Earlier I have made some observations on Mark Jacobson’s energy scenarios. See here and here. I continue my dumpster diving in this post with few storage related remarks. Let me start by showing Jacobson’s assumptions on energy storage in USA.
Jacobson et al.2015 assumptions on storage. Basically free. (Ignore the factor of 100 mistake in the 3rd column for UTES. They didn’t mean that.)
For UTES Jacobson has model in mind in Canada. “UTES storage is patterned after the seasonal and short-term district heating UTES system at the Drake Landing Community, Canada”. This is a group of 50 homes that get lot of their heat from solar thermal coupled to seasonal storage. Let us google…. and find a presentation by American association of Physics teachers. Boreholes, district loop, and short term storage alone had a cost of more than 20000$/home. This is far more than what IRENA says is the limit for financial attractiveness (0.25€/kWh investment cost). These houses were built only with generous subsidies from the public sector. Furthermore, if I read correctly the seasonal UTES system in Drake Landing can store about 12000 kWh per household. Of this about 60% is lost to the ground. So in Jacobson’s electricity heavy scheme we need almost 3 kWh of electricity in the summer to have 1 kWh of heat in the winter. If you compare the cost to heating with natural gas, there is easily an order of magnitude difference in favour of gas. Conveniently Jacobson et al. excluded other sectors than electricity sector in their cost discussions. Miraculously demand for an order of magnitude more expensive heat just appears to help solve the integration problems of 100% WWS scenario….Not that Jacobson would bother to mention the issue. Mind boggles. While we are thinking, how much would it cost to change american houses so that they would be heating from UTES systems? Let me guess… about 0.001…0.002 cents/household?
Incidentally Jacobson also has a soft spot for using cars to assist electrical grid. In 2011 he (and Delucchi) gave some cost estimates.
Delucchi and Jacobson 2011 on cost of vehicle to grid storage. Range 1.4-17.6 cents/kWh
Delucchi and Jacobson intepreting V2G costs…
Some update! Vehicle to grid is also almost free.
This is getting too depressing and disorienting. Time for a drink.
PassiiviIdentiteetti 
6 comments
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30/01/2016 at 6:18 AM
indy222
There’s a difference here, which I’d love to hear you address. I admit I’m skeptical of the rah-rah that seems to come from the Jacobson team. However, a good friend is a senior policy advisor to pluginamerica and had this comment when I forwarded your concern about V2G cost differences…
“Quick answer on this one – Marc Jacobson is talking about the impact on the batteries of using V2G (and it’s much less if just used for regulation/grid frequency management). The Plug In America estimates are how much an EV driver might expect to get back from selling electricity (and electricity services) to the grid – ala solar. Totally different items!
Hopefully that helps (and makes you feel better!)”
– J
> Hi J
>
> Hey, I’m trying to sort out who’s telling the truth about vehicle-to-grid (V2G) costs of electrical power and thought you might be familiar with pluginamerica and Jacobson’s recent claims…. here’s the analysis of Jacobson’s extremely rosy thoughts on how cheap to convert to totally renewables… (link to your weblog here)
30/01/2016 at 6:51 AM
Jani-Petri Martikainen
I don’t see how would the items be totally different. The cost estimate was based on how much owner needs to get for kWh sold in order to compensate for battery decay etc. Jacobson is basically claiming that a) there is no either no decay or b) if there is, it doesn’t matter since new car will be bought before battery is dead. I think neither assumption makes sense. His claim of no decay is not referenced and seems physically implausible and car life time is beside the point since surely cars resale value is reduced with dead battery. There are other cost estimates for V2G as well and none I have seen is remotely in the Jacobson’s ballpark. I choose to use plug in America as a reference since their results were pretty recent and I found them quickly.
30/01/2016 at 8:18 AM
indy222
Thanks. I’ll get back to you. Civil conversations – don’t you love it?
30/01/2016 at 9:00 AM
indy222
My Plug-In-America contact is going to bring up this subject tomorrow in person, to Tom Saxton, who wrote the article. I’ll report back. By the way, a climate scientist I’m working with has said, privately, that he finds Jacobson’s papers irritatiing; they read more like ad copy than scientific papers. So we may be on the same page here. I’m just trying to get … clear.
30/01/2016 at 11:15 AM
Jani-Petri Martikainen
Now there is a buzz about NOAA paper with renewables, supergrids etc. by MacDonald et al. Despite the misleading media surrounding the study, I found the paper to be good and serious. Jacobson’s work reads more like glorified advocacy.
31/01/2016 at 10:12 PM
indy222
Hello Jani-Petri,
Here is what Tom Saxton says…
“From reading the blog commentary (that would be this blogsite) on Jacobson’s study, I see that Jacobson considers three scenarios:
1) Batteries don’t wear out during the lifetime of a vehicle, so battery amortization is free.
2) Batteries wear out, but V2G doesn’t affect that.
3) V2G use is the same on a kWh basis as driving.
In case 3, his cost range is close to what I came up with, lower by a factor of about two but overlapping. He then immediately dismisses that case. “This case is unlikely, because there is evidence that V2G cycling does not cause the same battery degradation as does driving.” I can totally believe “not the same” but it will take more than a bit of handwaving to convince me it’s a factor of 10 lower.
So, basically he assumes battery cycles are (or will be) free. In that case, V2G is totally awesome. Duh.
My study measures the per kWh battery amortization based on driving use. The data I have from the Model S survey is very good, as I collect data from the trip meter that shows kWh drawn from the pack and many owners have left one of the two trip meters collecting data for the majority of the vehicle’s lifetime. That may well be an overestimate of the V2G cost, but it’s going to take some real evidence with actual production EVs to access the difference.
Tom
So – yeah; Jacobson seems to be more engaged in promo than in carefully authenticated evidence. He sure got a lot of smiles at Paris with this. Policy people seem to LOVE being seen as the saviors of the Growth economy in the face of climate change, even if the facts have to be ignored or bent. That’s what I’m seeing. Physics people like Prof. Tim Garrett and his evidence that growth will doom our atmosphere to ever-rising CO2 with no end in sight, even with not inconsiderable efforts at decarbonizing the energy required, are being completely ignored.