Grid resiliency is increasingly a topic of discussion, largely because of very public large scale power disruptions that seem to be becoming more common. This recent article in the Wall Street Journal is an example. While the increasing amount of intermittent wind and solar generation are contributors to this decreased resiliency, given their still relatively low percentage of generation this is not the full story. The decline of coal and the accompanying rise in natural gas is the biggest change in electricity generation over the last decade. This has been accompanied by an increasingly deregulated industry where responsibility for resiliency is not clearly delineated. 

It turns out that natural gas is dependent on its own distribution network of storage and gas pipelines which have different attributes from the coal distribution and storage network it has replaced. As was demonstrated in Texas in 2021, the gas network needs to be designed to handle freezing temperatures and is dependent on the electricity network to power parts of its infrastructure. The lesson is that big changes in the grid take time to stabilize and the current de centralized deregulated approach only reacts to structural problems after they are apparent, and does not anticipate. 

This should be a lesson for what is to become as wind and solar grow and coal and nuclear continue to decline. This will be a far more consequential change with far bigger problems to solve. It is easy to anticipate that the grid will become far less resilient very quickly. There will be an inevitable backlash when reality sinks in.

By Edmund Kelly

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-power-grid-is-increasingly-unreliable-11645196772

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This peer reviewed article was published in Nature communications on October 21, 2021, titled “Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power worldwide”. It uses global databases for wind and solar energy resource availability on an hourly basis over 39 years and over a fine grained geographical grid to model the potential reliability of various mixes of wind, solar, storage over large geographical areas that assume the transmission system can connect supply with demand. As such it does not try to estimate the economics, just reliability.

The analysis is pretty comprehensive and covers a wide range of options. The options that produce the highest reliability have excess generation of 1.5X to 3X, have 12 hours of storage and cover continent wide geographical areas. No area achieves 100% reliability though reliability in the high 90% range is achievable for all geographies. This still leaves some long duration outages everywhere. 

This analysis can be regarded as optimistic as it only covers 39 years of data. A simple analysis of California shows that there are very bad events that only occur once in 100 years or more. It also assumes perfect long distance transmission and a control system that always connects available supply with demand. The article discusses this and assumes some backup from non intermittent sources like geothermal, fuel synthesis, hydro etc. will be necessary.

Say the shortfall is 1%. That does not mean that the backup generation capacity is 1% of generation capacity. It means that backup generation capacity approaching 100% of capacity is necessary for 1% of the time. So along with a very expensive wind and solar based electricity generation system, a large and expensive backup generation system is needed as well. 

This analysis shows that the true cost of using intermittent energy sources is not the direct cost of generation but the costs of trying to make them reliable by mitigating the effects of long duration intermittency. Stratosolar's big benefit is it has NO long duration intermittency and so does not have to incur the costs of excess generation capacity or long distance transmission that far exceed the costs of generation alone. 

Combined with Stratosolar’s 3X capacity factor advantage, the absence of these extra costs mean that Stratosolar's overall cost advantage over ground intermittent wind and solar is in the region of 5X to 10X cheaper. This means that synthetic fuels made using Stratosolar electricity will be 5X to 10X cheaper and provide an affordable source of seasonal storage and transportation fuels. 

Hopefully analysis like that from this paper will bring some sanity to the 100% renewables debate and open up discussion of alternatives that can achieve the reliability of power generation that is essential to modern economies. 

By Edmund Kelly

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The amount of resources required to build renewable sources of energy is substantial. Comparing ground Solar PV and Stratosolar, there are several areas where Stratosolar requires far fewer resources including glass, steel, mass for storage, and land.

Glass: Conventional PV panels use glass for protection from corrosion, primarily from water. Stratosolar is situated where there is no water in any form, which simplifies the protection problem considerably. Stratosolar panels use no glass and weigh 2kg/m2 or less. Glass for conventional PV panels weighs about 10 kg/m2 and panel total weight approaches 20 kg/m2. 

Today’s PV production is about 200 GW/year and uses about 10 million tons of glass. Scaled up to 2 TW/year to meet a 2050 deadline for net zero CO2 would mean 100 million tons of glass per year. Today's annual glass production is about 200 million tons of which about 100 million tons is for flat glass. Glass production will need to expand rapidly as will the supply of sand and energy to make the glass. To reiterate, Stratosolar needs no glass.

