The world is electrifying. From transport to heating, from construction to manufacturing, any process that can be electrified is being electrified. Power transmission grids face a massive increase in demand.

Simultaneous to the demand increase is a move to increase a grid’s reliance on renewable—and intermittent—energy sources. All this means maintaining a balanced and reliable grid is becoming increasingly difficult. Without proactive measures, countries could soon face widespread and more frequent blackouts. 

The Need for Baseload Power

For most countries the most popular forms of renewable energy are wind and solar. While they are both an effective and cost competitive form of energy compared to fossil fuels, they are also intermittent. When the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, they are not producing power.

Intermittent renewables alone cannot meet the growing demand for electricity. Baseload power, which provides a consistent level of power output, is essential to maintain a stable grid. Sarah Long, the Market Director for Atkins Net Zero Energy, emphasises the importance of baseload power, stating, “We do need baseload solutions to keep the renewable penetration balanced.”

However, not all countries have equal access to renewable baseload power sources like geothermal or hydropower. Countries like Iceland, with an abundance of geothermal and hydropower resources, have successfully achieved 100% renewable electricity production. 

Another example is Canada, Alastair Perry, Vice President of Renewables in Canada for SNC Lavalin, explains, “Over 60% of Canada’s electricity is generated using hydropower. And hydropower has been around for over 100 years. One of SNC Lavalin’s first projects was working on a hydro dam in Quebec, and that was over 100 years ago.”

Nuclear Power

Canada also generates a lot of its baseload power from nuclear power stations. 

Nuclear power is a low carbon alternative that provides a reliable baseload power supply. While it remains a controversial topic, Long argues that nuclear power is an affordable option when considering the entire system balance cost. She explains, “The French have led the way on the nuclear side of doing things. France is often out there with the lowest carbon generation in Europe.” 

Germany, on the other hand, has gone from one quarter of their electricity supply coming from nuclear power stations, to completely phasing it out. Now, as of April 2023, none of Germany’s power comes from nuclear.

As Long explains this has led to a higher dependence on fossil fuels, which will slow the country’s energy transition “Unfortunately, they’ve had to fall back on coal storage while they’re balancing. For a high renewable system—where you’re trying to really get the greenest solution—it has ended up backfiring a little bit.”

One critique of nuclear power is the cost, but  Long argues that isn’t necessarily the case. “We’re doing some studies at the moment to look at the cost of the percentage of renewables on a grid and how much that final 10% or 20% costs, because then you’re paying a lot more to balance the grid. Going from 70% renewables to 100%, you get a sharp increase in the cost to balance.”

This means while nuclear power stations are expensive to build compared to—for example—solar farms, ensuring you have a strong baseload of energy can reduce the cost of energy across the grid.

“People will tell you that nuclear power is expensive, which is true if you look at the levelized cost of energy. However, if you look at an entire system balance cost, nuclear power starts to look very much more affordable.”

Building nuclear infrastructure takes time. For countries like Germany that have no nuclear supply other interim solutions are necessary to reduce carbon emissions in the meantime.

Carbon Capture and Storage

To bridge the gap between renewables and nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) can be a viable option. Although controversial, CCS can help remove carbon emissions from existing energy production. Long acknowledges that CCS is a transition solution for situations where other alternatives are not available. She says, “Whilst we can’t make those numbers stack up between renewables and nuclear, putting carbon capture and storage on is a kind of five-year project.”

This is after all a transition and certain fossil fuels will be part of that transition in some countries. So investing in CCS will help to decarbonise grids faster.

“Natural gas is going to have to play a role in the energy transition. I know there’s a lot of work being done on carbon capture to perfect the technologies, to drive down the cost, improve the risk profile to make sure that whatever is sequestered stays in the ground, or even find ways of using the CO2 that’s captured in useful products.”

 

Energy Storage Solutions

As the energy transition progresses, energy storage becomes crucial to balance the intermittent nature of renewable sources. Storage systems provide either long term or short term storage. Short term is usually hours to days, whereas long term storage is weeks, months or even years of storage capability.

Depending on the makeup of a grid’s energy sources, either long-term or short-term storage will be more important. In Canada where they have strong green baseload capacity, short term storage to manage the peaks and variability of demand is more important.

Perry explains, “Because we’ve been blessed with those baseload assets, haven’t looked a lot at grid storage in general, but I think the bits that have been developed, are more focused at this stage on the short term, managing four hours of peak, and battery energy storage systems are, I think, getting developed the most.”

In Germany, with low green baseload capacity and a grid more reliant on intermittent renewables like solar and wind, longer term storage is needed. Many options are being developed, such as thermal storage or compressed air. Long says one of the most interesting is hydrogen storage: “The one that we’re looking at particularly is hydrogen storage, converting gas storage-which currently exists in salt caverns to store quite large quantities of gas-and converting that to hydrogen storage.

Electricity can be converted into hydrogen through electrolysis, and then stored at huge volumes until it is needed to be turned back to electricity. While the round trip efficiency of hydrogen is not as high as other storage methods, the huge quantities and long time periods for which hydrogen can be stored make it useful for countries with a lower level of baseload renewables

Hydrogen is already stored in a handful of salt caverns in the US and Europe but work still needs to be done to allow for hydrogen storage to use existing natural gas pipes and infrastructure.

Long explains, “Hydrogen has a different molecular structure, and so the pipes, there is potential for more seepage from pipes. Gas turbines as well aren’t really designed to run on hydrogen at the moment. So there are various projects in the pipeline for blending different amounts into gas turbines, and various new projects being looked at for hydrogen powered gas turbines, but they’re not quite mature enough yet.”

Many energy storage systems are not mature enough yet, or capable of the huge capacity required. Battery storage is the most developed and widely used but Perry says many different storage options will be required, “If we were to convert all of the UK’s 32 million petrol vehicles to electric vehicles, what would that imply in terms of resource demand? If you look at what are now called energy transition minerals, the increase in demand for those minerals is staggering. So just to give you a couple of examples for numbers, for that 32 million vehicle conversion, if you were to look at a mineral like cobalt, which plays a significant role in the battery, the increase in demand for that conversion would be a factor of two times what the current annual global production of cobalt is. So that amount of minerals just to replace the UK fleet, imagine what that looks like when you go and try to replace fleets of vehicles and other countries. That is part of the reason why in the energy transition we need a little bit of everything—or a lot of everything maybe is a better way to put it. There are various bottlenecks that we’re going to run into in the transition that we need to find solutions to.”

Time to act

The energy transition is not just a necessity, but a great opportunity for all countries to be self-sufficient in their energy production. However, for countries like the UK to achieve their goals of reaching net zero grid by 2035, action needs to be taken now.

Long explains that while progress is being made in the UK there is still uncertainty about what a decarbonised grid will look like, “Currently, in the UK, a lot of it has been research projects, or initial early concept phase. We really need to be getting a lot of those projects into delivery.  I think we probably know about 70 to 80% of what that grid will look like, but there’s still a fair gap to close.”

Perry says we need to start acting like we’re in a climate crisis and be willing to take risks by investing in new forms of energy and storage, “If we really truly believe that we’re in a climate crisis, right now, I’d say our behaviour doesn’t really reflect that. We need to move quicker and accept certain risks as we move quicker, because if we continue at the pace we’re at, I don’t think we’re going to be able to get to the mitigation that we really want, to avoid the worst effects of the expected climate change.”