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Germany Finances Major Push Into Home Battery Storage For Solar
mdsolar writes with this bit of news from Green Tech Media "The German government has responded to the next big challenge in its energy transition – storing the output from the solar boom it has created — by doing exactly what it has successfully done to date: greasing the wheels of finance to bring down the cost of new technology. ... Now it is looking at bringing down the cost of the next piece in the puzzle of its energy transition — battery storage. ... KfW’s aim, according to Axel Nawrath, a member of the KfW Bankengruppe executive board, is to ensure that the output of wind and solar must be 'more decoupled' from the grid. ... This is seen as critical as the level of renewable penetration rises to around 40 per cent — a level expected in Germany within the next 10 years. ... According to Papenfuss, households participating in the scheme will spend between €20,000 and €28,000 on solar and storage, depending on the size of the system (the average size is expected to be around 7kW for the solar array and around 4kWh for the battery)."
Personally I prefer my home steam generator. It uses 100% renewable, carbon-cycle, eco-friendly biofuel (wood) to generate steam that drives a turbine generator. I can get about 3kW out of my setup.
That's only a few car batteries.
However the problem still exists the second you scale up.
The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.
If it was easy to store electricity efficiently, we wouldn't need all this "always-on" peak demand power generation. We'd just store everything generated at night already and then release it the next day.
Fact is, as soon as you get into storing electricity, you're into massive efficiency drops.
They specifically state they are targeting lead-acid and lithium-ion. In other words, not LiPo. Yes, yes, LiPo is a type of lithium-ion but typically when you state "lithium-ion" they are not talking about LiPo but safer chemistries.
Although I find it hard to believe all those batteries are good for the environment. The whole point of a central power system is optimization and they are doing the opposite.
I had five kids, and now you tell me I can't count on them? Dammit!
Depends on how you spend the money.
Generalizing is always wrong. No government has 100% failure rate at anything. That said, a subsidy aimed at reducing the technological debt is very helpful in introducing new technology and competition.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Efficiency matters a lot when you're in the burn-fuel-for-power model, because you can always just burn the fuel tomorrow if you need to have the power tomorrow instead of today. For wind and solar power, the power is available when it's available, and you can either consume it, store it, or waste it. Ideally you'd have a proper smart grid (not the kind that's being marketed, which is just a power meter with WiFi) so that you could have things like fridges and freezers run their compressors during supply spikes and leave washing machines and so on programmed to run whenever there is surplus power. In the absence of being able to trigger demand when you have supply, storing it inefficiently is probably better than wasting it.
That said, the majority of my electricity consumption when there is no solar power available is lighting. It would be great to have a DC main with a relatively small battery that could power LED lights overnight. It would probably also let me charge electronic devices more efficiently than going via DC.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Would you call this a case of "LiPo-suction"?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Personally I prefer my home steam generator. It uses 100% renewable, carbon-cycle, eco-friendly biofuel (wood) to generate steam that drives a turbine generator. I can get about 3kW out of my setup.
Home-built or off-the-shelf? Link to plans or manufacturer or re-seller, please ;-)
The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.
Perhaps this would be a use case for nickel-iron batteries? They have an extremely long life; the reason they fell out of use is because of low energy density and poor charge retention. But energy density matters much less in your crawl space than it does in your tablet or your car, and for this use, being able to hold a charge for only a few days would be fine.
"The whole point of a central power system is optimization and they are doing the opposite."
A central power system is also a single point of failure, distributed power generation is the way forward once they've got power storage sorted and cheap. The grid can be used as a back up system
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Been saying we should have started doing this in the USA two decades ago when i worked home construction.
Every one of those subdivision mcmansion homes we have built should have come with a solar panel on the roof and 2 volt battery array.
We built MILLIONS of them. Hell the people buying 40k homes for 200k+ you could have even sold it to them as a 'feature' and not subsidize it at all.
Between that and all the big box stores having an array on the roof. We could be powering half the entire country by solar now. And it would have cost less than a month of one of our 'wars'.
But no. Because socialisim or something. Or no wait. Solar is for hippies. Or no wait.. It's expensive. Or no wait. Solar sucks. Or no wait whats the excuse of the day now?
We're dumb.
I agree with the general drive towards decoupling immediate production vs. use with better energy storage, but even with improved battery technology, everyone having batteries in their house is a particularly inefficient (and high-maintenance) way of doing it. Better approaches need quite large sinks for excess energy. For example, pumped-storage hydro is good for very large amounts. For medium-sized amounts, especially transient spikes, Denmark is experimenting with (PDF) dumping the excess production into district heating, since the heat reservoir handles fluctuations better than the grid does.
Better prediction and integration between sources can also help. For example, Denmark is largely managing its fluctuating wind energy these days not by literally storing it, but by predicting much of the variation, and offsetting discretionary production within the integrated Nordic energy market. What mostly happens is that on high-wind days, Sweden and Norway just reduce production at their hydro plants, and use the excess Danish wind power instead. In a sense the excess wind therefore gets stored as potential energy in the hydro reservoirs, but just by not producing the hydro in the first place, rather than pump-storage.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Molten Batteries
I was surprised to learn that the concept behind molten batteries originated in Germany with the V1. MIT and Dr Sadoway have a battery system that is supposed to be available 2014. If it was invented in Germany and has since been used for ICBMs and ordinance. Seems odd that it has taken almost 70 years to come full circle.
China will do what they did with solar, which is acquire western tech, and then subsidize and dump on Germany.
If Germany really wants to do this right, they will block ALL energy storage from China. Heck, the fact that they manipulate their money against the Euro and USD should be more than enough of a subsidy to trigger this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Lead-acid batteries are quite easily recycled. Granted, you have to take care due to the lead - then again, the other batteries have similar problems. On the other hand, they're quite simple: Lead, sulfuric acid and that's about it. No exotic materials.
This sounds really neat. Does it scale up? And does it have to burn just wood?
wind is already cheaper in America than everything except for hydro, geo-thermal, and nat. gas (and in that order). And in some places, they do not have much of those 3, but have wind, so those areas are in fact, ordering wind. Even here in Colorado, Xcell is installing multiple nat. gas power plants, but they are installing several new wind power parks because they KNOW that nat. gas prices will go up.
And as to batteries, eos energy storage is already the lowest going, and they are below the costs of a nat. gas plant.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
yeah, it is not like coal, oil, nukes, hydro, trains, planes, space crafts, cars/roads, electrification, telephony, etc ever got a hand out from a gov, esp. the American federal or state govs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Where would you put this set of battery cells? I'm guessing it's not going to be something the size of a car battery... probably won't be able to store it in the basement in case it floods or the attic due to weight. So do German's have a extra space in their garage for something that may take up the floor space of a water heater or furnace?
