by: Sam Torrence
In the effort to fight climate change in the United States a renewed emphasis has been placed on creating a green energy infrastructure, but what does that mean? Clean energy solutions must be able to be attached to the electrical grid and be efficiently distributed to the population of the United States. To successfully achieve these goals, we cannot simply transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy solutions, the electrical grid must go through reconstruction as well. This reconstruction will need to include energy storage and distributed energy generation.
What most people call the electrical grid is an amorphous series of electrical lines, transformers, and substations all powered by both centralized power plants and decentralized power generating units. This grid is our complex and interconnected source of energy that feeds the constant demand for electricity from consumers and businesses. On the largest scale, the contiguous states are made up of three large, interconnected grids, the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
On a smaller scale, these interconnections are managed by balancing authorities. The balancing authority must maintain the delicate balance between the supply and demand of electricity within their designated section of the larger grid. This is a crucial task in the operation of the grid. If the balance between electricity supply and demand is off it can result in local and even regional scale blackouts, as we saw in Texas during the winter storm of February of 2021. This is even a trickier task than it might like sound at first because it is difficult to store electricity on a large scale electricity must be generated almost at the same rate at which it is being used and then routed to the proper places.
Due to the precarious nature of how energy is supplied most power plants do not consistently operate at full capacity. Rather they are broken up into three different categories of operation: base load generating units, peak load generating units, and intermediate load generating units. These different types of units provide different functions to help create the stable balance mentioned earlier. Base load units continuously run at top capacity; peak load generating units are only active when the energy demand is at their highest, and intermediate generating units act between the two as they are more versatile. This system is incredibly inefficient and costly as power generation is never at full capacity due to an inability to store energy.
This leads to an important aspect of updating our energy grid so that it is more reliable, and more capable of decarbonizing, energy storage. Renewable energies suffer from being intermittent; solar power can only be produced when the sun is out, and wind energy can only be harnessed when the wind is blowing. While intermittency issues are often overblown as a political tactic, it is a serious issue when dealing with the delicate balance of supply and demand of power being such a volatile problem with our energy grid. This is where lithium-ion batteries and other energy storage solutions come into play. While the sun is out during the day, peak electricity hours are often later in the evening when the sun is no longer lighting our homes. This means that there is more solar power produced than needed during the day and not enough produced later in the evening. The solution would be to store that extra energy for later use. Similarly, for other renewables such as wind and hydropower. Energy storage is not only useful for making renewables more viable but for stabilizing the grid so that it is more resilient.
However, it is not enough to just plug in Lithium-Ion battery farms into our grid. We must establish a more resilient grid moving forward based on the concept of distributed generation. Distributed generation is the concept by which energy is produced and transmitted closer to the end user. This concept has been promoted for more than a decade but has had difficulty in establishing a strong foothold in the commercial or legislative arenas.
The main draw to distributed generation systems is the resiliency that it provides to our over-stressed system. As previously discussed, our current system relies on a delicate balance between supply and demand of energy and is highly susceptible to power outages creating catastrophic harm. Distributed generation seeks to provide a solution. By placing the generation of power closer to the consumer and decentralizing the production from one large producer to a variety of smaller producers there is a reduced strain placed on the entire grid. This reduced strain is the result of the local power generation supplementing the energy needs of the consumer so that they do not add to the peak demand times.
Distributed generation holds lots of promise in the effort to make the electrical grid more environmentally friendly. The environmentally friendly aspect of distributed generation is dependent on how it is executed. The concept of distributed generation and rooftop solar panels are often intertwined leading to the immediate conclusion that distributed generation is blanketly an environmentally cleaner way to operate the electrical grid, and there is some truth to that. Because distributed generation places the production of energy closer to the end user less electrical power is lost in the transfer of energy over long transmission lines. This leads to more efficient usage of fuel sources, therefore, decreasing emissions in theory.
Distributed generation and energy storage solutions working in concert will be essential to truly create a sustainable energy solution. This will be an incredibly arduous task, but this reconstruction of the energy grid would create a more resilient and efficient system.