“Heat waves in the U.K. and California have created serious issues with electricity, primarily because of the lack of renewable power. Heat usually results in calm conditions, so little wind power. In the U.K., National Grid had to restart a coal-fired plant and California experienced blackouts. We examine the renewables problem. ”

Hot weather has highlighted challenges for renewable energy. Unseasonably hot weather in the United Kingdom resulted in the need for its primary energy grid operator to fire up a coal-burning power plant to ensure it could meet electricity demand. That was the first time in 55 days that a coal plant had operated, ending 3,300 hours of coal-free power. Across the world, California’s hot weather and drought conditions led to an outbreak of wildfires and the loss of some power plants, which necessitated electricity companies in the state to order rolling blackouts. What’s the problem? Hot weather usually means weather conditions become still, meaning the wind isn’t blowing. That means wind turbines aren’t turning. Therefore, there is less wind-generated electricity available compared to the amount counted on by the power companies, forcing them to default to back-up electricity supplies.

The U.K. is known for having unusual weather patterns. Some of them come as a result of the country being an island and subject to weather patterns that travel from North America across the Atlantic Ocean. Other times, the unusual weather, primarily polar blasts, migrates down from the Arctic, bringing very cold temperatures and snow to the northern regions of the country. The western U.K. benefits from the warming of the Gulf Stream and tropical maritime air masses, while the eastern region traditionally gets hit by the cold sea current from the Atlantic Ocean, which passes into the North Sea and often creates heavy mist.

Earlier this month, the U.K. was in the grip of an unusual heat wave. As often is the case, The Guardian newspaper worked to sensationalize the high temperatures. Its headline read: “UK temperatures pass 34C for six days in a row for first time since records start.” For those not familiar with Celsius temperatures, 34C translates into 93.2 Fahrenheit. As we expected, Paul Homewood factchecked the story and found a slightly different story.

The Guardian relied on a tweet from the Met Office, which compiles and reports UK weather data, and is also known to occasionally adjust and distort the data. As the tweet reported, the Met Office found three times when high temperatures existed for three consecutive days. Note that two of the ‘heat waves’ were actually within an eight-day span, from June 26 to July 3, 1976.

Exhibit 18. Met Office Is Only Partially Right About Heat SOURCE: Paul Homewood

The following were the six daily high temperatures and where they were recorded. As Mr. Homewood pointed out, given the large number of temperature measurement locations across the U.K., the six with the highest temperatures were either in London or the southeast region of the country. He also pointed out that the correct way to report record temperatures is to have them all from the same location, rather than assembling a record from multiple locations. Lastly, three of the six high temperature readings were from the country’s major airport, Heathrow. Airports are known as hot spots.

Exhibit 19. Met Office Temperatures SOURCE: Paul Homewood

To check the validity of the Met Office temperature claim, Mr. Homewood went to the government’s Central England Temperature (CET) database for the particular dates. Those temperatures show significantly less heat, which doesn’t negate the fact that for people living in and around London and the Southeast region of England, they were hot. Only two of the six days of the CET temperature records exceeded 30C (86F).

Exhibit. 20 More Realistic Temps? SOURCE: Paul Homewood

A bigger story from the reported August heat wave was that National Grid, the primary U.K. utility company, had to restart a coal-fired power plant to provide backup electricity due to the collapse of output from renewable energy. During the first quarter of 2020, renewables, in particular wind, dominated the U.K. power market. Wind provided 30.9% of the total electricity supplied, with offshore wind accounting for 15.0% of the total. Offshore wind represented nearly half of all the wind power supplied, which is not surprising given the explosion in recent years in offshore wind farm construction. Higher wind speeds, along with greater capacity, explain why renewable energy’s contribution increased. For reference, coal accounted for 3.5%, while natural gas provided 30.3% of electricity supplied in the quarter. This data is from the quarterly “Energy Trends” report from the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Wind, solar and other renewables, excluding nuclear power, provided 45.9% of the UK’s electricity during the quarter, a new record, surpassing the 38.9% supplied in the third quarter of 2019.