I keep a very clean and organized garage and I'd have trouble storing another lawn mower or installing another water heater/washer/clothesdryer.
Where did you pick up that opinion ? I can't think of a more reliable power grid. Living in Germany most part of my life (40+) I have never seen a brown-out nor a black-out here, except when a excavator damaged a big power line in the neighborhood. On the other hand working and vacationing in the USA, I have seen a number of brown-outs and I escaped the Northeast blackout of 2003 by sheer luck by a few hours flying west.
yes, I am quite sure that all of those cheap batteries are going to be lead-acid. *roll-eye*
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Solar has a good chance of being a very large industry in the future. Germany continues to advance, giving themselves an opportunity to be the world leaders in the industry -- the place where the skills, infrastructure, funding, supporting know-how (legal, financial, etc.) are all concentrated, like Silicon Valley for IT.
Meanwhile the "conservatives" in the US continue to obstruct progress here for political reasons, as part of their universal anti-liberal crusade. By loudly denying any idea that at any point was associated with liberals (including climate change and alternative energy), they will somehow change the facts and make conservatives "right".
Somehow nobody noticed that temperatures have not gone up in 16 years while CO2 levels climbed. So much for this new pagan religion.
Some people understand the importance of not drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term measurements in the presence of noise, and avoid cherry-picking the start date for their trend lines.
In order to really be useful, Germany would have to store at least gigawatt-hours of power. This huge solar peak they have during the daytime needs to be distributed at least into the evening hours, and ideally into the morning of the following day.
Distributed solar makes sense, at least partically because the loss of efficiency due to zillions of small power generation points more-or-less balances out with the gain in efficiency because the power is consumed near where it is generated, thus eliminating transmission losses.
Distributed power storage makes a good bit less sense. Charging and discharging batteries is - depending on the situation - somewhere between 60% and 80% efficient, dropping as the batteries age. The batteries will have to be replaced every few years, which further decreases the efficiency. Gigawatt-hours of batteries - we are talking - rough estimate - around 20,000 tons of batteries per GWh. That a lot of nasty chemical, not to mention manufacturing and recycling costs.
Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the Swiss, who then pump their lakes full, and then buying that electricity back when needed. This is around 70% efficient, and a hell of a lot friendlier to the environment.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
You lost an excellent opportunity to not show your ignorance.
Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
yeah, it is not like coal, oil, nukes, hydro, trains, planes, space crafts, cars/roads, electrification, telephony, etc ever got a hand out from a gov, esp. the American federal or state govs.
You forgot natural gas, the US government funded the development of fracking, I just read about cotton, where the government developed anti-wrinkle technology that reputedly saved the industry from new synthetic competitors around 1950.
Also, didn't we give the financial industry a couple of bucks the other day? Health care? Every defense-related industry?
Energy lost in transmission is about 7%, not 50%.
A pun isn't good unless it's bad.
He is probably taking into account heat to electricity losses. But that is kind of a misnomer since this does not apply to non-thermal power plants.
With lead acid, you recycle. Lead acid car batteries have ~98% recycle rate.
http://earth911.com/recycling/car-batteries/
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Lead Acid Batteries in fact are green, as long as you don't dump those in the nature, these types of batteries can be perfectly recylced!
imagine 4KWh of lead-acid batteries. that is going to be so much
better for the environment!
The lead in lead-acid batteries is completely recycled. That's already done with car batteries, so it's nothing new. Sulfuric acid is also recycled.
This is the CO2 return of invest of a windturbine. Solar panel is around 10 - 15 Months or so.
Not holding a charge mean wasting energy at the end. It is like drilling a giant hole into a hydroelectric dam at the end.
Anyway, the other question is: What's the carbon footprint of these batteries including the whole life cycle on a sufficient long period of time to not bias the result?
Achille Talon
Hop!
It sounds like a great use for nickel-iron. Unfortunately the nickel content makes them expensive. Of course the nickel can be recycled, so it's essentially a one-time investment. It's be interesting to work out the economics.
You have a good point. There shouldn't be subsidies for solar, just like we shouldn't have subsidies for nuclear, oil and hydro. Somehow it's the solar subsidies that get the most criticism though.
Not holding a charge mean wasting energy at the end. It is like drilling a giant hole into a hydroelectric dam at the end.
The point is, in the most basic system, you'd expect to discharge the batteries every night.
Anyway, the other question is: What's the carbon footprint of these batteries including the whole life cycle on a sufficient long period of time to not bias the result?
Considering that their lifespan is actually measured in decades, probably not bad ;-)
They also last practically forever with little or no maintenance. I wonder what the nickel content costs though? It's a fairly expensive metal.
They specifically state they are targeting lead-acid and lithium-ion.
Which is a different kind of disaster waiting to happen. Lead batteries provide about 40Wh of storage capacity per kg of lead. Germany has 40m households, and their average electricity consumption is 10 kWh per household per day. Which means that if, statistically, every household wanted to be able store one day of electricity consumption (which, arguably, isn't enough if you go 100% wind/solar, but anyway), you'd need 10 million tons of lead -- about one annual world production of lead, roughly as much as is contained in all car batteries worldwide combined.
And private households only consume 1/3rd or so of all the electricity produced in Germany (businesses and industry consume the other two 3rds).
AFAICT from this, the whole thing is a total non-starter. It will never scale up to any significant number of homes. A few percent of the households (mostly rich home owners) may do it, collect Government support and feel good about saving the environment. The overall effects will be inconsequential -- so much so that the whole project wasn't worth starting in the first place.
I own a house in Germany, unlike most readers here. To be clear, the money from the KfW is a loan, not a subsidy. The subsidy, if there is one, is that most KfW loans are interest free for the first 10 years.
The irritating thing to this home owner is that there seems to be no end to home improvements that our German government would like for me to implement. Be it tripple-paned windows, foam insulation, solar heating, solar power, and now batteries. And my house is barely 20 years old. I'm not against somebody who wants to put all these things into their home, but for this home owner, none of these things make any economic sense - even with a zero interest loan. This home owner has decided to do exactly nothing. And that in and of itself saves the environment a lot of waste.
The whole point of a central power system is optimization and they are doing the opposite.
