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Power Grids: The Huge Battery Market You Never Knew Existed
ashshy writes Unlike the obvious battery needs for smartphones or electric cars, many consumers are unaware of the exploding need for enormous battery banks as modern power grids are bringing a whole new set of requirements. From the article: "'Our electricity grid was built a certain way, and that way is to have on-demand production,' Argonne National Laboratory battery researcher Jeff Chamberlain explained. 'So as I flip my light switch on at home, there's some little knob somewhere that turns the power up. There is no buffer. It's a very interesting production cycle compared to other consumer goods. It was built a certain way, and the grid is currently changing in two different ways. One is, first our demand is increasing. But another is, around the world human beings are trying to get off fossil fuels and that means using solar and wind. Well, we cannot turn up the sun or wind, or turn down the sun or wind according to our energy needs. So the more those technologies penetrate the grid, the more you need energy storage. You need a buffer. And that is a very difficult challenge that's similar to transportation because it's cost-driven,' Chamberlain said. 'But it's also different from transportation because we're not limited by volume or mass like we are in vehicles. We're working on energy storage systems that are stationary.'"
Some good use for Graphene! ...in theory.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Build more nukes!
something about the size of china.
Storage could be nice and also substitute for transmission but it may not be as large a market as they anticipate: http://www.engineering.com/Ele...
Aside from the big supply end solutions there are also demand end solution opportunitues.
Because we have day and night consumer rates there is a market oppotunity for an appropriatly priced home storage unit able to shift night power to day power.
I've been hearing about batteries being needed for sun and wind is as long as I've been hearing about sun and wind...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Battery storage for bulk power has been talked up for years. Mostly by the wind industry. With solar power, you get peak power and peak air conditioning load around the same time. Wind varies about 4:1 over 24 hours, even when averaged across big areas (California or the eastern seaboard). So the wind guys desperately need to store power generated at 4AM, when it's nearly worthless, so they can resell at 2PM. When the wind farm companies start installing batteries at their own expense, this will be a real technology.
With the US glut of natural gas, this isn't needed right now. Natural gas peaking plants aren't all that expensive to build, and make money even if they only run for maybe 6 hours a day. That covers most peak needs.
There are other ways to store energy. Some of the dams of the California Water Project have reversible turbines, which can run either as pumps or generators. They pump water uphill at night, when power is cheap, and let it down during the afternoon to generate power. Since the dams and pumps are needed for water handling anyway, this adds little cost.
I believe that Tesla has this as a target market. A recent article about a Tesla factory tour mentioned that they were in the process of assembling a 4000 kwh battery pack to be used for fixed place energy storage (the cars are 60 or 85 kwh). Tesla will have an amazing capacity to produce batteries once they build their "gigafactory" (supposedly greater capacity that all of the existing Li battery factories) and it seems that they are looking to have a business selling battery packs.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Use liquid nitrogen-cooled superconducting lines to move the power where it's needed. Being able to transfer electricity from one side of the US to the other with little power loss would remove most of the problem as demand shifts from East to West. Combine that with water cracking tanks to generate lots of hydrogen when the sun shines and you should be good to go.
If only there were an efficient way to store energy from the sun or wind and turn it into grid-power later that wasn't called a "battery." Perhaps some futuristic supercapacitor-based system or fuel-cell-with-re-formed-fuel system will meet this need. Or perhaps something we haven't even envisioned yet outside of the realm of science fiction will be the answer.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What if you were working on batteries the size of a tractor trailer that had the energy density to power large cities for a week or two. Then you wouldn't need the grid. You could just drive the battery to where it could be charged, near the wind or sun, then when it was full, move it to the place where it was needed.
I appreciate the real time complexity of the power grid, but it is time to rethink distribution. It would be cool if every house in the USA could get off the grid through local energy storage.
The sun and wind are essentially free endless energy, the challenge is buffering, but I challenge you to think outside the grid. The solution is a new battery or fuel cell.