Steel: today's PV uses steel for supporting structures, about the same weight as glass or about 100 million tons of steel per year. Stratosolar needs no steel. 

Energy storage: Ground based energy storage is mostly focused on battery and gravity energy storage technologies. Energy storage comes down to Wh/kg. Batteries range from about 200 Wh/kg for Lithium ion to less than 50 Wh/kg for various long duration storage technologies like flow batteries. Ground based gravity storage is about 0.3 Wh/kg. Stratosolar gravity storage is about 50 Wh/kg. If we estimate mass for storage based on daily storage of 10 hours for an annual addition of 1TW of electricity generation, or 10TWh/year  of storage, this results in the following annual demand.

Ground gravity storage: 40 billion tons of rock, dirt concrete or water.
Stratosolar gravity storage: 200 million tons of water.
Battery storage: 50 million tons to 200 million tons of chemicals.

Because it does not have long duration intermittency to deal with, the stratosolar mass is the complete solution whereas ground PV will need a combination of more storage, excess generation and long distance transmission, all of which add a need for more resources. 

Land: This is perhaps the most constraining resource for ground PV, mostly because of political constraints. Most estimates lowball the need by ignoring the increased demand from an all electric economy and the added demand from economic growth over 30 years. 
Ground PV needs relatively flat land and panels have to be spaced to limit shading. Averaged over all geographies PV generates about 10W of electricity per meter squared (10 W/m2). For 1 TW of new electricity generation this adds up to about 100,000 km2 of land per year, or a total of 3 million km2 over 30 years. The total land mass for the US, Europe and China is about 10 million km2 each. Much of this is mountains and hills or remote deserts. Each of these geographies would need to find flat land near urban areas approaching 1 million square km or build more than 100,000 km of new high voltage transmission lines to remote deserts. 
Stratosolar only directly affects a little land for the tethers and an assembly area. There would be an urban exclusion zone for the area beneath the array, which could be built over mountains or coastal waters. Arrays would be few, perhaps 100 for the US and 1,000 worldwide and would be positioned perhaps 200km from urban areas, minimizing the need for long distance transmission. 

Stratosolar drastically reduces the need for material resources and precious land and is far more sustainable than current intermittent energy sources.

By Edmund Kelly

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Bloomberg's latest global solar update includes their expectations out to 2030. They expect reasonable growth but no exceptional change that would reflect the world taking the latest IPCC warnings seriously or the US actually attaining the ambitious goals of the Biden administration. 

Bloomberg provides a factual business and market perspective on clean energy. This makes their projections more objective than many such as those from the IEA, EIA, or BP, which are more political and goal oriented projections that are influenced by either save the planet or climate denial interests.

Factual global reporting on where the money comes from, where it goes, and what clean energy it buys exposes wishful thinking and is immensely valuable. This value is enhanced because the data is continuously updated and has been for decades which allows for a reasonable projection of trends into the future based on insight rather than simple linear extrapolation. 

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The past decade has shown that while the major markets in China, Europe and the US have waxed and waned, the global market has shown sustained growth in Solar PV capacity while maintaining a constant clean energy expenditure of around $300B/y. Bloomberg's projection to 2030 shows an expectation of similar behaviour, with $/W cost continuing to decline enabling capacity growth within a fairly constant budget. 

In the US, the Biden administration has ambitious goals, but faces strong political headwinds from moderate Democrats within and Republicans without. History would not predict a significant change in the status quo. China has stabilized its internal deployments and only seeks to expand its exports. Europe has goals but is nowhere near the needed growth to decarbonize. The Bloomberg 2030 forecast appears to be highly realistic.

​Given the political and financial realities that this projection embodies, breaking this impasse will likely take a technological solution that relaxes these constraints. Fusion energy were it to succeed would be one such possibility that has shown some recent improvement in its prospects but is still a long shot. Stratosolar is another possible new approach but less risky, cheaper and quicker to demonstrate feasibility. 

By Edmund Kelly

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“The best part is no part. The best process is no process. It weighs nothing, it costs nothing, it can’t go wrong”...... Elon Musk.