No, the point of a central power system is economy of scale. But, unlike coal or nukes, solar PV doesn't really benefit from economy of scale. Most batteries don't benefit much either. By decentralizing they avoid the transmission losses, and avoid some of the capital expenses of the grid. But there is a BIG drawback to decentralized power generation and storage: it will be harder to tax.
although lead acid are one of the most easily recycled battery, and certainly common, less than 40% of the material is recovered
Cite? I find it hard to believe that applies to the lead.
even the most efficient country in the world, agriculturally, australia only gets a slight return from the sun with about 0.9kJ of oil per kJ of food produced
Do the sheep account for much of that efficiency? I would think that livestock grazing on large expanses of open land (which aren't artificially fertilized or anything) would be very efficient from that PoV. How does New Zealand do?
Not holding a charge mean wasting energy at the end. It is like drilling a giant hole into a hydroelectric dam at the end.
NiFe batteries self discharge at a rate of 20-30% per month. If they're fully charged, during the day, they'll lose under 0.5% of their charge by the time you start charging them again, which seems a pretty adequate loss - you'll lose more than that in the charging and discharging of pretty much any battery type. Remember, we're talking about very short-term energy storage here.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Sure things might look okay now, but in 10 years when bubsiness (and JOBS) have moved to more market driven countries
Which countries are those?
P.S. Even though I completely disagree with you, I think it's idiotic that you were down modded to -1. Hey mods: that's for trolls and flamebait, not opinions you disagree with.
It makes sense for gov. to help new industries get started, but I do not like how they do it. far better ways to do so.
BUT, the financial industry is the one that burns me. We should NOT have bailed them out. Instead, we should have allowed them to crash and then picked up the pieces and re-built many new banks or better yet, credit unions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Efficiency is irrelevant.
The grid and the power plants _are already very inefficien_! But you accept it. Now as we talk about batteries (I'm not really fond about this idea) you suddenly come up with _inefficiencies_ ... thats pretty lol, imho.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"What I'm waiting for is swapping the prices of day and night electricity prices. In the summer "peak" demand has shifted to night time by now."
Until this happens, storing solar generated energy is just dumb. At the moment my panels help me in 2 ways:
-it lowers my electricity demand for a year by about 50%.
-it saves about 10% on the price per kWh since I send energy to the grid at peak rates (0.22 EUR/kWh) and almost exclusively use offpeak (0.20 EUR/kWh)
I have absolutely nothing to gain by storing electricity right now.
I know that tiny tech india (http://www.tinytechindia.com) sells steam power plants specifically for home power generation. Now, they are shipping from India, so if you don't live nearby the shipping costs will run into the hundreds of dollars. HOWEVER, they sell them so cheap that even with the exorbitant shipping, it's cheaper than buying a locally made steam plant, as most modern made "Classical style" steam plants are usually intended for either large scale industrial use (READ: Expensive) or as boutique steam motors for old-time steamboat and steam car hobbyists. (READ: Even more expensive!)
The Tiny Tech plants are very simple and basic and ugly as sin, but they work VERY well. (I know of a guy that bought one for use as a steamboat engine, and after just a few modifications to allow for reversing the motor action he had a really nicely working, if ugly, motor.)
Alternately, with just a bit of metal fabrication you can build your own steam engine out of an old refrigerator compressor or a large AC compressor (basically the same thing) I've even seen guys re-work air compressors like the kind you can buy at Harbor Freight into working steam engines for various uses.
The tech is old, and requires some good old-fashioned metal-working and machining skills, not to mention patience and a willingness to learn a whole new set of terminology, but it is still a very viable way to generate power for all sorts of uses.
You had me worried for a moment - I misread billion as million.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'll take my socialism in the form of corporate welfare for the oil companies, than you very much.
The role of "the state" or the government is to take action for stuff the populace or the market or the industry is to short sighted for.
Hence we have laws/subsidies for education, military, healthcare, space travel, pensions, marriage etc etc and especially for future energy.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Decades only at current prices. Prices having been increasing significantly over the last few years and that trend does not seem likely to change any time soon. If for EUR 20K you can lock in your energy prices for the life of the system (also measured in decades), then you are very likely to make significant savings over that time.
For example, according to UK Department of Energy and Climate Change figures, electricity prices have risen by 63% since 2005, and by over 250% since 1987 (considering 25 years being the typical life of a solar PV installation).
why would you use lipo in stationary regularly loaded device where neither weight or size are of any meaningful consequence?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The point is, in the most basic system, you'd expect to discharge the batteries every night.
Certainly not!
At night energy consumption is super low, going down to 35% - 37% of daytime consumption.
You discharge the battery over daytime, at peak fluctuations. And you charge it again, during daytime.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A central power system is also a single point of failure
No it isn't. The grid is many power stations tied together. There have been incidents where that interconnection itself has been a problem due to ripple effects of one power line failure (e.g. the Northeastern blackout of 2003), but that's technically solvable. As for local transmission line failures, the problem is poor practices (overhead lines instead of underground) and poor maintenance (e.g. lack of tree trimming near overhead lines). Most countries spend more on power line maintenance than the US, and it shows in the reliability. In other words, to the extent our central power station system is unreliable, it's because of penny pinching and politics, not technical barriers.
distributed power generation is the way forward once they've got power storage sorted and cheap. The grid can be used as a back up system
"Off the grid" is a pipe dream for most people. While household solar and batteries move towards that goal, the solar won't be enough to cover all power needs. That's especially true in, for example, apartment buildings. On the whole, greater use of renewables will require greater interconnection than what we have now. I applaud the German household solar approach, but Germany doesn't have anything like America's Southwest. A lot of solar can be generated there, but it takes long distance transmission lines to get it to people in less sunny climes. Similarly, the Midwest is an ideal place for wind power, but again you need transmission lines to get it elsewhere. These transmission lines are also important because of the unreliability of many forms of renewable power. It may not be windy in one place on a given day (or number of days), but it's rare for the wind to not be blowing everywhere. Hence you transmit the power to even things out. Hydro is another, and definitely the oldest case, of renewables requiring long distance transmission lines. The Pacific DC Intertie ships 3.1GW from Northwest hydro plants to SoCal. Much of the Northeast gets power from Hydro-Québec, which has 60 hydro plants generating an astounding 35.8GW.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The whole point of a central power system is optimization and they are doing the opposite.
No, it never was. It was a matter of scaling. A coal plant e.g. yielding 10MW simply makes no sense.
Decentralized power generation would be more efficient, but also more expensive. That is why it was not done so far.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What I'm waiting for is swapping the prices of day and night electricity prices. In the summer "peak" demand has shifted to night time by now.