With pretty good reliability, any "report" like that is followed by someone direly needing taxpayer funding to provide ... whatever, ignoring that profit originally was supposed to be reinvested instead of dumped on some idiots that are already overpaid.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Japanese seem to be building a 60 mega watt hour battery based on this technology.
The largest battery in the world already exists in Virginia.
Bath County Pumped Storage Station
Which can deliver 3 GIGAWATT for a metric shitload of time
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I've been posting about this, and the spin some politicians are pushing is reprehensible. Recently, Arizona allowed fees to charge rooftop-based solar energy producers for the privilege of selling or donating electrons to others for use. A few incredible or insane politicians are trying to spin it as if solar adopters are leeches despite the fact that they already pay for interconnect fees and all the excess energy they use.
The alternative, of course, is to go completely off the grid using your own batteries, which will end up costing the power companies (and the politicians in their pockets) even more.
But it's not all without a shred of truth. There are definitely some costs associated with high adoption rates of solar, and the breakdown is pretty easy to explain:
This works great for the power companies when a few people on one substation have some solar power generators, because they feed it back into the grid for use by those without solar. As a result, the power company can charge the full amount for the electrons used (often at higher prices), but they don't have to transfer it long distances which inevitably carries loss due to capacitance and resistance. And they get all of this without investing in the cost of increased production at the power plants.
This also works great for the solar generators, because they reduce their use during the most expensive times, and usually push themselves into a lower usage tier due to overall reduced usage. A household that uses 500kWh might only draw 100kWh net from the grid over a month, and the first 100 are usually very cheap. Some places pay for excess electrons put onto the grid, others do not.
But here's the limitation: if all your neighbors have solar, it will exceed consumption during times of bright sunlight. In other words, the substation will send out no energy (nobody needs it), and in fact cannot backfeed it to other substations. This can cause a real issue when there's a surplus. Line voltage may even go up from 110 to around 130. This is when they need energy storage. Batteries are one method, but flywheels can work well, too. They could spin up a flywheel to consume the excess energy, then release it later as-needed (e.g. a dark cloud). In fact, they can spin up a flywheel at nighttime, too, when they have excess production, to smooth out daytime use. It's not just for independent generating stations, but this infrastructure will smooth out their plants for normal use, too.
Some unscrupulous legislators are trying to saddle solar generators with the cost of those who choose not to use solar. They claim exactly the opposite, that the solar producers are driving up costs. Really, they're making a needed upgrade more obvious and in any case, there is literally no way they are "driving up costs" by reducing their own usage. That fails the basic 5th grader test.
Localizing the storage is far more efficient than sending it hundreds of miles, plus it future proofs the obvious issues of people inevitably moving away from coal and natural gas generators. These local storage solutions or backfeeding substations should be pushed by all, even those without solar generation.
Can't the wind farms just use gas turbines instead of batteries as long as those are cheaper? I'd assume batteries will be used if/when they become the cheapest way to handle the balancing.
Some day soon, in some areas, there will be enough solar to handle most power needs at peak insolation. When that happens, we'll have significantly cheaper grid power in the day than during the night. Then we'll see how much of the balancing water can do and if batteries can outcompete gas for the rest.
I bet one of these would cost less than one battery backup station, with the added BONUS it wouldn't use any fuel either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The problem is more complex. The huge, immediate problem is phase regulation, not selling power at night. Right now, when a cloud rolls across a PV field, the output drops very fast. The real use of the storage is to provide stability on the order of half a second to 10 seconds, which the peaker plants can't do.
they should move the grid to the cloud. Problem solved.
It's called "hydro power plant" and it is already used as "battery" e.g. in UK.
(they literally pump water up, in non peak hours)
... which simply explains why 'renewable power' is COMPLETELY useless.
It can't be generated when it's needed, and it can't be stored because we haven't got the technology. Don't think we haven't been trying for quite a long time to create such technology - because we have. And, so far, we've failed.
You can't run a modern civilisation on promises of a breakthrough 'in a few years'.
