nuclear-news

…at a two-day National Electricity Forum sponsored by the Energy Department and others, the federal energy secretary, Steven Chu, on Wednesday proposed a different set of solutions to the problem, which is likely to emerge elsewhere as installations of renewable energy expand and systems have to cope with surges or deficits of power they cannot predict.

One solution would be to break down the barriers between utilities so that the variability of generation can be leveled out over a larger area, Dr. Chu suggested. Routing more power to California would be a good first move, he said…..

Another would be using batteries, the secretary of energy said. The problem is that at the moment, the batteries needed to store just one kilowatt-hour (the amount needed to run an window air conditioner for an hour) cost about $350.

That is steep, given that the average price of that amount of energy is about 11 cents. But at $100, Dr. Chu said, batteries would “go viral’’ and change the energy equation.

But there are simpler solutions, the secretary said. He said he recently visited a medical center in Houston that ran a power plant that produced both electricity and steam and could run at very high efficiency when both were needed. The problem, Dr. Chu said, is that at some hours, especially at night, there was not much need for the steam. So the medical center was using it to run a cooling device that was usually a component of an air-conditioning system….

As the use of renewable energy spreads, some companies are storing energy as heat rather than cold. And some are harnessing batteries at the point of generation.

Dr. Chu described a synergy between batteries for plug-in hybrid or electric cars and batteries for the grid. “If I look at the world 10 years ago versus today, we were kind of a sleepy outpost’’ for batteries, he said, with no demand beyond “laptops, some power tools, and toothbrushes.”

“And now they’re saying it’s a $150 billion market,’’ he said.

Dr. Chu predicted that some of that would spill over into the grid. Until then, Bonneville proposes that its customers share the costs of unplugging the wind machines during times of high river flows with the wind producers. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/surplus-renewable-energy-an-update/