Can't be so hard and look at wikipedia etc. to see how the power demand curve is over day, or?
Claiming that at night the power demand is higher than during daytime is completely retarded.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If they have risen in the UK, it's due to poor government regulations and taxes. In the US, electricity prices have fallen significantly since 1988 in constant dollars, and unless people like Obama destroy the economy and energy market, they are going to continue to fall..
Furthermore, you are paying a significant opportunity cost on the money; you'd likely have gotten a 250% return if you had invested the money since 1987. And even if PV were worth it, you'd probably be better off waiting a few years for a newer, cheaper system. And that's not even counting the cost of maintenance, repairs, and cleaning.
Germany was dizzed by the US, for selling so many goods. I know that's because the industry fears ...
Other European countries complain about that a lot more than the US, and for good reason. For all that I admire German industry in many ways, Germany has had a mercantilist policy for decades. The Plaza Accord in 1985 dramatically reduced the German-US trade imbalance because it forced Germany to stop manipulating its currency. More recently, the Euro is beloved by Germany because they can run a trade surplus which doesn't get balanced out by movement in the exchange rates. European financial difficulties would be far less without the Euro. Like most mercantilist countries, Germany prides itself on its thrift and the competitiveness of its industry, where the truth is that they're simply part of the problem. The US took a similar tact in the 1920's, and it was a big part of the reason for the Great Depression.
That said, the majority of my electricity consumption when there is no solar power available is lighting.
This may be true for you, but some parts oft he world get cold at night.
And as for your "you can waste all you want from wind and solar" premise, that's just sheer lunacy. No resource is infinite.
You're preaching to the choir. Note my implied criticism for the typical libertarian's very selective complaints about government subsidies. The Koch brothers don't complain much about government subsidies for oil, do they?
For solar power, centralised is actually less efficient, because of the extra steps to high-voltage networks, transport, and similar steps down to 240V.
Depends on what you mean by "centralized". No grid is actually "centralized", all of them are distributed and with multiple sources (although with vastly more sinks, of course); in this sense, a grid with solar inputs could take advantage of the fact that when there are clouds over one part of Germany, perhaps they aren't over another part of it. The transmission losses can still be lower than energy storage losses (not to mention energy storage costs).
Ezekiel 23:20
Citation needed. You see there is this thing called investment, which may or may not have a return, but investors (such as governments) usually invest in things they expect to have a positive return. Some corporations do it as well, it's just that their shareholders don't always like them making investments with long-term payoffs. I don't think this is a new thing for Germany, and I see no evidence of them failing economically in the past, or now. They had a brief period in the 30s when their economy went tits up due to being forced to pay war reparations to all their neighbours, but since the 1940s they have been net positive contributors to the Soviet economy and now the European economy since reunification. Your comment sounds like mostly uninformed prejudice.
Korma: Good
I see unwelcome trends.
Those who advocate taking energy storage down to the building or subscriber level are living in a dream. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful dream! But this €20,000 unit cost will not magically come into existence. Those who envision lithium or (eventually it comes down to) lead acid batteries to the point where their effect is even detectable at grid scales are proposing an environmental nightmare in the manufacture and mass deployment of such things. Which thankfully will not come to pass because the investment capital is not there.
I go with solutions that are massive, central, run by the same people who (reliably) supply your electricity, and do not rely on evil large multipliers of objects constructed from rare earth elements or poisonous heavy metals.
I'm talking about something simple and inherently non-toxic, stored kinetic energy and rotation of heavy balanced cylinders in a near-vacuum. I vote fewer that are really big rather than many. Hoover Dam tech. Despite Beacon's bankruptcy in 2011 there are players who hope to salvage the concept using gimbals for stabilization.
I like the idea of kinetic energy storage solutions because if they were massive, centrally located and well constructed, the components would be mechanical parts that might have a smaller replacement cost than an equivalent amount of battery technology, whose chemical composition changes with age. It also fits well with my assertion that we should convert our long haul energy corridors (and generation facilities along those corridors) to native HVDC for a true inter-connected continental (and ultimately global) grid.
___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Nothing, until there's many so people dumping power into the grid that buying it from you at the fixed market rates becomes economically unsustainable. That's what is happening in Germany right now; utilities are complaining at having to buy this power and having no place to send it (we in NL have been buying it on the cheap, not that the consumer will notice this on their bill, but still). Since the utilities also have to run regular power plants for peak loads, their costs have soared. Electricity in Germany is expensive these days.
Unless they come up with a viable storage option, either in the home or in the neighbourhood, I expect the price of the power you sell back to the grid to drop sharply in the coming years.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
But, unlike coal or nukes, solar PV doesn't really benefit from economy of scale.
What about large area power generation equalization? (If you do have a really large-scale grid, that is.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Or how about a vanadium redox battery instead, a bit tough to handle right now, but with some engineering...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You could throw away the fucking lead/l-ion batteries and go with a nice Leyden Jar to hold that charge. Talk about super caps and they have existed for a couple of hundred years with the Leyden jar. I've played with one and let me tell you, depending on the size, they can hold some serious voltages - I've held one with 5M volts stored. Insane. The problem is, getting a controlled release from them and if Germany is willing to spend the money on the R&D, they make as much sense. Hell scale the damn things up and you could use them to stabilize the grid quite nicely.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
The batteries will last for more than a year, will be phased in over time, and will be fully recyclable.
The German people deserve credit for what they get right. For some reason the Germans have always seemed able to unite and take on massive projects more quickly than other nations. And I suspect their technology will be first rate in this new adventure.
Now imagine how easily most of the US can do the same. We are drowning in sunlight over a great portion of our nation. The potential of states like Florida and Texas to gather sunlight is remarkable. Most days we wish we had a little less solar light here. And we have plenty of wind and tidal energy as well. But unlike Germany we are a people at war with ourselves and our institutions and we simply can not push forward at all compared to Germany. Common resources such as wind, solar and tide seem to be shunned while things that cripple common resources are highly sought after here.
Ditto! Liquid metal (aka: molten salt) batteries are NOT about thermal storage, they are for storing electricity. You (the GP) are thinking of the molten salt systems used in concentrating solar-thermal power plants (aka: solar tower). Check dmbasso's link (above) for more info on liquid-metal battery tech.
Dr. Sadoway has been working with Khosla Ventures the last few years, commercializing this stuff. They expect to begin beta-test field trials with customers next spring, and hope to be in full production by the end of 2014. Khosla is also backing a compressed air solution that uses a sort of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression (solving an old bugbear of compressed air, the loss of energy to heat).