And if we ever DO manage to store large amounts of energy for grid use, has anyone stopped to think just how dangerous that storage facility would be?
For American readers: gas means a gaseous hydrocarbon, and not a liquid one.
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[color-blindness] ... this is sad. ... if nuc-lear hasnÃ(TM)t killed all bio-rechargers by then.
rsly
the paradigm shift is realizing that oil, coal, gas and even nu-clear ARE the battery.
they are (so far) not being recharged. with coal, gas and oil the planet will eventually recharge
them all by itself
the funnay think is that poples look funnay at you if you suggest to "make oil" to store the excess unlimited
solar energy/electricity?
Efficiency
I build robots and they all suck, they suck because they don't have enough power. I could potentially load them up with $1,000 worth of Lithium based batteries or two tons worth of lead acid batteries but for a robot that I want to follow my cat I am not sure that it is worth it. If I want to build a real robot that will go out in to the real world and do real things then I need batteries. It is one thing to have smooth rolling robots running over a smooth surface and not using much power. But to have an agricultural robot weeding its way through a clumpy muddy farm right after a heavy rain, I need some serious power.
So batteries force robot designers to make many compromises: They can compromise sales by making the robot too expensive, they can compromise how much work it can do by a small battery, they can compromise the computing power to save power, they can compromise functionally to save power.
Of all the problems the one that bothers me the most is compromising computing power; it is very nice to have two or more HD cameras feeding their data to one or more GPUs that crunch what the robot is seeing in real time and plan the optimal solution also in real time. Also other sensors such as radar or laser scanners can be energy gobblers.
For instance I would be curious to find how much Asimo's battery cost, and how long it lasts.
So it is battery technology that is the last piece of the puzzle to adding independent robots to our lives in a substantial way.
Pumped storage ... needs specific geography, high and low reservoirs close to each other to reduce losses pumping water uphill over long distances. It also needs a guaranteed supply of water, lots of it and the sunny parts of the US where large amounts of solar power are being generated are distinctly lacking in water
One only needs a low reservoir (see the Taum Sauk). Furthermore, while pumped storage certainly isn't a good idea in the Southwest, it is ideal in the Great Lakes area, where there's tons of wind resources (see: Iowa, Minnesota, etc.). And, as it turns out, there is a (functionally) infinite supply of water in Lake Michigan and a functionally infinite amount of land with delta h on the West Coast of Michigan, which has hills immediately adjacent to the Lake due to thousands of years of wind blowing from Wisconsin to Michigan. A storage plant like this already exists, just south of Ludington MI. We could easily build 100 GW worth of pumped storage there, equal to the capacity of all nuclear power in the US.
Pumped storage is also lossy, typically about 65% efficient round-trip.
My experience is that the average is closer to 75%, and it can be as high as 90% with modern, well maintained pumped storage. Pumped storage also has extremely fast ramping capabilities, making it very useful for the minute-by-minute operation of the grid. Of course pumped storage, like all major power plants, requires transmission investment to be fully useful.
Grid gas, coal and nuclear generators don't need storage as they either run flat out to meet the instantaneous demand and they can throttle back in quieter times.
Nuclear, coal, and gas steam plants have very real operational limitations. Nuclear is almost never ramped back to follow load; it's cheaper in the long run to pay negative locational marginal prices (LMPs) if need be. Coal and gas steam can only ramp a few MW per minute, and have minimum outputs whereby they can't maintain power any lower -- and that's often at about 50% of capacity. At that point, any lower output requires a shut down, and then a 12-30 hour cool down whereby the unit can't be restarted. Nuclear, coal, and gas steam are extremely inflexible generators relative to hydro, gas/oil CT, and even gas CC.
At the moment intermittent wind and solar generators use the grid as free storage but the more intermittent power that is added to the generating mix the more that storage will be needed to deal with peak inputs and debits.
