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With cheap PV and batteries, do we need grids? |
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22 Jul 2015, 11:17 PM
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In his latest article for 'GBEzine', the UK's longest established 'green building' magazine, author and energy specialist David Elliott wonders if the grid could one day become an unnecessary infrastructural burden.
With around half of green energy generation in Germany now being in the hands of consumers and local energy co-ops, and the cost of PV falling almost daily, some look to a future in which power grids and big utility companies are less important - most of us will generate the energy we need locally.
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In the USA, there has certainly been much talk of 'grid defection', with consumers already going off grid in droves. Off-grid batteries powered by PVs and wind may be getting cheaper all the time, and operationally that may be fine for remote homes, but would it really make sense in urban areas or for whole countries? Don't grids help us to balance variations in demand and supply in different locations, for a range of conventional generators and renewables at various scales and even internationally, such as with supergrids?
On its website Blog, the Rocky Mountain Institute says: 'Grid defection introduces its own set of considerations, including over-sizing systems to account for individual peak demand, rather than more efficiently sharing distributed resources as part of a connected smart grid', well certainly, grid defection will only be as big a deal as expected if PV/storage costs combined really do continue to fall.
For the present, rather than investing in battery storage, for most householders, it's clearly going to remain cheaper to import power from the grid when needed. Also whilst Feed-in Tariffs are around it is going to be more profitable to sell any excess power to the grid, rather than to store it but with FITs under threat from the current UK government that could all change quite soon.
While a degree of decentralisation seem possible, it seems unlikely that power grids will be eclipsed, given the need to balance the wide range of various renewable energy sources. At best, the wide adoption of battery storage by domestic consumers might offer a new type of distributed storage capacity (including electric cars), aiding wider grid balancing, but not doing away with the need for grids that, conceivable could deliver access to more efficient large-scale storage systems.
In parallel, some see district-heating grids, with large community heat stores, as a much better option than individual domestic heating/storage, at least for urban areas.
Indeed, a recent study for DECC suggested that, if the planned electrification of UK heating and transport (EVs) goes ahead, then that would significantly increase the load on local distribution networks, with heat pumps potentially adding a whopping 60% to the cost of network distribution and EVs 38%. So grids of various sorts will stay with us for a good while!
Davids full story can be read here:
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