In short, there are robust, inexpensive storage solutions in the pipeline. (And not a moment too soon.) This will radically alter the "landscape" of renewable energy. When you can couple dirt-cheap solar PV with dirt-cheap storage, you have a recipe for rapid transition.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
At night energy consumption is super low, going down to 35% - 37% of daytime consumption.
Residential demand actually goes up when school lets out, and stays up until after dinner--which includes both late afternoon, and some time after dark. The utilities' peak demand is more during the day, but that's because of office workers...
You discharge the battery over daytime, at peak fluctuations. And you charge it again, during daytime.
Which makes charge retention even less of an issue, which was my original point.
It's called picking winners and losers. Perhaps otherwise the next winners might happen in other countries first. Is capitalism the best path to making that choice?
It's perfectly green so long as the batteries are properly recycled once worn out.
That's true overall, but not in homes where people are at work during the day. It's just that homes are not the biggest users of electricity.
Do you own any polyester clothes?
Only an idiot will claim government saved cotton from polyester. Never trust that source for anything, ever again. They have an axe to grind.
Fracking was invented in about 1900. The recent furor is just morons bleating.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The rate of return government is concerned about is votes/dollar.
Assume anything else and you have to assume they are _all_ morons.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is Germany. There will be so many safety regulations for this that it is either absolutely safe or not going to happen.
The storage is not for personal/house usage. That would be complete nonsense.
It is for managing the grid. So if the grid has a surplus you charge *some* of the batteries and if the grid needs power you discharge *some* of the batteries.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It will be once all those electric cars get connected to the grid...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Not a lot more tech. IIRC the Roman soldiers in North Africa made a sort of ice cream by using the cold of the desert night, and a deep pit lined with straw, and a highly insulated cover. They'd open it at night, and close it during the day, and after a few days they had a frozen dessert.
So all you need is a good insulated container...say a large styrofoam box filled with water, a pipe that runs through it, and a fan to blow air through it, and a way of cooling the air when you had execss power.
That's not so high tech...at least not if you can get a refridgerator.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In NL the utilities aren't buying the excess power up until to 5MWh, it just gets deducted from your usage: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salderen
If you are a nett producer (which is not possible for most homes due to a lack of viable sun facing surface area), you get might get less (eg Nuon pays you about 0.07 EUR/kWh http://www.nuon.nl/energie-besparen/zonnepanelen/terugleveren/ ).
But if (and only when) these rules change, storing might be usefull. But I doubt storing electric power is very useful. I'm partial to storing heat instead ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump )
It seems to me that the ideal battery for this use would hold it's charge for at least a week. So 20-30%/month isn't bad. But don't focus too tighly on any one day cycle. You need more coverage than that.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Because they are basically isolationist. It doesn't work well in a world with rapid transport, but they are still basically isolationist. This is one reason the foreign policy is so stupid. People just don't like to think about it.
(That said, this is clearly an oversimplification. But it's one of the big pieces. Like the stereotype US tourist who thinks that foreigners will underdand them if they just talk slowly, clearly, and loud enough.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I have thought of building one of those. Can you link the plans?
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Stereotypical Germans are at work during the day, so I doubt them using that much energy at home during the day, but plenty in the evening.
this is, after all, about residential power and about going "off-grid".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
No it won't. As even then the cars batteries will be used to compensate for day time fluctuations.
The difference between maximum (at roughly 14:00, depending on your country/location) which I define as 100% and night is huge.
The night minimum is like 35% / 40% and "base load" is around 40% (again depending on your grid).
It makes no sense to use the car batteries at night ... you would need to shut down base load plants for that. You use the batteries for fine grained load balancing.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The market is, by definition, far-sighted.
By definition? The market is always right, if you define "right" to be whatever the market does. It's a tautology.
The definition of a security's price is "the value of all future business of the concern."
I hope you don't do any serious trading with that idea, because you're going to be very poor. As Keynes observed (from personal experience), the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
In other news: The US spending on war continues unabated...
(Imagine how many actual problems they could have solved by now if they spent all that money on something else....)
No sig today...
I'd done the research myself already. Wood is way more expensive than natural gas unless you grow your own... and Trees take a lot of space and time to grow. And thats an awful lot of work to plant them and then harvest them. I've seen systems that use pellets made from the sawdust swept up from sawmills. That is a lot more cost effective than cut wood.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Yet another paragon of scientific insight. I've read more than enough of those denialist sites to understand the two basic strategies. First, find something stupid somebody said (today's example is Typhoon Haiyan), and act as if that debunks the whole theory. Meanwhile, back in reality, most climatologists are extremely vocal about the fact that no one weather event can be blamed on AGCC. The other approach is to cherry pick a few examples of noise defying an overall trend. It would only be suspicious if you couldn't find such examples. Any theory of something so complex that perfectly matched the data would be a fraud. Nowhere, of course, do the denialists offer a thorough statistical analysis of their own that refutes AGCC.
I think they bet on new, more efficient, cleaner technologies that will replace lead-acid sooner or later (eg. liquid metal batteries) but something has to start this process of development. So yes - lead batteries might be dirty right now but overall process will cut a lot more of impact of coal in the future. Clearly they are far ahead of everyone else in this regard. Renewable energy devices prices are dropping similiarly to computer prices not so long ago. I wonder when (not if) they'll be able to push prices below coal.
Reminds me of printed documentation that says "this page intentionally left blank".
Your generalization is a little too generalized. Modern natural gas cogeneration plants are 60% efficient. Coal doesn't come anywhere near that, though.
Only an idiot will claim government saved cotton from polyester.
Ruth Benerito is most famous for her work relating to the use of mono-basic acid chlorides in the production of cotton, with which she has 55 patents, which allows for more wrinkle-free and durable clothing. She invented these wash-and-wear cotton fabrics while working at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) laboratories in New Orleans in the 1950s.
Sounds like government research to me.
Fracking was invented in about 1900.
And hasn't changed since.
That is absolutely not about going off grid, how do you come to that idea?
Why should a bank fund going off grid for germans?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah, what did the Romans ever do for us? ;-)
I usually don't reply to ACs, but I must respond to the stupid.
Building solar panels takes resources. Marshaling resources takes energy. You may not get more energy out of the panels than you put in to build them, install them, and maintain them. They also degrade over time.
Bottom line is no form of energy generation comes for free. It should be used as efficiently as possible and not wasted.
