IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/renene/v35y2010i9p1967-1969.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Grid-connected intermittent renewables are the last to be stored

Author

Listed:
  • Swift-Hook, Donald T.

Abstract

When hydroelectric power systems became widespread, associated developments for energy storage, using pumped water, soon followed. Many other methods of storage have since been considered. Today's interest in other renewables, notably wind energy has led to assertions that, because it is intermittent, wind can make no contribution to the firm power on a power system (i.e., it has no capacity credit) but that storage can make it viable. Here we show that such assertions about intermittent renewables like wind are false – they can and do make contributions to firm power and storage has no special contribution to make for them. However, their main contribution is to fuel saving and storage is counter-productive for that because the losses in the storage and regeneration round-trip would represent a waste of fuel that had already been saved. More importantly, the energy being stored comes from those generators that were the last ones brought on line to supply the extra energy that is being stored, which would be the first to be shut down if the storage stopped, e.g., because the store was full or had broken down. These will be (marginally) the most expensive generation on line, the (marginally) cheapest generation always having being used first. Renewables have no fuel costs, so their (marginal) cost is zero, which must always make them (marginally) the cheapest power on the system, whenever they are available. So they will always be the last to be shut down or stored. When storage is installed, grid-connected intermittent renewables like wind energy will never be stored unless nothing else is available.

Suggested Citation

  • Swift-Hook, Donald T., 2010. "Grid-connected intermittent renewables are the last to be stored," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 35(9), pages 1967-1969.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:renene:v:35:y:2010:i:9:p:1967-1969
    DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2010.01.025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811000042X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.renene.2010.01.025?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Swift-Hook, D.T. & Ter-Gazarian, A.G., 1994. "The value of storage on power systems with intermittent energy sources," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 5(5), pages 1479-1482.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Khoshrou, Abdolrahman & Dorsman, André B. & Pauwels, Eric J., 2019. "The evolution of electricity price on the German day-ahead market before and after the energy switch," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 1-13.
    2. Chong, W.T. & Pan, K.C. & Poh, S.C. & Fazlizan, A. & Oon, C.S. & Badarudin, A. & Nik-Ghazali, N., 2013. "Performance investigation of a power augmented vertical axis wind turbine for urban high-rise application," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 388-397.
    3. Swift-Hook, Donald, 2013. "Wind energy really is the last to be stored and solar energy cannot be stored economically," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 971-976.
    4. Carson, Richard T. & Novan, Kevin, 2013. "The private and social economics of bulk electricity storage," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 66(3), pages 404-423.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Khoshrou, Abdolrahman & Dorsman, André B. & Pauwels, Eric J., 2019. "The evolution of electricity price on the German day-ahead market before and after the energy switch," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 1-13.
    2. Georgilakis, Pavlos S. & Katsigiannis, Yiannis A., 2009. "Reliability and economic evaluation of small autonomous power systems containing only renewable energy sources," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 65-70.
    3. Pickard, William F. & Shen, Amy Q. & Hansing, Nicholas J., 2009. "Parking the power: Strategies and physical limitations for bulk energy storage in supply-demand matching on a grid whose input power is provided by intermittent sources," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 13(8), pages 1934-1945, October.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:renene:v:35:y:2010:i:9:p:1967-1969. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/renewable-energy .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.