because they are and not despair because we can overcome them. So I think you have to hold all those things in mind and that's not an unusual or unique thing. Like that's how we get through our lives. We encounter challenges, we find solutions, we implement them, we iterate, we try again. And we don't generally give up right away. At least you don't get very far if you do.
David Roberts
Or give up before we even really are trying, before we've even tried at all.
Jesse Jenkins
"Ah, can't possibly do it." And so that's where we are, right? We have a bunch of solutions. We've talked about them here. They are not all at scale, ready to use predominantly today. We cannot stop using natural gas power plants tomorrow. In fact, I would counsel we don't shut really any down over the next decade or longer because we probably need them as we rapidly replace coal.
David Roberts
You can idle them, not shut them down. Right? There's a distinction there.
Jesse Jenkins
What we care about is how much fuel they burn, not how much power capacity they have. And so we need to keep that front and center. So I think it's interesting is that over the last few years, I think a really clear roadmap has emerged for decarbonization of the power sector. And that roadmap looks like this: It says deploy wind and solar and batteries and demand flexibility as quickly as we can. Right? We know these things can work, they're effective. They need to scale up and play a bigger and bigger role in our energy system as fuel saving and balancing resources.
The second thing we have to do is use those resources to just shut down our coal-fired power plants as quickly as is practical. Yes, they're the highest source of air pollution and carbon emissions and the cheapest thing to replace in the grid. So best bang for the buck is shut those plants down as quickly as we can. In any net zero pathway we run, they're offline by 2030, basically, all the coal plants in the US. Third, while we do that, we have to keep our existing natural gas and nuclear power plants running because they provide firm generation today.
And we don't have enough of that multi-day diurnal firm generation ready at scale right now. And so you want to keep existing nuclear as a foundation to make more rapid progress on and you need to keep the gas power capacity even as we use less and less gas burned in the generators and in some places in the country where we're really rapidly retiring coal, we may even need to add more gas capacity. But we should do so recognizing the role that those gas plants are going to play in the longer term as this sort of backup kind of resource.
And then the final thing, of course, is we have to build a lot bigger grid, right? The fourth thing, we can't tap renewables. We can't meet growing demand for electricity from EVs and heat pumps and hydrogen production without a bigger grid. And so we have to do that at the same time. And all those things together, those four things we've seen in study after study can get us an 80% to 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector even as we expand electricity supply and keep costs pretty much comparable to what they are today.
Even lower after you account for subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act.
David Roberts
And of course, all this innovation going on in all these areas is going to produce all kinds of things we can't anticipate.
Jesse Jenkins
And that lets us go the rest of the way. So the next decade is doing those four things and cutting emissions 80% to 90% and then simultaneously because yes, we can walk and chew gum. We're smart big people with lots of big boys and girls with the ability to do two things at once. We are going to be deploying and innovating and scaling the rest of the toolkit that we need. The synthetic inertia, the firm low carbon generation, the multi-use fuels, the demand sync technologies, the long duration low-cost energy storage, all of that will be commercially ready — not every technology out there, but something in each of those categories will be commercially viable in the early 2030s.
And then we put the pedal to the metal, deploying those things to go the rest of the way to close the distance to 100% or 99% carbon-free grid. That's how we get the job done.
David Roberts
Beautiful. A substantial social and political challenge, just —
Jesse Jenkins
For sure.
David Roberts
to put it mildly. But technologically, the road ahead is more or less clear.
Jesse Jenkins
Yes, and it didn't say like, "we have all the technologies we need." I've been hearing that for 25 years. We have all the technologies we need to make rapid progress, and that should be all we need to start making rapid progress. And if we walk and chew gum at the same time, if we're clear-eyed about the challenges ahead of us, we don't see them as impenetrable barriers, but rather as innovation challenges to overcome. And we invest the resources and scale the technologies to do so proactively, which is what we are doing now as a private and public sector, then we're going to get there, we're going to solve these problems.
David Roberts
Beautiful, beautiful, Jesse. All right, variability: check done. Marking that off my list. Moving on to the next thing. I assume once this podcast circulates, I will no longer be running into people on the Internet who are informing me that the sun goes down at night.
Jesse Jenkins
I look forward to that day on Twitter.
David Roberts
All right, thanks so much, Jesse.
Jesse Jenkins
Thanks. Take care.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.
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