Big Picture of Energy Generation 2030

Electric Energy Generation till 2030

We can read every day about the change in the energy market. We hear about the year 2050, a time when most of our politicians are no longer with us. 

But is the Big Change to renewables so far away? 

There is only one way to understand the change, and that is, read the data we have. And I did this and present them here. The source is from BP energy statistics, you can download the data there.

Solar and Wind

I concentrate on two sources of energy solar power and wind power. Both are renewable and have the potential to power our civilization. I take the sum of both to get a more smooth picture because there is some change between wind and solar shares, that obscure the real change. The result in a logarithmic graph can show us the long-term trend:

Figure 1: (click to enlarge) red: global electric power consumption; blue: global installed solar and wind power; yellow: global mean power from solar and wind. Data source: BP

The mean global electric energy consumption is about 2000 GW, shown as the red dots, which align in the plot and show a constant growth of 3%.

All installations of wind and solar power are shown as blue dots and have an astonishing constant growth over the last 20 years in the range of 22% per year. 

The mean energy production of this fluctuating sources is much smaller as the installed capacity due to the fact, that the sun does not shine at night and the wind does not always blow. A good estimate based on data from BP shows a factor of five between the blue and yellow line. This means the wind and solar production is only 20% of the time as strong as on the nameplate. Of course, this is a statistical value and may differ between different installations.

The most interesting point is somewhere at 2030, the yellow line crosses the red line, in other words, the generated electric energy over one year from solar and wind power is larger than the electric demand in 2030!

Could this be true  

Today (end 2017), only 2% of the global electricity is from solar power, but remember only 1% was from solar power 3 years ago. In 2020 we will see 4%, 2023 we see 8%, 2026 there are 16% and 2029 32% and 2032 64%, this is the rule of exponential growth, as we all have seen in electronics. 

Figure 2: Solar energy share in different countries and the world. Source: IEA PVPS, shown in pv-magazin.

The remaining 36%, oh sorry I did not include wind power in this very short estimation!

But there is one thing, that may stop this trend. It is not the price of photovoltaics because photovoltaics is now below 3ct/kWh and thereby cheaper than any other energy source. There is a so-called learning curve that gives in the future even lower prices due to high production volumes.

The roadblock could be energy storage!

If we find no way to store the energy cheap and on the huge scale, we cannot go far beyond 50% of fluctuating renewable energy in the electric grid. And the storage demand is in the range of 24 h global electricity production, 60,000 GWh!

To imagine this number using batteries, think about the Gigafactory built by Elon Musk. If it reaches full capacity it may supply 100 GWh of batteries a year. If we install all the batteries in the grid, we need 600 years until we have enough storage. This works only out when the batteries have a lifetime of at least 600 years. 

Figure 3: Gravity Storage, a large-scale electricity storage system.

We need new ideas, my concept of a Gravity Storage may show a way out of this problem. One Gravity Storage site can store up to 8 GWh of energy, and we don't need expensive raw materials only rock and water.

But this is another story. 

Global Demand for Energy Storage

Energy Storage Demand in a Sustainable World

The global transition to renewable energy production is in progress. Last year, 2015, more renewable power capacity, like solar and wind power, was installed as conventional capacity like coal and nuclear. Besides this nice development, there is a weak spot, the installed solar and wind capacity produce only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. For a full change to an emission-free world, we need energy storage.

How big is the storage demand on a global scale, this is hard to guess, because it depends on a lot of assumptions. I will try to make a good guess within this post.

The Global "Energiewende" 

I will not describe the "Energiewende" (change of the energy system) in Germany, I will focus on the global change. This makes sense because we have to change the energy system on the global scale to stop the carbon problem and limit the exhaustion of the scare fossil fuels. 

The strong growth of PV installations, about 70 GW are expected for 2016, continues the long-term trend of constant fast growing installations over the last decades. 

This trend will change the energy system as we know it today within two decades, to understand these let's look into the near history.

The growth of the energy consumption and the installed renewable energy production.
Consider the logarithmic axis of the installed power. Data source BP 

The first thing is, the electric power demand has a constant annual global growth of 3%. The installation of wind and solar power combined grows every year with 22%. The result will be, that somewhere around 2025, more fluctuating renewable energy is installed as conventional power plants. 

But be careful, the produced energy of wind and sun will still not match the demand, because they only produce energy when sunlight or wind is available. Resulting in the green line, which represents the mean renewable power generation. This line hits around 2030 the demand.

