All countries should seek to transform their electricity systems to renewables. They should do this with care; a hasty transition risks blackouts and price increases, discrediting renewable energy.
How countries can transform electricity systems responsibly
- Identify sources and destinations of renewable energy, and upgrade the grid / build new lines and substation capacity / resilience accordingly
- Include the electrification of heating, transportation and industry
- Identify the longest period there will be with minimum low-carbon generation, then build storage accordingly:
- Capacity (MW) is max demand, plus 10% capacity margin minus all dispatchable renewables
- Volume (MWh) is total demand over this extreme weather period plus 10% minus all the generation we can 99% expect over the period
- Duration will be a mix of short (demand side, batteries), medium and long, with the long being the full duration of the weather period plus 10% margin
- The 10% margins are to allow for any of the back-up plant to fail in some way, or demand to reach extraordinary levels
- Don’t rely on interconnectors because your neighbours’ times of system stress (high demand and/or low generation) will mostly coincide with yours
- Build the storage in a balanced way (balanced by building very roughly proportionate amounts of each duration)
- Create a legal definition of storage as ‘storage’, not as ‘generation’ or ‘consumption’: it generates no new electricity and is a grid service that moves electricity in time. With such a definition, contracts can be let for “storage services” of different types and groupings
- Change the regulatory environment to encourage revenue stacking, and to favour low-carbon sources – one way of doing so is outlined in Storelectric’s proposal, A 21st Century Electricity System, in which capital investment, clean energy and the introduction of innovations are all incentivised without a penny of subsidy
- Refuse to give in to the power of incumbents to threaten to cause blackouts by closing power stations prematurely: have contingency plans, and encourage the incumbents to invest in clean energy technologies
- To transform electricity systems requires cross-party political support as it’s a 30-year program
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