Pumped Storage: what is the scale needed?

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Scott3

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#2532230 31-Jul-2020 16:18

PolicyGuy:

Yes indeed.
I wonder what carbon price Fonterra is paying for these plants at the moment?
Are they paying the $25/tonne 'current market price', or are they on a 50% deal (many are) or are we taxpayers actually paying all their carbon fees? A full carbon price recovery regime would immediately change the fuel economics.

I think previous governments have not pushed too hard on that because it would put a major squeeze on Fonterra milk price and shareholder returns, and would put out of business a bunch of coal miners, truckies, maintenance service providers and other downstream businesses. Politically hard

Even $25/tonne is a pittance.

Abatement cost of lake onslow scheme is $250/tonne... (but we need roughly a decades warning to get it up an running)

Scott3

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#2532234 31-Jul-2020 16:22

Sidestep:

The Government's borrowing cost isn't 5%.. If you look at NZ Treasury's “funding” site, you'll see that New Zealand Government Bonds - even the longest (2037) - are yielding well below 1%..

Cost of government / institutional borrowing heading towards zero poses issues to time value of money based analysis.

We live in interesting times. (although Japan has been in this situation for decades)

Sidestep

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#2532236 31-Jul-2020 16:25

PolicyGuy:

Yes indeed.
I wonder what carbon price Fonterra is paying for these plants at the moment?
Are they paying the $25/tonne 'current market price', or are they on a 50% deal (many are) or are we taxpayers actually paying all their carbon fees? A full carbon price recovery regime would immediately change the fuel economics.

We, as taxpayers provide Tiwai with $48 million of free ETS units annually.
Actually paying the full carbon price would change the economics of many things..

wellygary

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#2532258 31-Jul-2020 16:58

PolicyGuy:

Yes indeed.
I wonder what carbon price Fonterra is paying for these plants at the moment?
Are they paying the $25/tonne 'current market price', or are they on a 50% deal (many are) or are we taxpayers actually paying all their carbon fees? A full carbon price recovery regime would immediately change the fuel economics.

I think previous governments have not pushed too hard on that because it would put a major squeeze on Fonterra milk price and shareholder returns, and would put out of business a bunch of coal miners, truckies, maintenance service providers and other downstream businesses. Politically hard

They don't appear to be getting a significant allocation, they got one for whey production, but its tiny at 45K units... so it looks like they pay the standard ETS rates on their Coal,

https://www.epa.govt.nz/industry-areas/emissions-trading-scheme/industrial-allocations/decisions/

raytaylor

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#2532471 31-Jul-2020 22:25

Sidestep:

More electric vehicles should increase electricity demand overall, but by charging overnight, they might eventually perform a similar function to pumped hydro at a lower cost.

Personally I'd rather not be wasting my expensive battery cycles on grid balancing. And I imagine producing batteries will have more of an environmental cost (though in china) than pumped hydro here locally.

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Scott3

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#2532486 1-Aug-2020 00:33

raytaylor:
Sidestep:

More electric vehicles should increase electricity demand overall, but by charging overnight, they might eventually perform a similar function to pumped hydro at a lower cost.

Personally I'd rather not be wasting my expensive battery cycles on grid balancing. And I imagine producing batteries will have more of an environmental cost (though in china) than pumped hydro here locally.

I also don't think vehicle to grid is worthwhile.

That said, even without it EV's should help as long as drivers are incentivised to set charge timers so they charge in the middle of the night.

Sidestep

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#2532493 1-Aug-2020 04:48

raytaylor:

Personally I'd rather not be wasting my expensive battery cycles on grid balancing. And I imagine producing batteries will have more of an environmental cost (though in china) than pumped hydro here locally.

I wasn't talking about sucking away the last declining cycles of my sister's Gen1 leaf to balance the grid.

That was in the context of the ICCC's goal of 50% of NZ's transport being electric by 2035, and up to 1,100 MW of battery storage .
I can't imagine, if that was so, that the gigantic potential of all those batteries wouldn't integrated into some type of smart network.

Even then smart V2G EV's would be more useful ironing out momentary spikes - of say, everyone putting the kettle on during the Coronation Street ads – for a few minutes, rather than taking up the slack of 500MW of wind dropping off the grid over a period of hours.

I'd also imagine the base charging approach of V2G to be unidirectional, where your EV's treated as a controlled load, like hot water ripple control - to give some flexibility in postponing the charging process to off-peak periods. Need a recharge badly? Just pay peak prices.

A bidirectional – proper V2G – EV charging process, allowing charging from, and discharge to, the grid would have to be compensated for somehow.. selling your cheap 'off peak' power back into the grid at peak times should make you some pocket money – given your battery degrades with each cycle.

