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The Catch-22 of Energy Storageby Barry Brook | http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/#more-6460 |
Pick
up a research paper on battery technology, fuel cells, energy storage
technologies or any of the advanced materials science used in these
fields, and you will likely find somewhere in the introductory
paragraphs a throwaway line about its application to the storage of
renewable energy. Energy storage makes sense for enabling a transition
away from fossil fuels to more intermittent sources like wind and solar,
and the storage problem presents a meaningful challenge for chemists
and materials scientists... Or does it?
Guest Post by John Morgan. John is
Chief Scientist at a Sydney startup developing smart grid and grid
scale energy storage technologies. He is Adjunct Professor in the
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT, holds a PhD in
Physical Chemistry, and is an experienced industrial R&D leader.
You can follow John on twitter at @JohnDPMorgan. First published in Chemistry in Australia.
Several
recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that,
against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of
intermittency of wind or solar power. Not for reasons of technical
performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more
intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after
construction of the generators and the storage system to power our
present civilization.
The problem is analysed in an important paper by Weißbach et al.1
in terms of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI – the ratio of
the energy produced over the life of a power plant to the energy that
was required to build it. It takes energy to make a power plant – to
manufacture its components, mine the fuel, and so on. The power plant
needs to make at least this much energy to break even. A break-even
powerplant has an EROEI of 1. But such a plant would pointless, as
there is no energy surplus to do the useful things we use energy for.
There
is a minimum EROEI, greater than 1, that is required for an energy
source to be able to run society. An energy system must produce a
surplus large enough to sustain things like food production, hospitals,
and universities to train the engineers to build the plant, transport,
construction, and all the elements of the civilization in which it is
embedded.
For countries like the US and Germany, Weißbach et al.
estimate this minimum viable EROEI to be about 7. An energy source
with lower EROEI cannot sustain a society at those levels of complexity,
structured along similar lines. If we are to transform our energy
system, in particular to one without climate impacts, we need to pay
close attention to the EROEI of the end result.
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