National Grid provides a daily report on wind and solar power supplied to the grid, based on actual data for the prior day, what is happening in the current day, and the forecasted supply for the next day, which is used in planning and scheduling purposes. The report in Exhibit 21 (next page) is from August 18. One can see how low wind output was the day before, but was anticipated to increase during the current and next day. Solar output shown in the lower portion of the chart was greater than actual solar power supplied on the August 17, and was projected to be much greater than the solar power anticipated to be available on August 19. We suspect August 19 was anticipated to be rainy or extremely cloudy.

Exhibit 21. Performance Of Renewables During Heat Wave SOURCE: National Grid

For the U.K., wind is the preferred renewable power, largely because the country has an extensive coastline, so it can build many offshore wind farms. As we reported in our last Musings, the data is showing that offshore wind farms are not becoming cheaper to construct, although wind power auction prices for the output from newly planned wind farms have been trending lower. The conclusion of the detailed study was that the decline in auction prices is likely due to speculation by offshore wind farm developers hoping market prices will increase, in which case they will pay a minor penalty to abandon their auction agreements, then enter into market-price deals One wonders whether these wind farms will be built if market prices fail to rise, as penalties are small.

Exhibit 22. Monthly Average Daily Sun Hours SOURCE: Met Office

If solar power was a more significant portion of U.K. renewables, it would have been producing much greater output during recent months. A chart of the average daily hours of sunshine per month showed how much more sun than normal was experienced during March, April and May this year. On the other hand, both June and July showed below normal daily sunshine hours. Therein lies a weakness of renewable power.

The reason National Grid had to restart its coal-fired power plant, one targeted to be permanently retired in 2025, was due to wind power’s contribution to total electricity supply dropping precipitously. From contributing 31% of supply in the first quarter of 2020, in early August, wind was only producing 4% of the power. Extreme heat is associated with mild winds, but it also contributes to natural gas generators underperforming, further pressuring power supplies.

In California, a recent heat wave and wildfires have put pressure on its electric power grid. Major electricity providers mandated rolling blackouts in order to reduce the risk of the power grid failing. Because of the fires, some power plants could not operate, while others were undergoing maintenance, usually done during the summer, reducing the generating capacity safety margin needed to deal with emergency plant outages. The power companies were pressured by some politicians to use a portion of the safety margin to avoid blackouts, but they pushed back, arguing that if any generating plant failed, the entire state could be blacked out.

A week-ago last Friday, the state suffered a surprise blackout. The first in 19 years. Another one occurred on Saturday, but blackouts anticipated for the following Monday and Tuesday were avoided as temperatures moderated. The weekend outage happened after 1,000 megawatts of wind power and a 470-megawatt gas plant briefly went offline. Supposedly, it was the gas-powered plant’s failure that caused the blackout. That detail led one renewables supporter to declare that natural gas is “the unreliable component in the system.”

“Hot weather and a cloudy day should not be able to shut down the fifth-largest economy in the world," Lance Hastings, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, said in a statement. "While we support California’s renewable energy goals, we absolutely need system redundancy that allows us to continue to operate and manufacture products for our residents and the world." People might also add that they would like to have less costly electricity.

Travis Kavulla is a former member of CAISO's western energy market governing body, the regulator of the state’s power system, and now a vice president of regulatory affairs for NRG, an owner of gas plants and other energy resources in states across the country, including 4,000 megawatts of gas and solar in California. He made the point that natural gas is consistently able to provide power around the clock, which "proves the point that, at least for now, it's an essential resource." That is not a popular position to take in California, unless one is talking with the people who are experiencing blackouts.

As expected, The New York Times wrote that everyone knew the heat wave was coming, yet the dashboard maintained by the California ISO (CAISO) showed scores of power plants were down or producing below peak strength, “a stunning failure of planning, poor record keeping and sheer bad luck.” After excoriating the CAISO management, the article’s author acknowledged that “even if all the missing capacity had been available, California would probably still have struggled to deliver enough electricity to homes where families were cranking up air-conditioners.” This shortfall was supposedly due to mismanagement by CAISO and state regulators. The article said Steve Berberich, president and chief executive office of CAISO, defended his organization’s decision to order rolling blackouts rather than dip into the reserve power supplies set aside for emergencies. The article wrote that “Mr. Berberich said that the reliance on renewables was not a factor because the state was facing such a huge shortfall in generating capacity. ‘It’s simply a matter of raw capacity.’” The problem with that statement, as we show later, is that there is plenty of generating capacity – it just isn’t the right capacity, which can be supplied when needed!

