⚡️New Paper Commentary⚡️

In which @BrianTarrojaPhD and I look at the value of controlled charging or vehicle-to-grid in a different way: How much less energy storage would you need and what is that worth?

Read/download for free here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ener… Brian gave a good summary of the work overall in this thread (below), but I want to focus on just one part (where I think we did a clever thing): How should we estimate the value of smart charging or V2G?

https://twitter.com/BrianTarrojaPhD/status/1392985717488316421

This is smart and good.

https://twitter.com/Tylerjoelb/status/1392598001005236229

That is: it doesn't seem like we're seriously thinking about how to get the vaccination rate up and we ought to be trying out low-cost experiments like this to see what works.

Let's talk about inflection points in energy systems, using diesel/solar/battery microgrids as a case study.

Yes, this is a 🚨New Paper Alert🚨

With Simon Sandler, @AlexGNElenes, & @Ericdwilliams0

Not downloadable free, but DM me if interested: doi.org/10.1002/er.5995 New technologies like solar + batteries are getting cheaper. And certainly lower cost drives greater adoption. But does adoption go up gradually or are there "tipping points" where new tech is suddenly preferred? We wanted to dig into this question with a microgrid case study.

Joining the professional class today basically requires that you continually make amazing close friends and then leave them forever (or they leave you). You have to do it again and again and it sucks every time.

Why don't we ever talk about this? It seems to be the #1 downside. This is obviously a real "first world problem" type of complaint and I imagine most people who manage to get into the highly-educated professional group are happy with their choices (I am), but the inability to hold onto the amazing people that have changed your life is hard.

If you are looking for a solid semi-academic read on how governments behave in a crisis, Essence of Decision has a lot to say about today's situation. It is about US and USSR actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I'll describe a few lessons below. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essence_o… The book shows that many of the actions taken by either side in the Cuban Missile Crisis (CMC) weren't really rational and attempts to explain them through other means: organizational behavior or political negotiation. This is because organizations don't "think" rationally.

Here's a long thread about my history of bike touring, because:
1. I don't feel like working.
2. You might like a distraction.
3. There will be nice pictures.
4. Bike touring is a great vacation that involves lots of social distancing, so maybe you can try it out in summer 2020. For me, it all started, sort of, in High School. A good friend and I thought up a plan to bike across the US after graduation. We had no idea if that was something that people do (it is), how long it would take (2-3 months), or what we would need (not too much).

Let's actually talk about curtailment a bit because there is one important conceptual thing that people often miss, which is the relevance of timing of curtailed energy. It matters a lot whether curtailed energy is spread across the year or all at once. (short thread (I hope))

https://twitter.com/ElephantEating/status/1196713574820917248

According to CaISO (link) 461 GWh of wind/solar were curtailed in 2018. Could we have done something useful with that energy? It depends on how it is spread out.

We can see that there is at least an annual cycle (most curtailment in spring/fall) caiso.com/informed/Pages…

Relevant to some recent discussion on this website, here is a new paper comparing the emissions estimates that you would get from different estimation methods. It is a topic close to my heart, so here are a few links/explainers on why you might care.

https://twitter.com/priyald17/status/1164655053736751104

First, this explainer on the basic idea of what it is and why it is relevant:

https://twitter.com/ElephantEating/status/978436206613680129

If you're trying to understand/explain what cheap wind/solar is like, I propose this analogy: Imagine if humans had never discovered rice, wheat, potatoes, or other starches, and were just developing them now. What effect would this have on farming, eating, society? A huge effect, to the benefit of society. It would be a new staple crop that at first promised to deliver low-cost calories to society and then later could become the basis of most diets around the world. First, the nutritional value of the plant would be tested in labs.

A thread on some related political organization ideas that I've found useful (yes, I know I'm getting a bit out of my lane, but this isn't the usual commentary): On what types of action are most effective at realizing change (I'm thinking about climate, but applies broadly). There has been a lot of discussion in climate twitter about personal action versus govt action, and the role of groups likes Extinction Rebellion. A lot of it is indirectly answering the question: What is the "right" way to enact real change?

What are we arguing about when we argue about how to regulate the electricity industry? (though this thread applies to most types of regulation) Two things, both of which matter:
1) What strategy gets us the physical outcomes that we want?
2) How are costs/benefits distributed? Often times, discussion about regulation strategy focuses on one or the other of these arguments. Academic types, especially economists, focus on the first one. Practitioners and activists focus on the second one. But both are important.

A conversation off of Cody's tweet brought up Train Energy Storage, which I think is a neat idea but have never run the numbers (and hadn't seen elsewhere either). The question was about whether they could be good seasonal energy storage, so consider this the reality check.

https://twitter.com/cody_a_hill/status/1035270390098972672

Train Energy Storage (TES) is a neat idea - put a bunch of sand into traincars, connect power lines to the (already-electric) locomotive, and pull the train up a mountain to store energy & recover the potential energy (locomotive motor) on the way down. interestingengineering.com/concrete-gravi…

Since I'm supposed to be getting work done right now, I'll take some time to give my two cents on the CA rooftop solar policy, which seems almost perfectly designed to split the "smart people I listen to on energy twitter" crowd. I am a bit divided on the policy, so I want to roughly outline a few points of agreement and my way of viewing it (even though I have no firm answer in the end).

I'm reading this pretty nice summary of the relationship between wind/solar adoption and reliability. In short, no noticeable relationship thus far, and seems to be a lot of room to run (plus some straightforward policy ideas about how to extend it): ieefa.org/wp-content/upl… This paper is a nice review of actual practice in grids with a lot of wind/solar. What they are finding is not terribly surprising: If you account for minor policy/market changes and the indirect economic response from other generators, integration is easy for quite a while.

I promised a thread about whether energy system modeling results are overconfident. This is that thread.

Short answer: yes, certainly, but because the people doing it are only human, not (generally) because they are doing a bad job.

Longer answer below. I should note that some of these ideas (and the screencaps) come from Granger Morgan's great (though somewhat technical and sophisticated) book Uncertainty. This sort of thinking was a central part of my PhD program, so all the @CMU_EPP folks out there will find this familiar.