It's not that there was/wasn't government research. It's that it didn't matter. Polyester sucks, wrinkle proof cotton is not wrinkle proof.
Your second point, yep: Fracking has been safe for over 100 years.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
First, night time is used for charging the car batteries that you've used up during the day...
Second, using your car battery to boost the power grid is generally stupid, because few people will want their car battery to not be charged, limiting what they can do with their car.
Third, bi-directional electrical setups aren't particularly cheap, and for some reason, power companies prefer to pay you next to nothing for your power, while charging you way for you to use their power...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Especially if the energy used to make a PV Solar Cell is still -less- than the amount it's expected to produce, over its lifetime, PV solar energy might not be the best choice of sustainable energy to invest in.
(Batteries for -local- storage of electrical energy might be good, eg, as anything that disconnects one's home or office from mains power is a problem almost anywhere.)
In a post-Fukishima world, the EC - if not [also] Germany - should be investing in Energy from Thorium (eg, developing improvements of its proven technology from the 1950's, which even Germany has successfully trialed in the 1960's or the 1980's, I understand).
For many of the reasons (ie, features), cf Prof Dr Eduardo Greaves' [36-min.] talk "Thorium as Nuclear Fuel in Molten Salt Reactors" (on YouTube.com). (The impatient can search TED.com for Sorensen's 10-min talk & view at least its last 5 min's.)
R&D should run in parallel with Education & Debate, in the hopes that the Public will soon "get" that there are several types of reactor, some (eg, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors = LFTRs) being much -safer- than Fukushima's reactors proved to be.
We should all understand the differences between even Canada's (long ago) improved CanDo reactors (still in the same "safety class" as Fukushima's, I understand) -and- LFTRs, which are expected to be not only "walk-away safe" but also cheaper to build & run.
After people come to understand the significant differences & inherent advantages in the design of LFTRs (and their safety levels are verified in ways that give all peoples confidence to embrace them, even near their back yards), we'll be able to make another great stride in our energy technology that can enable us to:
1. reduce CO2 emissions, & also turn back Climate Change that appears to be caused by it
2. enable any & all nations to build & use LFTR-technology - instead of current Plutonium-producing reactors, that we limit today
3. reduce the amount & cost of spent-fuel storage, eg, by consuming that fuel & getting energy from what was once waste
4. reduce or even eliminate "oil wars"
5. enabling us to -stop- "fracking" for Shale Oil &/or Coal-Seam Gas (CSG), which destroys water & land resources
6. reduce internal conflicts within nations (eg, legal battles & protests over "fracking")
7. redirect our minds to innovative & exploratory projects, in Science, Medicine, Space, Community Development, etc.
I see only win-win's from Energy from Thorium... are there any risks or disadvantages?
Let the debate continue, eg, in you comments & replies.
Unfortunately it generates soot and presumably dumps it into the local atmosphere via a chimney. Back when most people had such things we had major soot pollution problems in our cities.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Most fuels are "100% renewable" on a small scale. It's when we use more of it than can practically be produced in the same amount of time, that it becomes non-renewable. Wood is no exception. If a non-trivial number of people did the same as you, the price of wood would spike, and there'd be no way to grow it quickly enough.
Methane (natural gas), biodiesel, and others follow the same pattern. If we don't use much of it, it's cheap and can be produced entirely by closed-loop "green" systems. When demand goes up, though, the production becomes unsustainable.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Germans are taking back their electricity grid, so of course the utilities are upset. There is pressure on local governments to re-nationalize the grids in whole cities, and some power stations. Why pay the power company's profit when you can just own it all yourself, optimize it for your own benefit?
In the short term it will be expensive, but in the long run it will be cheaper. It's good that Germans seem able to see beyond next month's wage packet.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They are so expensive for their projected life-spans, that you'll most likely save money buying and periodically replacing lead-acid batteries.
Being over a century old, I doubt R&D is going to improve on the technology much. But if increased production can decrease prices, they might become economical.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Here is one http://www.gekgasifier.com/ an open source gasifier and electric generator of 20Kw
WAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Central commercial-building air conditioners that store energy as chilled water / ice are being installed all over the place in order to use the cheap NIGHT-time electricity to provide DAY-time (peak-demand) cooling.
The idea of doing a complete 180, turning that on its head is quite amusing. The reality is far more likely that the above systems will just no-longer be needed, as peak rates simply fall, and even-out electrical prices.
There are also less-expensive methods to reduce peak demand, that just involve over-cool buildings early in the morning, and slowly letting the temperature rise slightly throughout the day. This kind of system could easily meet the needs of building cooling *slightly* after sundown, as you are talking about.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And electricity is NOT the most efficient form of heating. Natural gas is VASTLY less expensive in the US, and most parts of the world have some fossil fuel that's cheaper to burn for heat than electricity is. After all, conversion of any fossil fuel to electricity is only maybe 60% efficient, while condensing boilers can get 97% thermal efficiency.
Of course, even better is just having homeowners install solar home heating systems, as they can thermally store solar energy, and release it into the home at a later time. Such systems are vastly more efficient, and vastly cheaper, than PV panels, anyhow.
Solar is pretty close to infinite, and wind in specific locales also is practically unlimited. The only question is whether or not the amount of energy you're extracting from your solar or wind installation makes up for the up-front cost. If so, not utilizing ALL the output is only a very minor loss. And dumping a lot more money into the system up-front, in order to "use" that power (but at a financial loss) makes NO SENSE at all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I've played with one and let me tell you, depending on the size, they can hold some serious voltages - I've held one with 5M volts stored. Insane.
The world doesn't run on volts, it runs on kilowatts. You can store up 25,000 volts just by shuffling your feet on the carpet, but that doesn't mean you can power your home that way.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
How much physical resources would it take to build the panels necessary to harvest infinite energy? How much land area?
The only thing infinite in this situation is the stupidity required to believe that any resource is infinite.
Except I don't WANT items in my refrigerator to freeze, and items in my freezer to thaw and melt, when grid power supply is fluctuating. Ditto for waiting hours or days to wash/dry clothes less expensively.
