One comment, if I may, on the choice of wording: “baseload won’t be needed” – another way of looking at it would be to say that ‘baseload’, i.e., coal and nuclear, will not be feasible to operate in a system like this. Their capex is huge, opex low, and only way to make profit is to run 8000+ hours per year on full load. With 40+% renewables, that won’t happen, so traditional baseload will become prohibitively expensive and thus price itself out of the market. Again, fast flexible capacity is needed to balance the system, and coal and nuclear are not particularly flexible.

Another comment on the fact that Denmark doesn’t have storage: Norway does. Take a look at Danish wind data and compare that with DK-NO electricity flows. Not saying that it’s a bad thing – in many ways, it is a textbook case of maximising the use of wind power (in terms of CO2, does it really matter if the wind gets used in Denmark or Norway)?

Great stuff!

Kimi Arima
Wärtsilä Power Plants
http://www.smartpowergeneration.com

For example, will storage be “end user friendly” and get installed in large amounts in people’s homes and apartments? Since retail users pay more for electricity they stand to save more by storing electricity during low price hours and then using that electricity when rates rise.

Or will something like Ambri’s liquid metal batteries provide such cheap storage that they will get installed on a large scale at the utility level? I’m not sure that molten metal would be very acceptable in our residences.

I can see a future in which end users become major electricity producers as solar prices fall. Solar reaches parity at the retail end much sooner than at the wholesale level. We could see enormous amounts of homeowner and commercial solar. By the time solar drops low enough to compete at the wholesale level we might have enough installed.

That would put utility companies in the business of providing storage and fill-in power, covering the hours when the Sun isn’t shining.

It’s going to be very interesting to watch….

Ask the wrong questions – you get the wrong answers.

NO electricity will need to be stored, WHEN enough renewables deliver electricity from stored ENERGY, and you won’t need a very large capacity of stored energy to get the grid running sweetly at lower cost.

A balanced mix of renewables plus an expansion of technologies such as BEVs, will drastically cut the “need” for dedicated grid (battery) storage AND limit the flow of cross-border transfers of electricity.

Aquion says that they are going into production in 2013, they are currently building their factory. And their price target is <$200/kWh.

Ambri has operating prototypes and expects to be in production with their liquid metal battery in a couple of years. Their price should be even lower.

—

Germany is not a 'stand-alone' country. Germany constantly buys and sells electricity across its boarder. The larger the European grid becomes the more renewable energy will be usable without adding storage.

A study that tries to determine how much renewable energy Germany could use without taking into consideration the wider European system is likely to generate too low a number.