International renewable electricity and EVs

On 21 May, the UK International Research Centre had a one day meeting in London on "International Renewable Electricity: An Essential System?" It was backed by University College London, Calverton Energy Research Group and Electrical Review. There was a considerable relevance to EVs.

 

More advanced electricity distribution will involve such things as localised storage, possibly based on large versions of traction batteries and even used traction batteries. When there are enough electric vehicles on the road, they may help load balancing on a super grid. Local energy generation into a super grid, using much of the same photovoltaics as used on cars, is a probability, notably from North Africa to Europe.

Mark Barrett of UCL Energy Institute gave a thoughtful view of the big picture. European countries first shared electricity in 1914 and now 34 European countries share a European grid.

 

A global supergrid is possible but the needs and the optimisation of large grid systems cannot yet be calculated, particularly as the nature of these grids is becoming fractal with all sorts of changeable, local electricity generation, storage and collaboration even between a few houses.

 

 

His calculations show dc distribution, carbon capture and a hydrogen economy are unattractive on the grand scale. However, 8% of power is lost in distribution, mainly voltage conversion. Security, load management and restraining the cost of electricity are important and increasing the share of renewable actually helps with these if optimally delivered.

Dr Mark Delucchi of the Institute of transportation Studies, University of California gave a superb disposition on "Renewable Energy's Contribution to Transport and Scope for Assisting Renewables Integrations".

 

Some takeaways here were that, for electricity generation, biofuels are very bad on all counts - water pollution and use, land use, carbon dioxide and quality. He did not limit that to where they involve the nonsense of burning food or destroying rain forests. Tidal and wave power are unattractive and nuclear power fuels the terrorism threat.

Battery electric vehicles are potentially very attractive in reducing carbon dioxide without malign side effects and even balancing electricity loads. Fuel cell vehicles can have similar credentials when viable. Ofcourse, both employ large state-of-the-art batteries. EV battery economics become complex but not unattractive: for example he seemed sure that lithium batteries will outlive the cars they power before very long and reuse in grid storage is a real prospect.

The Europeans used to note that the lucky UK is a lump of coal lying on a bubble of gas and a large drop of oil. They did not mention the wind.

Tim Helweg Larsen of the Public Interest Research Group assessed that offshore wind energy, particularly from floating wind turbines could provide six times the total power needs of the UK and we could be net exporters of electricity by 2032 and net exporters of power as a whole by 2043 with £55 billion NPV but in answer to a question, he admitted that this would involve a £1 trillion investment. We believe that the new British Government is not quite thinking on those lines at present.

Panel discussions exposed disagreement on whether North Africa can provide secure or even economical electricity in Europe. Andrew Smith of London Analytics looked at supergrid variability and cost issues. Gus Schellekens promoted a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report giving a power roadmap for Europe which inter alia recommended that politicians must think longer term if European power is to be optimised and that North Africa can provide secure power.

 

 

The audience warned that terrorism and planning permission are huge problems and he accepted their existence but still felt that things could be changed e.g. by mutuality of interest with North Africa and bringing in 60 day planning decisions. He said that business models must embrace the change from cheap to build, costly to run power stations to the opposite. The audience noted that this is not new, given hydro, nuclear etc.

Mark Delucchi then returned to the podium to examine more problems with nuclear power including long term waste and fusion power being many decades away. He looked closer at how the available power from wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric is poor compared with wind, PV solar or concentrated solar power CSP.

 

Global power demand will reduce 30% thanks to more efficient electric end use technologies. On site storage from batteries and compressed air and smart grid are coming in, with solar complementary to wind in availability. Aggregating inputs over wide areas rapidly removes energy availability challenges. Work must now be done on performance/ reliability criteria for wind water solar WWS systems, future demands and other aspects.

He addressed the platinum for fuel cells, lithium for batteries and neodymium for electric motors, noting that they run out, for practical purposes, in decades to two centuries or so if not recycled. Neodymium may have two centuries left and there are alternative traction motor designs that do not employ it. Lithium runs out in less than one hundred years and price may rocket before that. Platinum is not too restricted. His bottom line was therefore that recycling of all these metals is important but none are show stoppers.

 

 

He then projected power costs, showing geothermal and CSP as higher than WWS in 2020. He warned that transmission costs will be up to double due to longer distances between sources. The air pollution costs and climate change costs of coal and natural gas emerge as huge compared to those for the WWS renewable.

 

He then turned to the social lifetime of hydrogen fuel cell EVs seeing consumer lifetime cost giving breakeven against prior subsidies in 2022, about 200 years after they were invented. Patience needed! His equivalent study for BEVs assumed that their batteries have 10% longer life than those in hybrids and that they will be used optimally i.e. for city driving. He concluded that the cost to society of BEVs and FCEVs will be similar to those for fossil fuels.

 

However, IDTechEx questions whether fuel cell technology is ready for prime time in cars, given the problems of safety, start up time, managing very variable loads efficiently, weight, size and so on with so many of them. Is it really only a matter of economics? Either way, Mark counselled that the WWS electricity that should be used to power them has no rival in terms of avoidance of greenhouse gas, pollution, limited resource or terrorism threat.

 

The third segment of the day had two speakers covering aspects with little relevance to electric vehicles. Overall this was a good day, marred only by a few questioners that wanted to listen to themselves. We learned to beware of the term smart grid. To quote Lewis Carroll, "A word means what I want it to mean. Nothing more and nothing less."

 

 

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