The result is, the next century will be dominated by the installation of storage to match the fluctuating production at any time with the global demand.

Influence to the Storage Demand

The main impact for the storage demand has the electric grid infrastructure. The reason is, that the grid is the most efficient way to transport the electric power from the source to the customer. Is the sun shining in the southern part of a country, it is efficient to bring the energy to the cloudy northern part. And similar, if the northern part has a lot of wind during the night it makes sense to bring the energy with the same grid to the customers in the southern part.

This results in a competition between grid and storage.

To find the economic optimum between power grid size and storage is complex

Theoretical, it would be possible, to span a global grid around the globe and connect this grid with all solar power plants. This would result in a perfect 24-hour solar power supply without any energy storage at all because the sun shines always at some places on our earth.

The main problem seems the high price of such a grid and the energy loss in the power line. The other extreme case is a power storage at home with a seasonal capacity (only necessary in the northern region) of 1000 kWh for every person in the house. Then we can go off grid, sufficient PV on the rooftop assumed. The price for the batteries may reach a million dollars, not affordable.

If we dive into detailed computer simulations as done by J. Tambke und L. Bremen [1] we learn, that a country like Germany needs a storage capacity of seven days after a complete conversion to wind and solar has happened and there is a perfect power grid, often called a copper plate. 

Expanding the area of the perfect grid connection to an area like Europe only two days of storage is necessary. If we are optimistic and assume a perfect grid of this semi continental scale we need only a storage capacity of two days.

Further Chances to Optimize

Besides the grid, another chance to minimize the storage demand is the so-called smart grid. Whenever possible, an energy consuming element in the grid goes offline if the power price is high or goes online if the price is low.

We don't know the exact possible amount of energy demand that can be shifted to other times but an optimistic guess might be, that 50% of the demand can be shifted in a way that the storage demand is halved.

Assuming this, we need only one day of storage if a smart grid and a continent-size grid is available.

Adding up the Numbers

The energy consumption in the world in the year 2030 will be around 4,000 GW. To store this energy over one day, we need a 24h storage system with a capacity of 96,000 GWh. Keep in mind, the Gigafactory of Elon Musk may produce 100 GWh per year. If all the storage is used for the global Energiewende, the production for this demand needs about 1000 years.

But be careful, other solutions may be available.  The energy stored in the lakes of Norway contains an astonishing amount of 80,000 GWh, although there is no pump, the stored volume can only be used once in a year and has to be refilled by natural perception.

Pumped hydro technology may be a good solution, especially the Gravity Storage system, a typical site can store about 8 GWh. We still need 10,000 Sites, but this seems to be more within practical reach, than a bure battery solution.  

References

 [1] Jens Tambke, Lueder von Bremen, Länderübergreifender Ausgleich für die Integration Erneuerbarer Energien. 

World Energy Council Meeting 2016

World Energy Congress 2016 in Istanbul

From 9th-13th October 2016, the World Congress on Energy was held in Istanbul. It was the 23rd Congress since 1923.

The topics of the congress were distributed over the entire energy area, including the oil and gas production and renewable energies. There were many important statesmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Turkish President Recep Erdogan, including many other government members from different countries, including the visit of Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, the first official meeting after six years frozen relations between Turkey and Israel.

Side by side, Putin and Erdogan at the conference in Istanbul

Vladimir Putin talk was about the importance of energy and the price of oil, a remark about a co-operation with OPEC during the speech has moved the oil price to rise by 2 $! He was the only statesmen, who included the words "exponential growth of solar energy".

The issue of energy just brings together not only scientists and engineers but also politicians and diplomats. The global linking of energy distribution, especially natural gas, plays an important role and Turkey was presented as a hub between Asia, Middle East and Europe and the Mediterranean.

The world's energy

All participants have concluded, that the energy transition towards renewable energy, particularly solar and wind, is on the way. However, the completeness and how fast that arrives is controversial. While I am convinced that before the end of the next decade the significant change of the energy system has been completed, Marie-José Nadeau, Chair, World Energy Council believes that in 2060 the share of renewable might reach only 50% of total energy production [1],

Marie-José Nadeau, Chair, World Energy Council

This is understandable from the perspective of the energy industry. They trade with oil, coal and natural gas. Should the change take place quickly, the oil and the coal is not any longer requested by the market. The industry worries about stranded resources. This means the oil in the ground, on which the wealth of large companies and nations is based, may become worthless.

