Government Clown Denies That Energy Storage Exists In Space & Time

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Energy storage is a thing that exists in space and time, though you wouldn’t know it from the recent remarks of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who is apparently unaware of such things. Nevertheless, batteries do exist, they are routinely used for squirreling away large quantities of wind and solar energy, and the technology is continuing to evolve in support of grid efficiency, resiliency, and…wait for it…reliability! Now, where have we heard that word before?

Wind, Solar, & The Reliability Factor

Comparing a member of US President Donald Trump’s cabinet to a clown is an insult to clowns, but such is the world we live in today. Burgum is among those piling into the clown car previously known as the federal government. How else to describe the intentional faceplant he executed on live television during an appearance on Fox Business Thursday last week, when he conjured up a world in which every sunset is a “catastrophic failure.”

“And of course, when the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called sunset and there’s no solar energy produced, and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive,” Burgum said during the widely reported segment.

“We’ve had times where, in the last couple of days, in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars this country has spent on wind, we only had like 1 percent, or 2 percent of electricity being generated by wind,” Burgum also said.

Where to begin? One could just as easily point out that of course, when the sun goes down, and when the sun comes up, too, you have a catastrophic failure called climate change unfolding in real time and yet we’re subsidizing fossil energy resources that are destructive, dangerous, and expensive.

As for reliability, last year the US Energy Information Agency ran the numbers and reported that as of 2023, wind accounted for a full 10% of US electricity generation, not just a percent or two. Wind and solar together topped out at a healthy 14%.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s “American Energy Dominance” plan somehow finds room to embrace two other forms of renewable energy that racked up a far less “reliable” track record than either wind or solar in 2023, with geothermal registering a dismal 0.4% and biomass (all forms combined) squeaking into the single digits at 1.1%.

The American Energy Dominance plan also supports hydropower, which clocked in at just 5.7% in 2023, surpassing solar but falling short of wind by a wide margin.

Reliability & Energy Storage

In sum, the plan supports three forms of renewable energy that collectively underperform wind and solar by a wide margin. The big question is why exclude both wind and solar, and there is an explanation of sorts. Under the American Energy Dominance Plan, “reliability” is the common denominator for geothermal, biomass, and hydropower along with fossil fuels and nuclear energy, with reliability referring to any power generation facility that delivers electricity on a 24/7 basis.

That simplistic definition of reliability snips wind and solar out of the picture, which is very convenient for Trump personally. Not so convenienced are professional grid planners and other stakeholders for whom reliability is a whole-of-system effort.

“Energy reliability is the ability of a power system to consistently deliver power to homes, buildings, and devices — even in the face of instability, uncontrolled events, cascading failures, or unanticipated loss of system components,” the Energy Department states, while emphasizing that wind and solar energy do the opposite of what Burgum suggested to Fox viewers:

“When we diversify our energy mix by adding more types of energy to the grid, we increase our energy reliability. The rise of renewable power, which comes from unlimited energy resources, like wind, sunlight, water, and the Earth’s natural heat, has the potential to vastly improve the reliability of the American energy system.”

Energy storage is a key element of reliability, including small-scale batteries distributed among homes and other buildings as well as utility-scale storage facilities. “Energy storage technologies can improve energy reliability by making surplus energy available whenever it is needed,” the Energy Department explains.

Reducing The Cost Of Energy Storage

The Energy Department’s longstanding grid modernization initiative has already settled on a formula that emphasizes small-scale distributed energy storage and power generation resources to improve reliability and resiliency. The initiative is probably in mothballs now, but US Presidents come and go, and the US grid will be in need of an overhaul long after the current occupant of the White House leaves office for the last time on January 20, 2029 — peacefully this time, one hopes.

Part of the modernization plan involves deploying modern grid management tools to help reduce costs, by optimizing energy storage capacity for wind and solar generation.

In 2023, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory took a deep dive into the distributed energy storage angle in a proof-of-concept paper under the title, “Shifting Demand: Reduction in Necessary Storage Capacity Through Tracking of Renewable Energy Generation.”

The study explored the potential for minimizing the capacity, and consequently the cost, of wind and solar energy storage. with the aid of a new (as in, brand new) autonomous control system called FAPC for “forecast-aided predictive control.” As deployed in the NREL paper, FAPC would be able to scale up to control thousands of assets.

The paper focused on shifting demand in a renewable energy scenario saturated with EV charging stations and HVAC systems. “Results show that FAPC effectively shifts demand to track a RE [Renewable Energy] generation signal under different weather and operating conditions,” the research team concluded. “It is found that FAPC significantly reduces the required capacity of the battery storage system compared to a baseline control case.”

More recently, researchers at Aalborg University in Denmark have developed a cost-cutting energy storage concept for solar arrays, which combines regular lithium-ion batteries in a hybrid system with supercapacitors. Because supercapacitors are more durable than Li-ion batteries, the expectation is that the hybrid system will reduce system costs by dividing the energy storage chore between two components, enabling each to perform to the best of its ability.

The new study modeled a hybrid system that reduces battery cycling by up to 13% over a year. Further studies will involve testing the concept on batteries under real-world conditions.

There Goes The Clown Car, Over A Cliff

As if on cue, just a few days after Burgum’s appearance on Fox, a swarm of jellyfish invaded a nuclear power plant in France, forcing plant operators to shut the whole thing down. So much for Trump’s energy plan and its insistence on “reliable” power plants.

A little closer to home, in May two nuclear power plants in Louisiana were abruptly taken offline, leading to a massive blackout in New Orleans. The shutdowns were reportedly needed to stabilize the grid and prevent a more widespread power outage.

Too bad grid operators didn’t have a suitable energy storage facility at hand to stabilize the grid. In contrast, over in the UK, a new 200-megawatt battery array in the Scottish Highlands is credited with preventing a widespread blackout after a 1,877-megawatt biomass power plant went on the fritz. The energy storage facility was purpose-built to deliver grid stabilizing services as part of Scotland’s plan to rely exclusively on wind, solar, and hydropower.

Meanwhile, here in the US…oh, never mind. Drop a note in the comment thread if you have any thoughts about that or better yet, find your representatives in Congress and let them know what you think.

Photo: Did Interior Secretary Doug Burgum miss the memo? Everyone else knows that today’s energy storage technology can absorb large amounts wind and solar energy, and tuck them away for later use (utility scale battery array courtesy of NREL).