Decentralized model in detail - Energy
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It’s high time to wrap things up and present the decentralised model we have been working up. We’ll being with energy because it’s the foundation of all civilisation.
Energy
The more there is energy to use and the cheaper it is, the more we can automate and have robots and computers do non-creative work for us. This releases time to pursue other interests like research and development of technology and creation of arts. In a sense civilisation is a thermodynamic system. No energy or very expensive energy leads to no civilisation. Hence its right to start our decentralised wrap-up with a look at the importance of energy for society.
The energy segment is going towards electrification at rapid speed due to a few key reasons such as efficiency gains in electric motors compared to combustion engines, it reduces dependency on fossil fuels when electricity is generated in clean ways like with nuclear, solar or wind and general advances in energy storage technology.
Generation
There are a multitude of decentralised energy generation technologies:
Some technologies like solar, wind, small scale hydro and biomass scale downwards to very small units, others like nuclear, geothermal power, large hydropower etc. require larger investments and supply to a bigger areas like nearby city.
As the investments are fairly big for an individual, its likely people will form energy associations and jointly purchase and built their decentralized generation and storage capacities. Energy associations are one of the trends of future.
Energy associations can sell excess to the grid. As an alternative, local energy markets may emerge if people also own their own generation capacity and participate to a local micro-grid.
Storage
Since renewables are intermittent sources (available irregularly) storage is needed. The storage options are many and the options depend how much to store and how fast the energy is needed to be available. For fast access in limited quantity large batteries, capacitors, rotating masses are possible options to balance the grid. For larger storages pumping water to higher ground or storing it in ammonia, traditional fuels or hydrogen to use in generators or fuel cells (for hydrogen) later.
Like all things, also storage technologies have tradeoffs. Batteries are expensive option to store large quantities and are best for short term balancing. The rare earth metals used can come a problem etc.
This post gives more detailed information on energy storage with hydrogen, DME, Ammonia. And a starter on fuel cells, decentralized way to turn those energy store media back into electricity.
More on energy structure on the article on electricity industry structure. (see towards bottom)
Balancing energy with demand response
There is a basic asymmetry between energy generation with renewables and the demand. Renewables are intermittent sources – their output can rapidly swing to zero when wind stops blowing or sun sets in the evening. One way to achieve balance is energy store, but it’s not the only one.
Load shaping is the idea to reduce energy use when demand is high and/or generation capacity is low. The reverse idea is also possible, use energy when it is readily available and limit when in short supply. A few examples:
Electricity for non-essential services is shortly switched off during peaks. Houses with battery storage can start using it during peak selling reduction capacity to the grid or air condition can be switched off for say quarter of an hour in large set of houses without affecting indoor temperature.
Industrial plants can stop producing for a few weeks during high demand times. Sometimes factories can earn more by not running and doing regular maintenance
Water shortage is a real problem in many areas of the world. Solar energy can be used to run reverse osmosis/nanofiltration to make it potable for us or for irrigation. There is no need to run this process at night so the whole water purification process could be run just during daylight time eliminating the need for expensive storage.
lectricity can be used to cool down houses when sun shines and it’s hot. Or a combination: water is purified and cooled during daytime and stored coolness used during night time to keep temperatures tolerable (“cold, cold heart of home loved by all”).
Manufacturing could well be done only when cheap electricity is available (running factories, irrigation pumps, 3d printers, CNC machines etc.). This would require perhaps some overprovisioning of machinery
For more on energy store, demand response, see also article on electricity industry:
Chaos Engineering
Renewables change the structure of previously hierarchical and stable grid system into a complex one controlled by price signals and active balancing measures. More control power is needed to cover large swings in production and still the resulting system becomes more unpredictable.
Complex systems have emergent phenomena – behavior you cannot foresee from parts. IT data centers have similar characteristics and are using resilience engineering to prevent chaotic shutdowns (also called chaos engineering). The idea is to stress test live complex systems with intentional errors to smoke out hiding errors. When applied to the grid, this means randomly tripping wires. To cope participants need to be able to sustain outages and operate in island mode. Chaos engineering principles “toughen up” the system during good times so that crises go over unnoticed. For more see the article on “chaos grid”
Alternate view
As an alternate view, this post lists some points against decentralized energy. It’s always good to look at the negatives or arguments against whatever you are favouring, You regularly need to revisit and change the initial ideas.
Summary
Energy segment is easily decentralisable with lots of options for generation and storage. Cost issues and path dependency (we have built a centralized, fragile system that is cost efficient) slow down change.
Intermittent energy generation makes the system unpredictable and ideas from IT infra are needed such as chaos engineering.
Decentralised energy is resilient form of needed for our civilisation to work. Access and low cost of energy is the one basic enabler for modern life.