But V2G will be no help at all in saving power for 'dry years'

The road to that ICCC 2035 outcome, and Megan Wood's vision of massively overbuilding renewables and cyclically converting the excess to hydrogen appear to be paved with hopium.

Whereas the path to the "NZ Battery" is clearly achievable if the costs stack up.

I'm all for investigating it promptly, and if it's not happening, moving on. NZ needs some viable solutions, built before the crisis is on our doorsteps.

Tracer

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#2532950 2-Aug-2020 01:53

wellygary:

Interesting..

The claims that there will be gobs of electricity for everyone's EVs might not actually eventuate....and all the surplus could all get used by SI industrial processes moving from Coal and LPG

"The dairy giant Fonterra is casting ambitious eyes at the electricity that is about to become available after the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter closes."

"If a deal can be achieved, it is likely that the Clandeboye dairy factory in south Canterbury and the Edendale factory in Southland would switch from burning coal to using electricity."

"It is understood the two factories would plan to use about 1500 gigawatt hours of electricity per year."

"That is about third of the smelter's take - and is equivalent to the amount of electricity that would necessarily go to waste after the smelter closes and before transmission lines are upgraded to take the power North."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/422440/how-meridian-fonterra-and-tiwai-point-s-electricity-are-linked

In addition to Edendale and Clandeboye, it looks like there are at least another couple of 100MW of boilers that could go electric in the SI

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/why-electricity-will-replace-coal-in-dairy-plants

Just another data point confirming the myth about heavily subsidised electricity is exactly that. See the treasury documents released a few years back, and Meridian's financials for further proof. The part I'm not certain of is why a large portion of the media keep pushing that myth, despite all the evidence available being to the contrary. The good deal ended a few decades ago.

Tracer

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#2532951 2-Aug-2020 01:53

frankv:

Yes, and it's very unlikely that SCC and Rio Tinto would be running the smelter now if it was actually losing that much money. With an integrated supply chain, it's very easy to increase the "cost" of alumina so that the mine in Australia makes money and the smelter doesn't and/or decrease the "price" of aluminium so that the recipient makes money and the smelter doesn't. Bear in mind that Rio Tinto made $3.32 billion in the first 6 months of this year... it didn't get there by running losing smelters.

No, it got there mostly from iron ore, and a little bit from smelters in Canada where the hydro electricity costs a fraction of what it does here. Alumina and aluminium are both commodities. The LME sets the price, not the producers.

frankv:

And one has to wonder why a smelter with a fixed price contract for electricity supply was hedging against power price volatility.

I think you answered your own question. It hasn't been a fixed price for some time, and it hasn't been 100% fixed even before that.

Scott3

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#2532982 2-Aug-2020 10:05

Sidestep:

...

I'd also imagine the base charging approach of V2G to be unidirectional, where your EV's treated as a controlled load...

Best not to use the term V2G in this context. The acronym for Vehicle to Grid, and describes discharging discharging the EV's battery feeding power into the grid.

Time of use charges, smart metering & load shedding are means that could be use to encourage EV charging at off peak hours. Several power companies offer EV plans, where power consumed between say 11pm and 6am is a couple of cents cheaper per kWh. This incentives moving EV charging from peak time, and is supported by current metering & charging tech.

Sidestep

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#2533052 2-Aug-2020 13:14

Scott3:

Best not to use the term V2G in this context. The acronym for Vehicle to Grid, and describes discharging discharging the EV's battery feeding power into the grid.

Time of use charges, smart metering & load shedding are means that could be use to encourage EV charging at off peak hours. Several power companies offer EV plans, where power consumed between say 11pm and 6am is a couple of cents cheaper per kWh. This incentives moving EV charging from peak time, and is supported by current metering & charging tech.

Sure, I was confusingly using V2G as the technology descriptor, rather than the physical bi-directional charger..

I meant unidirectional as described here - where although the power flow is unidirectional, the information (feedback to the aggregator/smartgrid) is bidirectional - the fleet not acting as a 'dumb load' but a 'controlled load' and able to forecast available capacity/requirement to the grid without necessarily drawing it down.

Good if you need a battery full enough to drive you to work and back (or a bus-full of kids to school).
That's got to be the basic requirement of any charging technology: Wikipedia says I could describe it better as V1G..

I've just been to look at a system by Nuuve – who's EVSE-HD60 chargers are being considered for a local School Bus fleet, offering what they call 'unidirectional' or 'bidirectional' V2G and V2B through their fleet management app (and GIVe platform).

Transdev Canada is supposed to start running their fleet of 27 Lion electric school buses next month in a couple of Eastern Provinces using Nuuve's V2G.
The fleet - even in what I'll call 'V1G' mode, will be considered a 'grid asset'..

There are several competitors (including Bluebird – a huge builder of yellow buses) - as a fuel cell supporter I'm watching with interest.

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