Key issues in the energy transition in the coming decades

The importance of the Paris Convention for the CO2 reduction was repeatedly stressed. Generally, however, many see only a shift from coal to natural gas, as is well known, natural gas produces half as much CO2 when it is converted into electricity than coal! This is due to a fact that a methane molecule consists of one carbon and four hydrogen atoms, but also to the better efficiency of gas power plants.

Key finding: the phenomenal rise of solar and wind energy will continue!

Power Turntable Turkey

At the conference in Turkey, the geo- (energy-) strategic role of  Turkey was stressed by Erdogan.

Important oil and gas pipelines connect large resources of Asia with European customers, more gas and oil pipelines are planned.

The strategic position of Turkey

Finally, the construction of a new gas pipeline connecting Russian and other Asian gas fields to Europe by crossing Turkey was one reason why Putin, but also the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, showed up in Istanbul.

The Importance of Hydro-Power

It's a certain irony, the most important renewable energy in the global mix, providing at least 71% of all renewable energy is hydropower or 6.8% of global electric energy production, is an often forgotten big player.

The importance of hydropower may lie in a combination of solar, wind and hydro-power. At the conference solar power, as named a water saver, in the form that during the day the turbines are shut down at the dam resulting in increasing water level, during the night, with redoubled turbines, water can be used for power generation. Thus normal dams are important energy storage elements for the energy transition. ot to forget pumped hydro storage or even the new technique of Gravity Storage .

A nice photoshop picture used as advertising billboard in Istanbul

There are, at least in Africa and in South America, still many untapped hydropower "reserves". However, anyone was well aware that each dam has also an enormous impact on nature and very often engages in the habitats of people! Especially in India, the water of the rivers is sacred and thus hardly the construction of dams possible as mentioned by Richard M. Taylorlearned Chief Executive, International Hydropower Association.

Africa to get electricity

While the inhabitants of the Americas and Asia are almost completely supplied with power, in Africa there are still 600 million people without electricity. This means no light, no easy way to charge a mobile phone, no fridge and no welder.

The last day of the conference was therefore devoted to Africa. In Africa, here essentially black sub-Saharan Africa was meant, you have to think about the huge areas and the still sparsely populated countries. This makes the construction of a conventional electric grid network uneconomical and therefore solar energy stand-alone systems and microgrids are very important.

The forum "Talent and Capacity Building" moderated by Samir Ibrahim from Kenya, right Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy from India, next to Andreas Spiess, Solar Kiosk , from Germany.

The practical implementation requires some knowledge of electricity and solar energy. Bunker Roy helps the people with his Barefoot College to teach this to everyone. While he teaches women worldwide (Grandmothers) to practical issues of the use of solar energy, an impressive project!

Andreas Spiess tries with his, as he stressed, a commercial solution of the solarkiosk promoting the dissemination of locally adapted use of solar energy in Africa.

The Exibition

There was a international exhibition were companies and countries presented interesting ideas and investment opportunities.

Booth of Heindl Energy GmbH

The Heindl Energy GmbH has presented the "Gravity Storage" technology on its exhibition stand. Unfortunately, very few companies from Europe were represented at the fair. The booth was right next Aramco, the largest oil company in the world from Saudi Arabia. As far as I have observed, our stand had awakened almost more interest.

A 600 MW power plant on the water for emergency cases

There were of course many other interesting exhibition stands, I found the idea of "power ship" interesting, which is a ship with a complete power plant (up to 600MW), inclusive substation, which anchors in a port and supports the local power generation, after a natural disaster or for other reasons.

Reference:

[1] WEC press release 2016

The End of Fire

The End of the Fire Era

About half a million years ago, mankind started to manage the energy of fire. The first use of open fire was for heat production and cooking. Since three thousand years fire could be kept in a stove to use the energy more efficiently. During the 17 Century, the incredible story of mechanical energy production by the use of fire within steam engines and internal combustion machines began.

This glorious historical period will come to an end, very soon!

What is wrong with fire

There are at least three big problems when we use fire to generate useful energy.

1. The fuel is expensive and not sustainable
2. The conversion into useful energy is dirty and has high losses
3. The atmosphere can't absorb infinite amounts of carbon

All these disadvantages are a good reason to extinguish the fire forever. But is this possible and is this part of a long-term trend?

Have a look at the flames. 

