AMOS ACT Themed Seminar Session - Renewable Energy - 19th Jul 2012

July 19, 2012

The AMOS ACT Branch is inviting all to this themed seminar session on renewable energy. We have one speaker lined up:

Peter Coppin (CSIRO Energy Transformed Flagship) Canberra, Australia

A Renewable Energy Future – Making it a Reality with Storage

In a future reliant on increasing amounts of renewable energy, coping with the inherent variability in generation from weather driven sources such as wind, solar and wave will become a major issue. Shifting energy from windy or sunny days or filling in shorter wind lulls and cloudy periods is seen as an ideal role for storage. Established storage technologies such as pumped-hydro and compressed air which are able to achieve this where they are feasible. The current power generation, transmission and market systems are, in fact able to cope with these longer term-trends while variable renewables remain at modest penetration levels. There is another class of applications for storage, perhaps more pressing than energy shifting by hours or days. When highly convective or stormy weather conditions are widespread, the fluctuating wind speeds can produce substantial variations in wind energy generation with periods of 1 hour or less. Similarly, intermittent cloud can produce very sharp changes in PV solar power generation. These conditions can lead to very significant problems on the grid, reducing carrying capacity of lines and increasing the amount of spinning reserve and regulation services required to unachievable levels. The only alternative is to curtail the renewable generation which is already being done in several markets.

A number of electrical storage technologies are being developed to both remove these rapid fluctuations and provide support to grid systems with large amounts of solar and wind power. Most of these are now being demonstrated at the MW-scale. These include lithium-ion, flywheel, flow-batteries and new-generation hybrid lead-acid batteries such as the CSIRO-developed UltraBattery technology which utilises an internal ultra-capacitor to give faster charge/discharge capability and longer life. These storage systems are designed only to remove the short-term variations and do not attempt to store total generation. This results in an effective system without the normally high capital cost. The smoothing system is controlled by predictive algorithms which utilise solar and wind forecasting techniques which can significantly reduce the amount of storage needed. Examples of a number of commercial, MW-scale trials of these systems will be outlined.