Those aren't big enough power draws in homes for the the economics to make sense, unless power was being given away absolutely FREE, which won't happen. There might be minimal acceptance of such a system for large, industrial customers, but what percentage of demand that makes up in an area varies greatly. And similarly, they aren't interested in letting power prices completely disrupt their operations, and so will only "move the needle" a tiny bit, even for large changes in prices.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
While interesting in many ways, small-scale steam turbines are rather inefficient. A more efficient way to use that wood to produce power and heat would be to use a gasifier to produce wood gas (a mixture of CO and H2 and N), run a modified diesel engine (with long-nosed spark plugs where the injectors used to be) on this gas and use it to power a generator, use the waste heat either directly for heating purposes or - at least partly - to dry the wood supply. Store the rest of the heat in a large insulated water tank and use a heat pump to pull energy from that tank when needed. The storage tank can be fed with solar heat as well as other 'waste' heat sources (washing machine, dishwasher, shower, etc).
This has the added advantage of the system being less likely to blow up, always a risk with pressurized steam. The wood gas is dangerous so the whole installation has to be somewhere outside but I guess your steam turbine lives outside as well...
--frank[at]unternet.org
If you believe solar radiation is NOT effectively infinite, you're the fool in this case. There is astronomically more of it than we could hope to harness for our needs, for many, many centuries to come.
You're the one who's spouting platitudes and silly nonsense here, not me.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How many panels? How much resources? You ignore these questions because answering them destroys your platitudes.
The question is silly and pointless. See my first response again.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Your first response is nonsensical.
With enough recycling of forests, it would be carbon neutral. With even bigger forests and burying with sequestration, it could even remove CO2.
A bigger issue might be particulants cooling things down. I wonder how much "clean burning" has affected that.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> And as for your "you can waste all you want from wind and solar" premise, that's just sheer lunacy. No resource is infinite.
You have adopted a meme that wasting energy is bad, which is true for polluting or limited resources (though using energy is good).
We are at a state where energy is cheap and plentiful. We want to get there while reducing pollution. We want to be able to waste energy.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No, you don't get the concept.
It is not night time that is used to charge the batteries.
It is *peak* and *surplus* times. That can be during any period of the day.
Third, bi-directional electrical setups aren't particularly cheap, and for some reason, power companies prefer to pay you next to nothing for your power, while charging you way for you to use their power...
That depends on your country and the respective laws. In germany they PAY you for BOTH, the loading and the usage of your batteries power.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
We're not there yet. Until we are efficiency is useful. Don't get me wrong, I think we should electrify everything, but you should always use the resources you have as efficiently as is prudent.
What the heck? Are you sure about that? I'm one person, I use about 15 kWh a day on my own, and I'm a fanatic miser. I don't leave a single light on except the room I'm in at the moment. Practically all my lights are CFL or LED. I don't have an electric stove, clothes dryer, or water heater. Those are huge pigs; most people have all of those. I am a fanatic about not holding the refrigerator door open wide or cracked open for more seconds than absolutely required. My TV is tuned to take no more than 30W.
Consumes forests, emits CO2....
On about a 40-year cycle.
it does not draw on our past carbon bank to add to the mix
which is the entire point.
but it sets back reforestation
no, it promotes reforestation. Rapidly growing trees consume lots of CO2, old trees just a little. Some of it gets harvested again, but lots of it becomes the forest floor. Besides that, only market demand for wood causes forests to be planted. Paper recycling has actually cut into forest planting at this point.
and "counts" existing growth and its carbon sink :-(
what?
I'm deadset against woodburning energy
You should learn more about it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
With even bigger forests and burying with sequestration, it could even remove CO2.
Forests build up the soil (e.g. pine needles, leaves) and even foresters only take out the trunks and heaviest of limbs for firewood. The brush is usually left to decompose (become soil, aka sequestered).
The amount of fuel needed to harvest needs to be subtracted, but in general trees are an excellent solar energy capture and storage device.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Wood is way more expensive than natural gas unless you grow your own
What sort of figures are you using? Up here it costs $2600 to heat our house with propane and $400 for cord wood (two cords, seasoned). Propane is about 2.5x as expensive as natural gas these days so it would cost us about $1000 to heat with natural gas (were it available - our house is on 32 acres of forest land).
Many folks around here have those automated pellet stoves - one local installer has a giant hopper with a vacuum feed that can completely automate the season other than a once-a-month ash clean-out.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A supercap, with say 1 whole farad of storage, can only provide 1 amp for 1 second losing 1V of charge. Seeing they are only rated for 5V max, that's only a few watts for a few seconds. We *need* to supply a few kW for hours on end - that's about 5 - 7 orders of magnitude away from where we need it.
Um, either you are using the wrong words or you completely misunderstand the situation.
You do NOT want to charge your car during peak hours, as presumably that would be more expensive for you and put the greatest strain on the utility company. If anything, you would want to be nice and let your car discharge into the electric grid during peak hours, to increase the available power, reducing the possibility of brown/blackouts and/or reduce the amount of power the electric company has to buy on the spot market at greatly inflated rates [see California for examples of both].
You want to charge your car during off-peak hours, where is it cheaper both for you and for the electric company to generate the electricity that goes into your car. And that is generally in the middle of the night when you are asleep and not using your car.
And yes, different countries have different rules and policies. In the US, capitalism must rule, and the electric companies must maximize their profits over anything or anyone else. See California as well, where the power companies helpfully turn off power plants during the hottest summer days, forcing electric suppliers to buy power for two or more times as much from the same companies on the spot market, only where the power plant is different.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
And I just realized you may be using 'peak' to refer to when power generating capability is greatest, while I associate peak power to generally mean when power demand is greatest.
And for charging your car, for most people who use it to commute, it's generally most convenient [and/or only possible] to charge their car at home at night, as they probably won't have anyplace to leave it to charge at work during the day.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Er... I agree?
Which is why every home I've ever lived in or moved into doesn't do that? And hasn't for years.
You have on-demand boilers these days. The days of "Economy 7" (in the UK) and stored hot water are long gone. They went as soon as we started to worry about all the energy we're pissing away by doing that.
My house doesn't even have a water tank - the boiler is on the ground floor fed by water pressure, and the hot water / radiators are pumped from the boiler directly when they are required (and at no other times).
Hell, my boiler has a "pre-heat" option that keeps a couple of litres of water warm for the hot-water taps if you really want that. I turn it off - it's a waste of energy for no real benefit. The fact that it's an option tells you that 50% of people with those boilers probably do too.
I've ripped out more old, unused hot water storage tanks from houses than I've ever seen in active use. Dunno what country you live in (gallons and Fahrenheit might give that away) but in the UK, stored hot water tanks are old-hat and have been since I was a kid. I've never lived in a house that had one (and thus have never heard "You've used up all the hot water!").