To ignite a fire without tools is one of the most demanding tasks man can solve and only very few of us did this ever complete. On the other side, it is the process that happens more often than any medium scale process we can think about. After some calculation* we find:

With other words, for every person on the planet earth, we ignite every second a fire and extinguish it within a fraction of a second again. And none of this fires is seen because it happens within the engines of our cars.
Other fires burn in large power plants and in the heating system of our home, we don't see them even. The fire has lost its visibility. And this might be the first signal, that fire is disappearing.
Another place where flames appeared was the ignition of cigarettes, even this type of fire seems to disappear, no smoking in restaurants, in an office building, in airplanes and only some lost desperadoes at the entrance of some buildings remind us of the old days.

Why fire

All the little and large fires in our engines have only one reason, they should generate mechanical energy and this energy is sometimes converted to electrical energy. This is possible due to the thermodynamic law of physics. But this law tells us, that the efficiency is always low and needs always a cold reservoir like a river or fresh air. This is the reason, that most of the energy is lost in heat, leaving the car through the exhaust pipe or the radiator. The situation in large conventional power plants is similar.

The famous Durango Silverton narrow gauge steam train.

Since Benjamin Franklins work in the 19. Century, we are aware, that electricity is the ultimate useful medium for energy. We can convert electricity in just any service we can imagine. About 60% of the electrical energy ends up in an electric motor to move people, cool air, transport stuff and cut wood.

Not one of this tasks requests a fire, but we had no other solution till now, so we used a fire to solve the problem.

Fire is Unhealthy

There is just no single technology that produces many unhealthy substances as fire. There exist people who inhale the smoke intentional, but most of us try hard to avoid the smoke. We have these smoke detectors on the ceiling and we have different filters in our cars and in coal power plants.

Smoke detector, we try to avoid smoke

When we look to China, a day in Peking is like smoking a packet of cigarettes. But even if we live in modern industrialized countries we have to inhale nanoparticles of all kind due to the burning of gas, oil, and coal. To give an exact value of lost lives due to fire is very difficult, but it surpasses nuclear power by many orders of magnitude.

No fire no harm

If we extinguish all the fires and even the nuclear type of fire that feeds less than three percent of our global energy demand, we can save the planet and the people.

World energy consumption, only hydro and renewables
don't burn and generate smoke of different kinds. Source Wikimedia

Although it seems impossible to expand the small renewable branch in the picture above, it could get real, because this branch is growing exponential:

The blue dots show the installed PV in the world, the dotted line is a 25% growth

Exponential means, the growth rate is constant and the growth rate of PV is about 25% per year. If this continues for another 15 years, the whole earth can be powered by solar energy. Today we have installed 5000 GW of fire powered power stations, within 20 years we have more than 10000 GW of PV on earth. Read this: Is 100% PV possible?

A second trend is, that electricity is stored in batteries. We are used to mobile phones which need every night a charging. Many of our appliances like screwdriver and toothbrush use batteries.
The next big step is the electric car, the definite way to extinguish the fire. The visionary Elon Musk built a car with batteries from the laptop. Today Tesla sells the Model S at an ever-growing rate.
More batteries will come. As far as I know, no other factory-type expands faster than the battery production plants with the Giga Factory on top. Read also: Storage Maters.

Largest production site ever for a small product! Source TESLA

More than 50 GWh of batteries should leave the Giga Factory every year. But this is not sufficient to meet the demand of 90 000 GWh of storage for a clean future. Complete new technologies like the Hydraulic Rock Storage are invented, which can store many GWh in one site with very low environmental impact.

Will fire stay  

We will never extinguish the fire forever because people like fire.

We love fire

But hidden fire for old machinery invented in the 19. Century will go forever, even hydrogen. It was a fun time of smoking stem engines and high factory chimneys. A world of dark snow in the winter and dirty ash.

Have a clean time.

Is 100% Photovoltaic possible?

The World powered by the Sun

Today, photovoltaic electricity is only a small fraction of the global electricity production. The volume seems to be one percent in the year 2015. If we do a very simple extrapolation and imagine, that all these PV modules were installed in 2014 and we continue this installation speed, then we need another 99 years, to have a 100% emission free PV world. But this is simply not the way the world goes round.

I will try to extrapolate the situation, based on data from the MIT report "The Future of Solar Energy" [1]

Analyse the past of Photovoltaic

If we wont to understand the future, it is very useful, to look into the past, not only to understand the development but also to understand the error which occurred by predicting the future. 