A chart showing renewable output by hour of the day in California on Friday, August 14, highlights the challenge the market experienced, especially when the sun began setting. In August, solar output begins declining around 4 pm and ends somewhere between 7 pm and 7:30 pm. When the sun goes down, wind output is supposed to climb, but this night it rose to about 1,000-1,500 megawatts (MW), 1.2% to 3.4% of total power demand at the time. The chart shows how the wind power at that point was even below the amount produced earlier that morning. The challenge for wind is that it traditionally is low during heat waves, therefore it will never be a huge source of power during those events. At wind power’s contribution level, approximately 25% of installed wind generating power in California, it about equaled the output from one large fossil fuel plant. So, if one knew a heat wave was coming and that wind would likely disappoint, why weren’t more fossil fuel plants ramped up? The problem is there isn’t as much capacity available given California’s mandate to shut them down and replace them with more renewable power.

Solar’s performance was even worse than wind’s when one considers that at its peak it generated 11 gigawatts (GW) of electricity out of a capacity of 27 GW, or roughly 40%. So, to get that volume of solar power, the system built nearly 2.5 times the amount of power actually generated at peak. How cost efficient is that?

Exhibit 23. Renewables Power contribution Daily In California SOURCE: CASIO

A solution being proposed to overcome the intermittency of solar and wind is to build more battery storage capacity. The California Public Utilities Commission has directed utilities to triple their battery storage for electricity by 2026, or adding the equivalent of 3,300 MW of generation capacity. The problem is that this increase may be offset by the projected retirements of gas-fired and nuclear plants slated for closure. Moreover, this strategy is expensive. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the capital cost for a solar plant with an attached battery storage system runs between 50% and 150% higher than for a new natural-gas plant. Furthermore, battery lives are about 10 years, adding to the environmental costs of producing and recycling them, as well as the cost of maintaining the storage backup.

A recent “Boiling Point” newsletter published weekly by Los Angeles Times suggested eight steps that could be taken in California to create a viable clean energy system. The steps included:

Build lots of batteries
Build lots of solar and wind too
Go big on rooftop solar (and batteries)
People power
Expand the power grid
Keep Diablo Canyon
Geothermal and offshore wind
Long-duration storage

In elaborating on some of these points, the newsletter pointed out that there isn’t much attention being directed to demand management, which can be just as important as supply management. Whether people can be encouraged to alter their habits with respect to use of electricity is uncertain, even with time-of-day pricing. Having mechanisms to restrict the power people use at times of peak demand can be done with customer consent and incentives. In fact, in the 1980s, Houston Light & Power offered a program where they installed a control device on air conditioner condensers that they could then remotely trigger to shut them off during peak power demand periods and restart them when the temperature dropped. In return for granting HL&P the right to control air conditioners, they paid consumers. (We don’t remember what we were paid to allow that device to be installed.)

The author of the “Boiling Point” highlighted a 2019 analysis from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that concluded California could get 90% of its electricity from climate-friendly resources by 2030 while reducing energy prices, even if the costs of solar power, wind power and batteries don’t decline as quickly as they have in recent years. To achieve that target, the system would need to install 25,000 MW of batteries.

Sonia Aggarwal, vice president of the research firm Energy Innovation, said, “Storage is a total game-changer.” The problem with batteries is that they don’t create energy. They only shift the time of day when the energy can be utilized.

Exhibit 24. The Glut Of Renewable Power Generated Daily SOURCE: Clean Air Task Force

The cost of battery storage is huge. California claims to lead the U.S. in energy storage with 4.2 GW of installed capacity in 220 operational projects. However, most of the storage is pumped hydroelectric storage, with only a small share represented by batteries. Pumped storage consumes significant amounts of land to store the water to generate the power. A 2018 study by the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy policy think tank, concluded that reaching 80% of California’s power needs with renewables would mean massive amounts of surplus generation during the summer months, requiring 9.6 million megawatt-hours of energy storage. To reach 100% renewable power, the system would need 36.3 million megawatt-hours of storage. The study also determined, during summer peaks, the 100% renewables system would generate as much as eight million megawatt-hours of surplus power.