Your example doesn't hold water. :-)
I mean they dump the excess, in the case of batteries, this isn't excess.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Most of the time when I run the washing machine, I want the clothes clean today, I don't care particularly when. I'd be happy for the machine to wait until there was a bit of extra supply. With the fridge, to maintain a constant temperature you have a feedback system which has some dampening to prevent oscillation - you can either advance or delay the chilling by quite a bit without affecting the temperature. You can also run the compressor and chill the coolant a bit in advance of needing it, if it were economically sensible to do so - the extra insulation would only add a small amount to the cost, and you'd likely recoup that in a year if electricity prices fluctuated by 10% during the day.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1. tough luck for those still on the grid. the power companies will have to find cheaper methods to generate and distribute.
2. the distributed model i was talking about is each property having their own power generation, not in the way you understood it to mean. the grid is all the eggs in one basket.
3. the ones that want to. can be built in with all new builds.
4. it will be at some point.
5. the grid will be ticking over all the time, it already ramps up for spikes so its capable.
the running out of power that california experienced wouldn't have been such a problem if everyone had the capability to generate their own power. It would also force the power companies to lower their prices.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"There have been incidents where that interconnection itself has been a problem due to ripple effects of one power line failure"
so its a single point of failure that takes out millions of homes in one go. Wouldn't it have been nice if 50% were power self-sufficient and then whole towns and cities wouldn't go dark.
""Off the grid" is a pipe dream for most people."
yes, but the more that do it the better. no-one is going to say its going to happen over night.
Take a worst case scenario and you end up in a war, whats one of the first places that will be taken out? my guess would be power generation plants
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Sigh, so many miss conceptions.
When my windfarm produces more power than the grid demands, I either can (if I still have the capacity) pump water into my pumped storages, or I can disconnect a part of my windfarm from the grid, or I can use my smartgrid and load car batteries, or other batteries.
The cost of electric power is dynamic and depends on contract: during peak hours it might be unwise to start my washing machine as it will probably draw power that is expensive, but it might be quite cheap to load a car batterie at this point as the grid operator gives you a premium price for it, otherwise the power would be wasted. Yes capitalism rules, if the grid operator would not gift you the power for your car battery it would be likely much more expensive for him to get rid of the "extra power" e.g. he might need to sell it for a negative price at the spot market.
In germany e.g. grid operators are oblieged to pay the price for my wind power even if they can not feed it into the grid. That means if I generate 100MW, and they can only use 80MW I have to disconnect 20MW but they still pay for 100MW. So for the grid operator it is much better to sell the extra 20MW for a very low price to car owners then let it get wasted. Especially if the smart grid contract between the grid operators and the car owner allows the grid operator to tab into the cars power if needed.
Note: the car will not load and give power "randomly". If it is for the next 3 hours in charge mode, it will only be used for charging if there is a surplus, and wont be touched for draining (to prevent unnecessary drain/load cycles).
With the rest you are right, ofc over night power is cheaper. Nevertheless all those ideas to get batteries into the power grid have the main focus in helping to "stabelize" or fine tune the grid. The main focus is not to load them over night with cheap power ... that could be done since decades with a second power meter.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm pretty sure that's not true for nearly anybody else.
No idea when it's going to start washing means you have no idea when to go in and move them to the dryer. And since you have no idea when the dryer will start, you have no idea when you'll need to come and take them out. 9pm? 2am?
These delays will also be multiplied by how many loads of laundry you're trying to get done that day, making it a completely unworkable scheme for most households.
No. Unless you think 10 minutes is quite a bit of time. Fluctuations in ambient temperatures (day versus night), frequency of access, and items being added/removed will substantially change the interior temperatures in very short order. If the compressor doesn't come on RIGHT AWAY, you're going to very quickly have frozen items melting, and refrigerated items going above the proper temperatures, and spoiling more quickly.
And predicting the future is a similarly bad idea. The thermostat can detect a temperature rise, then a few minutes later, the temperature could drop below the target, as cold items are removed and re-added, or the thermostat is subject to stray warm air pockets. So when you turn on the compressor in advance, you either risk over-chilling the contents, or you store that cold somewhere, and don't utilize it before it warms again.
I can't imagine how you calculated that... Looking-up a basic $500 refrigerator, I see an EnergyGuide rating of $41/yr. A 10% savings would be $4.10. You can't add practically ANYTHING to the design of that refrigerator for $4, never mind extra computer controls that are going to plot and predict future power demands, and the data connection to interface with this smart grid to tell it when electricity is cheaper...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Worldwide there is 5 times more money spent on military than medical.
I wonder what that is like in the US ;-)
New things are always on the horizon
The funny thing is, oil still does. And it might surprise you, but it's more than solar and wind.
New things are always on the horizon
That is a very US-centric view.
New things are always on the horizon
No idea when it's going to start washing means you have no idea when to go in and move them to the dryer
This assumes that you have a separate dryer, which assumes that you have space for a washer and a dryer...
And if you're going to quote a $500 refrigerator (with a link that doesn't work) as a 'basic refrigerator', then I know that we're living in completely different worlds. When I moved house 3 years ago, I bought a new fridge and spent about 15% of that, including delivery.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Really, cause I see politicians handing out bread and circuses world wide.
You think Greek politicians aren't buying votes with government money? Egyptian politicians? Russian politicians?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That said: if your objection was about units. Good call.
The rate of return government is concerned about is votes/money.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Do you think it applies to Germany ? because I don't.
New things are always on the horizon
Lessor extent, but yes. Germany has a strong 'social safety net'. No doubt German mouth breathers vote for their benes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've looked-up combined washer/dryers, and they're incredibly expensive compared to separate units, which doesn't seem to match-up with your tiny, stolen refrigerator. And you can't really claim you don't have space, as you can always get a smaller and smaller (and stackable) washer/dryer pair.
That link is still working just fine.
I can't imagine how you did that... Even one about half that size is still $370. I'd be impressed to get a new mini-fridge or electric ice-chest (without freezer) for $75.
However, while an interesting distraction, that doesn't change my point in the slightest. If you've got a small refrigerator using less power, there's even less money (<$4) to be gained by your smart-grid idea. And with a lower-priced refrigerator, the cost of the additions would be even less-well hidden in the current price.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If you are going to go through the time and money to store electricity in a battery, why not stick it into a car?
Because that's a lot of extra weight to lug around with you all day.
Fracking was invented in about 1900
Radio was invented around then too, but the technology and its applications have changed a lot since then. The modern fracking techniques were developed by government funded research in the 80s and given for free to industry. Just look it up; it's easy to learn about.