General Elon principles:

1) Question the question
The superior stratosolar solution comes from looking at the solar electricity generation problem from a new and radical perspective. 

2) Reason from first principles.
Look at the solar electricity generation problem as a whole, move the location and thereby eliminate the unnecessary parts.

3) Kill your darlings
This is the fourth stratosolar design reboot. Build, test and continuously and rapidly iterate.

4) Undesign
No long term electricity storage, no long distance electricity transmission, no omniscient electricity grid control, one third the number of PV panels; provides fully dispatchable electricity from solar energy; a superior product at a fraction of the cost.

5) Ideas supersede hierarchy
Stratosolar does not have a hierarchy. Ideas win on a level playing field.

6) Everyone is a chief engineer.
This describes stratosolar to a t. 

Without knowing it we have been following Elon’s principles all along. This  speaks to the fundamental truth of the principles of innovating at the large scale.

By Edmund Kelly 

Bloomberg is broadening their clean energy investment survey to cover more than energy generation as shown in the latest graph covering up to the end of 2020 above. The yellow is the clean energy electricity generation component they have covered in the past. As can be seen, clean energy generation for 2020 is substantially unchanged from 2019. 

Clean energy investment has been substantially constant between $250B and $300B since 2011. This article covers things in more detail. In 2020 China and the US were down while Europe as a whole was up. Previously China was up and Europe was down. These changes are always directly related to policy and subsidy changes in each geography but the overall investment stays the same 

The bottom line is the world is not increasing its commitment to clean energy and at current levels of investment clean energy will not be significant until the end of the century, not 2040 as is the goal of many countries. The current investment limit is bounded by government support. To increase investment requires stand alone generation that can replace fossil fuel generation at a lower competitive cost without the limit of government support. 

Because intermittent generation relies on government mandates as well as subsidies, an investment is a complex and high risk venture that does not fit a market based model. The cost of intermittent generation does not reflect the increased price it brings to electricity consumers. This price is a result of the energy generation system as a whole becoming less efficient as it tries to adapt to intermittent generation. These inefficiencies grow exponentially as more intermittent generation is added to the grid and are at the heart of the stagnation in clean energy investment. If clean energy were leading to lower electricity prices, market forces would increase demand. This clearly is not happening.

Stratosolar represents a path out of this quagmire but to get out of the quagmire there first has to be an acceptance that there is a quagmire. The investment data clearly demonstrates a quagmire but we seem to have the blind leading the blind into a fantasy future. 

Falling capital costs enabled record volumes of both solar (132GW) and wind (73GW) to be installed on the basis of the modest increase in dollar investment. This is roughly 200GW. 

Total world energy demand is heading for around 30 TW by 2050 or about 1TW average new generation per year. This means that current generation alone is one tenth what is needed without adding in storage, transmission and other costs. 

Venture capital and private equity investment in renewables and storage increased 51% to $5.9 billion last year. Compare this to the $300B invested in wind and solar projects. Virtually none of this $5.9B was for new clean generation technology. This is the problem Stratosolar faces. There is no investment in new generation ideas. All the limited risk investment goes to storage and other status quo pursuits.

​By Edmund Kelly

Michael Schellenberger is a well known clean energy advocate. He is however a sceptic on intermittent renewables and an advocate of nuclear energy as the only viable energy source that can reduce CO2 emissions. This puts him at odds with the environmentalist status quo, of whom he was once a significant member. Here is a recent article where he takes aim at recycling and environmental contamination problems with PV panel based solar energy.

While he is biased against solar, many of the points he makes are valid. Solar PV has grown so fast that lifetime and recycling problems are only starting to get serious attention. Many panels have short lives due to quality issues brought on by the extreme pressure to reduce costs. The backing material in many panels has been reduced to inadequate protection levels and many junction boxes are defective. Glass based panels are difficult and expensive to recycle and are mostly dumped in landfills where they leach heavy metals. Solar financials are based on 30 year panel lifetimes which are not likely to be achieved.

Stratosolar uses lightweight panels and are not exposed to water based corrosion. They produce three or more times as much energy per panel. 

​By Edmund Kelly