Exhibit 25. How Power Climbs With More Renewables SOURCE: Clean Air Task Force

Based on the Clean Air Task Force analysis of CAISO data, building the level of renewable generation and storage necessary to reach the state’s clean energy goals would drive up costs exponentially, from $49 per megawatt-hour of generation at 50% of power from renewables to $1,612 at 100%. That assumes lithium-ion batteries will cost roughly a third of what they do now. Another study in 2018 published in Energy & Environmental Science found that getting to 80% of demand reliably using only wind and solar power would require either a U.S.-wide high-speed transmission system or 12 hours of electricity storage. A battery storage system of that size across the U.S. would cost more than $2.5 trillion. And, you are still 20% short of a total renewable power system, unless the definition of renewable energy is changed to include nuclear, hydropower and geothermal.

A key point about building such a battery backup system is the cost and utilization. “The system becomes completely dominated by the cost of storage,” said Steve Brick, a senior advisor for the Clean Air Task Force. “You build this enormous storage machine that you fill up by midyear and then just dissipate it. It’s a massive capital investment that gets utilized very little.” But the California electricity customers will be paying for it 12 months a year.

The peak electricity demand that has caused California’s problems during the heat wave was in the range of 42-46 GW. If one assembled a system of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants with a capacity of around 55 GW, the state would have a comfortable cushion to deal with maintenance issues or accidents. According the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), California has installed electricity generation capacity of 76 GW, with solar at 27 GW and wind at 6 GW. If you eliminate the solar and wind capacity, the system is left with 43 GW, which equals or is close to the peak generating needs during the heat wave. One could potentially import power from neighboring state power systems, which California relies on extensively, but it is likely that they will be needing all of their output. The state routinely imports 15% of its total power needs, which fell to only 5% in the recent region-wide heat wave. Guess what all this means? Rolling blackouts are needed to manage the grid’s stability and allow for sudden outages. This solution will become even more critical as the state continues to shut down fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, while adding more renewable power.

Californians complain about their high electricity bills. The state is known for having the most expensive power costs in the Lower 48 states. However, according to the EIA, the state’s average cost for residential power in May was only 19.86 cents per kilowatt-hour, putting it below five other states. Those five states were among the six states composing New England, where clean energy mandates, expansion of renewable power and restricted natural gas supplies are helping drive residential power costs up. Pity the residents of Connecticut who were paying 23.96 cents per kilowatt-hour in May, the highest among the Lower 48 states.

Two recent charts from the EIA show Lower 48 power generation by fuel for the first six months of 2020. Natural gas has grown the most this year (+9%), with renewables up 5%. Coal’s generation fell 30% compared to the same time last year, while nuclear power fell 4%.

Exhibit 26. Natural Gas Power Grows The Most in 2020 SOURCE: EIA

What is interesting is to see the contribution by fuel over a longer time frame. What we see is how important natural gas and coal was in meeting power needs in the Lower 48 last summer when renewables’ contribution fell. Moreover, over the past 18 months, renewables contribution has barely increased. Once again, we see how essential natural gas is to the electricity grid and the U.S. economy, just as Mr. Kavulla observed above.

Exhibit 27. Renewables contribution Has Hardly Changed SOURCE: EIA

The hope that renewables will be able to power our economy continues to run into the brick walls of intermittency and cost. It is impossible to eliminate the first, and solutions to solve that problem do little but add to power’s cost. Overbuilding of renewable generating capacity to meet peak demand has contributed to high power costs, as consumers must pay providers when they produce more power than needed. It would be interesting to see how many renewable projects would be built if developers had to pay consumers when their output falls below projected levels. The solution of overbuilding renewable generating capacity to ensure adequate capacity is not the most cost-efficient solution, and battery backup systems only add to the cost. Fantasies continue to be perpetuated in the energy world.

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Energy Musings

Renewables To The Rescue; Or Rescuing Renewables?