Opinion: Reinventing Fuel-Based Power for a More Secure and Resilient Grid

by Toby Gill (Intelligent Power Generation/Green Car Congress) With battery storage able to provide a unique role in balancing a renewable electricity grid, Toby Gill, CEO of Intelligent Power Generation, asks could innovations in green hydrogen and biofuel technologies contribute to a more optimized and economical energy mix?

The growth of global industrialization, increasing demand on energy resources and rising carbon emissions are deepening the need for energy infrastructure that is increasingly green, distributed, flexible, and resilient.

We are transitioning from a demand-led energy system, where power generation can be easily turned on and off to match demand, to one that is led by supply from variable and inflexible sources. As a result, grid balancing is now becoming more complex, whilst resilience and reliability all the more important. The challenge, now, is in establishing a renewable energy mix that can effectively and economically balance supply and demand season-by-season, week-by-week, hour-by-hour and second-by-second.

This varying demand on the electricity grid is managed by different balancing mechanisms, with some more suited to specific changes in demand than others. One example is diesel and natural gas generators, that are plugged into local transformers. These “dispatchable” forms of power generation can respond to changes in demand in as little as 5 minutes, making them suited to balance those difficult-to-predict peaks.

We are no longer working with an energy system that can be led only by predictions in demand, but one that needs to establish a new set of mechanisms that can effectively and economically balance this demand uncertainty with a newfound uncertainty in supply.

Again, to scale battery storage to store the weeks and weeks of power needed to balance the grid in those situations would result in huge infrastructure requirements.

Hydrogen and biofuels offer another form of renewable energy storage to further optimize our energy system. Wind, solar and battery storage are not the most optimized solution, not when we have a route to net-zero, demand-responsive power with fuels such as hydrogen and biofuels. These renewable fuels can be a more energy dense and more cost-effective energy storage medium for balancing supply and demand not just in those longer timeframes, but across the spectrum of intermittency.

The challenge in using renewable fuels today is twofold. Firstly, the timelines to the abundant availability of renewable fuels that are economical to produce and environmentally sustainable is uncertain. This creates risk around investing in fuel infrastructure today that could become redundant tomorrow. Equally, any technology currently available, for burning these renewable fuels, uses a flame during the combustion process, producing the pollutant emissions that are harmful to human health.

We need, therefore, technologies and solutions that offer fuel-flexibility in order to de-risk the transition to renewable fuels, as well as ones that do not compromise our clean air ambitions. Hydrogen fuel cells go some way to answering these challenges, but breakthroughs in flameless combustion and low-cost, high-temperature ceramics offer an alternative solution.

We can, then, continue to use the localized dispatchable power generation that we have always used but do so with renewable fuels. As with batteries, renewable fuel-based power offers a further opportunity to optimize our energy system and reduce the total amount of infrastructure needed.

A hybrid system of wind, solar, batteries and renewable fuel-based power is the solution for a resilient, optimized and stable energy system

As the world strives to decarbonize and mitigate our climate impact, one of our key goals is to ensure sustainable, secure and affordable energy. Renewable fuels, and innovations in the technologies that operate them, offer a road map to reinventing fuel-based power generation to help achieve this future. An energy system that uses wind, solar, battery storage and renewable fuel-based power is not only more optimized and stable, but one that is decarbonized and affordable too.

Let us not, therefore, discard fuel-based power as a tool of the past, but one that can evolve to help us achieve a resilient and secure net-zero future. READ MORE