The last few days are looking rather interesting for renewable energy and climate. Crashing Vor picked up on research out of Stanford that can boost the energy capture of current solar panel technology with some optical ingenuity. Anything thing that brings the cost per kilowatt produced by photovoltaics down and increases their efficiency also increases their competitiveness as a power source.
Skralyx points to a European research project that has found a way to concentrate sunlight to heat a relatively cheap catalyst up to temperatures where it can produce jet fuel from CO2 and H2O. It means being able to recycle CO2 from the atmosphere or other sources into more complex hydrocarbons without needing to use fossil fuels for a base material. While burning it as fuel for airliners still produces greenhouse gases, doing it this way would greatly reduce the net amount of carbon ending up in the atmosphere by taking some of it back out again to make more fuel. It would also get away from the environmental impact of extracting and refining fossil fuels.
The latest news comes out of the Department of Energy:
In a milestone for renewable energy integration, General Electric (GE) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) operated a common class of wind turbines in grid-forming mode, which is when the generator can set grid voltage and frequency and, if necessary, operate without power from the electric grid.
The demonstration at NREL using GE’s controls showed that the popular type-3 turbine technology can supply fundamental stability to the bulk power grid. Such grid-forming controls could allow the turbine to make up for fewer conventional sources of stability on the grid, such as coal or natural-gas-fired generators.
This real-device demonstration is the first of several in the Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Energy Technologies Office project, “Wind as a Virtual Synchronous Generator (WindVSG),” which aims to research wind and storage inverter controls that electronically imitate the stabilizing features of conventional generators. As part of WindVSG, NREL has been conducting research characterizing inverter-based resources and simulating system operation in controlled grid environments. The laboratory is now validating the grid-forming principles on real devices in a replica power grid environment.
The problem with renewables like wind power (and solar power and battery farms) is that the power they supply is different from traditional fossil fuel power sources. Those supply a baseline capacity to support consistent frequency and meet fluctuating demand while keeping voltage constant. This research shows wind turbines and other renewables can be operated in a way that matches those characteristics.
[UPDATE: jfromga linked to an article that explains in more detail what is going on regarding frequency and voltage.]
As renewables make up a larger share of the power supply, they will also need to take a larger share of responsibility as stewards of grid stability. That responsibility includes the capacity to restart power following an outage, to restabilize following a transient electrical event, and to generally “form” the grid as baseline power resources. Large spinning generators have traditionally helped keep the power grid’s frequency and voltage steady. Now, inverter-based resources like wind, solar, and batteries are being primed for that role in multiple DOE projects, including the Grid-Forming Inverter Consortium, which will share findings and research objectives among industry and community partners.
This is important not just because it will make it easier to take more fossil fuel plants off-line speeding transition away from fossil fuels. It also should improve the resilience of the grid against increasingly likely climate disruption. Further work is planned to extend the concept and to understand what operating wind turbines in this manner will do.
Though a major step ahead for grid-forming renewable resources, this demonstration also indicates new directions for investigation. Within the WindVSG project, the research team will continue to study how the grid-forming turbine interacts with other devices on the power system and whether the grid-forming mode results in greater mechanical stress on the turbine. Further demonstrations will also validate the grid-forming turbine when disconnected from the power grid.
For wind turbine fleets and other resources like solar PV and battery storage, grid-forming controls could open a new market opportunity in the form of grid services; that is, grid stability as another value stream for renewable resources. With this demonstration, using GE’s solution, NREL has validated one more approach for renewable assets to provide advanced stability. And with the ARIES platform, NREL can help partners prove such renewably sourced stability on their own systems.
For those interested on following up on this and related energy news, the article includes some links that look like a very useful resource.
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UPDATE: One more thing. One of the stock objections to wind turbines is that the blades end up in landfills at the end of their useful life. That does not have to be the case. As wind turbines continue to be installed and put into operation, finding ways to reuse them as they age out will get more attention and more options.
Staying with fossil fuels is not an option.