Solar and storage to spawn new energy ‘clouds’

A tidal wave of storage deployment will be very soon upon us. It is likely that the largest take-up of storage will be small scale or ‘incremental’ storage within the suburbs, mirroring solar uptake.

The concept of taking a suburb “off-grid” is not as far-fetched as it sounds, given that single households are already doing it. The possibility of making a collection of houses self-sufficient in electricity by creating energy “clouds” can now be achieved at or below the cost of standard poles and wires and, once the generation capacity is credited back, it becomes cheaper still.

For example, let’s build a subdivision with 3000 dwellings, 2000 single houses, 500 townhouses and 500 medium rise units. Based on distributor data, the maximum demand for these dwellings would total 9.5 megawatts, with a daily average consumption of 54 megawatt hours per day.

Through diversity many of these dwellings will share common peaks, however many will not require power at these times. Of the 3000 dwellings, 2500 are immediately available to fit solar PV, if each single dwelling were built to accommodate 6 kilowatts of solar and each townhouse 4 kilowatts, we can conceivably produce 54 megawatts of electricity per day.

In order to provide for 9.5 megawatts of peak demand, presumably at night, 20-30 megawatt hours of storage needs to be available. This storage need not be only deployed at the solar sites; if we install 10KWH in each of 3000 dwellings we have 30MWH of storage, enough to cover demands of all residents.

Now, based on a simple import export tariff structure, a capital expense of say $24 million and an average 20% R.O.I., the average cost per kilowatt of electricity needs to be 24 cents. The capital contribution by a broad-acre developer for distributor head-works can be as much as $6000 per dwelling, but creating an interconnecting web rather than a hub and spoke network can halve these costs, a possible $10 million saving over a project. This permits the installation of small distributed stand-by generators, say 10 @ 500KVA, allowing for 5MW of emergency top-up in the event of seasonal peaks of prolonged bad weather.

In the case of bad weather, especially in sub-tropical climates, the reduction in electricity demand and use is proportionate to the severity of bad weather. Effective load management through 5 minute TOU tariffs should tackle a situation of energy starvation in even cold climates. What must be considered before one dismisses this scenario is the levelling effect of the installed storage and how, even in the worst of solar days, energy is still being produced. If we add to our new suburb a shopping centre of say 1 hectare, with 10 megawatts of solar and say 5 megawatts of storage, we again have strengthened the reliability of our electricity cloud.

And we are not talking about significant capital expenses compared to the current model.

Are there any developers out there who want a go at this??

Comments

6 responses to “Solar and storage to spawn new energy ‘clouds’”

  1. dwj Avatar
    dwj

    This is complete drivel.
    If you have 54 MWh/d of demand and an average of 54 MWh/d of generation, then 30 MWh of storage is almost useless. Unless you intend to run your diesel generators every other day (and even then they would need to be at least twice the capacity you suggest) then you need at least a week of storage, say 350 MWh. Even with 350 MWh of storage the generation would need to be significantly oversized to allow for the “spill” of unusable generation.
    Please do some proper simulation of these scenarios using real world data before you go into “print”. You simply cannot analyse this sort of thing using averages. On the first cloudy day it all falls apart.
    The very idea of small groups of people going off-grid makes the task of changing to renewables based generation very much harder. The fact that you have a grid allows you to have very much less storage through geographic separation of generators and multiple types of generation.

    1. Rob Campbell Avatar
      Rob Campbell

      I am a glass half full person, you are obviously are a glass half empty type. Whilst your comments may have merit, it does not seem reasonable for you to cast out, as you do in many of your comments, writings that are offered up as conceptual, not fact. Once I finish with my actual data, (I am still waiting for diversity data from Energex), I will have genuine data sets and then I can start quoting facts. Until then you should avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, (Its etiquette you learn at uni).

      1. dwj Avatar
        dwj

        Rob,

        what I learnt at Uni was to make critical assessments of information. However, there are people reading this site who are not in a position to critically assess this type of information.

        If you had presented the scenario as a “wouldn’t it be great if one day …” then I would not have commented but since you have used hard numbers and developed a return on investment which are clearly wrong, I feel compelled to alert people to this.

  2. Stuart Bonnington Avatar
    Stuart Bonnington

    If a new town was to be built out in whoop whoop then I
    agree that it would make sense to go about it in the way you have described
    above. However, population growth and housing developments are by vast majority
    occurring in the major capital cities, therefore I do not agree with your above
    description. Here are my thoughts about your suggestion –

    You would have to employ several employees or have a
    contractor to manage your network – maintenance,
    finance, compliance, insurance, safety, environmental, people doing fuel runs
    for the 10 stand by generators because it’s
    been raining and cloudy for a couple days. You know who I believe the most
    experienced group of people to do all this – the utilities. And guess what,
    they’ll charge you to hell for the service.

    What happens when there’s a failure of equipment, or when
    everything needs replacing. Who pays for that ? Was it a result of poor manufacturing?
    Poor maintenance? Was it hit by lightning ? So you’ll also need an engineering
    team to determine failure reasons, strategies to avoid in the future and a
    legal team if it was a result of negligence ect.

    2 years down the track and we’ve built 100 of these new
    sites on the outskirts of Sydney’s west. We’ve got 100 maintenance crews, 100 insurance
    teams, 100 safety teams ect – one for each new development. WE’VE ALSO GOT 1000 STAND BY GENERATORS – 500 MW of stand by diesel
    generators !

    There’s a lot of people doing the same job at each site, and
    massive potential for cost savings. Why don’t we amalgamate each department
    from each site ( as they are all doing the same job but separately ) and save a
    lot of money.… That to me sounds like the electricity transmission and
    distribution owner to me.

    Rather than having 500 MW of diesel stand by, why don’t we
    connect these new developments to a network and we can cut that number
    substantially… That to me sounds like the electricity grid to me.

    If you try and cause stranded electricity assets – you’ll
    also make the 3+ GW of wind capacity installed go bust and redundant. Snowy
    hydro scheme…goodbye…. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

    1. Rob Campbell Avatar
      Rob Campbell

      One of the projects we are currently looking at is similar to the one I have put in my example. However in this case we are not talking generators, but grid connection, however all of the cabling within the estate would be “private” although the roads are gazetted. It would be a straight demand metered connection, the cost of which would be entirely dependant on the success of the “cloud” we have created. The great thing is that the whole lot can be adjusted to avoid any charges, which may include sticking a genset in later. Whilst there is an opportunity for the developer to be come the retailer in this case we are looking at a body corporate structure as well as they are also looking at private waste-water management. The biggest point I am trying to make in my article is that the trend away from ‘Big brother’ is gaining momentum because they have lost the purpose for which they were created. That is to provide the best possible service at the lowest possible price. With regards to the snowy and wind, don’t forget we have industry and high rises to feed as well!

  3. Harry00 Avatar
    Harry00

    3000* 10kwh storage at say $5000 each is 15 million. 2000 6kw solar systems at $8000 each would be $16 million, 500 times 4kw systems at $5000 each would be 2.5 million. Add in the costs of the generators and also the storage replacement costs every 10 years. Then the fuel costs for the generators.. Over 33.5 million.
    For the distributor at $6000 per dwelling that’s a total of 18 million with the equipment likely lasting half a century or more.
    The initial costs are higher and after 100 years what would end up costing more?

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