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) predict since 10 years the global PV installations in a published outlook. The first outlook from 2006 predicted for the year 2030 a global installation of 100 GW. This volume was already matched in the year 2011, only five years after the report was published! Ok, one wrong shot can be excused.

In the year 2011, the EIA predicted 150 GW until 2020. Again a failure, already in 2014 we have reached 180 GW of solar. 

The MIT analyzed all predictions and compiled them to a very nice picture:

Figure 1: Different predictions and the reality, source MIT [1] page 137

In the early time, the predictions of the IEA had an exponential growth, that is a good guess, because most of the time, new products grow in that type. The only problem was at that time, the growth factor was too small, for example, see IEA 2008 prediction in figure 1. Today things have gone worse with the prediction from the IEA. Not only is the factor to small, the prediction includes a reduction of the production of PV itself. This seems hard to understand. (An in-depth analysis was done by Christian Breyer, paper PDF)

Things got even more strange when we look at the price predictions of PV. The EIA predicted the development of the PV price till the year 2030. It should be mentioned, that it is a very difficult task to predict a price of any product for more than 20 years. But this failure is very illuminating.

Figure 2: Price prediction by EIA IEO 2009 of PV and observed results. [1] page 137

The EIA IEO 2009 outlook predicted, that the capital cost of PV in the year 2030 will drop to 4$/W.

Actually, the price even for residential systems dropped to this value already in the year 2014. It should be noted, that the price for residential PV systems in Germany was at the same time at 2$/W.

The price for utility PV systems reached only two years after the report was published the predicted value for 2030, 4$/W. 

All this information should be available to the EIA today. It irritates me, why the EIA does not change the prediction about the deployment of PV although they can observe the rapid price drop obviously. (I am thankful for any helpful hint)

Is there enough material for a large rollout of PV 

One possible reason, to be pessimistic about the global rollout of PV might be the scare elements used in PV systems. Today almost all PV systems use Silicon to convert sunlight into electricity. The MIT analyzed the production of different raw materials, essential for the production of SI-PV-modules. 

To set up a PV system we need concrete and steel to mount the panel in the direction of the sun. Glass, aluminum and plastic are necessary to protect the silicon cell, copper and more plastic are necessary to transport the power away.

Figure 3: Commodity materials required for PV. [1] page 131

Today, all these commodities are produced in a volume, that no real bottleneck will occur. In figure 3, we can see, that the steel production of 9 days is sufficient, to mount all PV panels for 5% of the global electricity production, within half a year, the steel production is sufficient for a 100% conversion to PV.

The least available material in this consideration is glass. For a 100% PV world, we need the glass production of 20 years. But glass production is in no way a limiting factor. The necessary raw material is sand, an endless resource.

The solar cell itself consists of a silicon wafer and some silver, are they rare?

Figure 4: The annual production and requirement for a solar future. [1] page 135

In figure 4 we see, that silver might get a little problem because we need an amount of silver that is produced within 30 years. It should be mentioned that new technologies of production can reduce the necessary mass of silver very strong. Other elements, like Ga, are only necessary if we would use GsAs cells in our PV systems what is not widely the case. 

We conclude the raw material is no show stopper for a PV future.

My prediction of PV growth

Compiling all this information, I come to a quite different prediction than the IEA. My simple, but till today best guess is, that the exponential growth will continue, but at a lower rate. 

Figure 5: Long-term trend of PV installation.

In figure 5 we see the global installation of PV shown as a black curve in this logarithmic plot. In the year 1992, we had only 100 MW of PV installed, ten years later, in 2002 it was 1000 MW, Today it is about 200 000 MW!

Update to Figure 5 including the growing power demand, wind, and the latest figures available 2016.

If the growth rate continues at 25%, as seen within the last three years, we will reach 100% PV not long after the year 2030. Remember, today we have a global power plant pool of 5300 000 MW, sufficient to power half the world. Even if we expect, that the future is fair to all people, we need "only" 10 000 000 MW to bring electricity in every home on this planet, long before 2050.  

One problem remains: Storage

Without an affordable storage system, PV can only bring electricity during sunny daytime. For a complete conversion, we need about 90 000 GWh of storage [2].

One solution for residential systems may be the power wall from Tesla, but I am not convinced, that this makes sense on a large scale. For large scale, I recommend the Gravity Storage!

References:

[1] The Future of Solar Energy, 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ISBN (978-0-928008-9-8)
[2] Elon Musk predicts (minute 18) during the presentation of the power wall 90 000 GWh of required storage. https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k