Free storage? Wind and solar fueled generators, like all generators, sell the energy instantaneously. Your metaphor makes no sense. All operating power plants sell in real-time. Same price for the same power. Eventually, substantially more storage will have economic value, but on the mainland US grid, not for a long time. California is poised to have 33% renewables by 2020, and they don't need additional storage. (There's an order for ~1.5 GW of storage to be procured, but it's not needed -- it's CA's way of pushing progress forward, seeing that eventually storage will be a less expensive resource (LCOE) than CTs.) Most other parts of the mainland won't have exceeded 10% non-dispatchable renewables by then.
Getting wind and solar farm operators to pay for this extra storage probably isn't going to happen, sadly.
Why should they? In most of tUSA, there's a day ahead and a real time market. Power has a price (LMP). Generators can sell into that market or not. When supply exceeds demand, the LMP goes negative, and all generators who are operating are equally responsible for the problem; all generators who are operating at those times pay the same financial penalty. That includes operating wind and solar and the nuclear and gas and coal that can't turn down.
In the mean time, the number of MWh that are curtailed is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total MWh consumed in America. Storage simply isn't very valuable on the American grid right now because we
Support a few technologists in Washington.
It looked like this, right?
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https://www.ted.com/talks/dona...
Basically the same technology used in aluminum smelter, with liquid salt for the battery...
Does anyone know if this ever got off the ground?
Wind and Solar are active during daylight, the same time people's air conditioning is on, or are in the office with the lights and A/C on.
When people are home, if they had solar panels, they should have charged up local storage banks, and rely less on the grid. Assuming everyone goes to work in the morning and comes back in the evening.
Some of us are the reverse, we do everything productive in the evening because that's when it's most cost effective (on electricity, transportation) and then sleep through most of the day because our bodies don't care as much about the temperature when we sleep.
Because I try not to respond to ACs, I'll stick it in here.
As you pointed out, Nuclear ships DO NOT run their plants at 'full power all the time'.
But even HUGE nuclear plants can be built to be capable of 'load following', going from 100% down to 50% and below on a consistent basis. France has a number of them.
Part of the problem with using reactors for load-following is that all the reactors in the USA are very old Gen-II designs, you need to be at least 'newer' Gen-II to do a lot of load following, and we don't have enough nuclear for them to NEED to load-follow, leaving them as the cheapest margin for on-demand power.
If we went from our current mix of about 20% nuclear, 40% coal, to a carbon-neutral mix of 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'other, including hydro', you'd have most of your peaking power in 'other', but nuclear power would still have to adjust for peaking.
I don't read AC A human right
Why not use excess wind power to produce synthetic fuel (essentially gasoline or diesel) from natural gas?
My SIG is a P226
I am not saying that it is not needed, just that the true costs and efficiencies for renewable energy must include the factors introduced by the widespread use of grid storage.
One added benefit of storage is the a power grid can protect itself by becoming an array of disconnected cells to prevent a problem from propagating throughout the entire grid.
Everything that needs to be known about the concept of electrical storage has been known for a LONG time. The Hawkens Electrical Guide published in 1914 has a good easy to understand explanation of how to float a battery on a DC power distribution system.
CHAPTER XLV STORAGE BATTERY SYSTEMS.
The reason the battery system described in Hawkins is not used for utility power except in rare cases is economics.
The Golden Valley Electric Association would not have considered such a large backup battery unless it was the economic solution for a power supply problem. As stated in the link at temperatures of -50F there are unique considerations needed to stabilize the grid.
Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) - Golden Valley Electric Association Fairbanks Alaska 40 MW for 7 minutes. This system is a combination of a static var Static VAR compensator, that can perform as a 4 quadrant inverter. This arrangement is effective for solving many power system stability problems, not just a generation imbalance.
Technical Description from Wind Power
As battery technology improves there will be economic solutions for far less extreme situations.
I've been interested in this for some time. Here are some solutions I've come across:
Something like a standard battery
Flow batteries, where you store liquid electrolytes in tanks, and energy capacity is proportional to the capacity of the tanks
Salt/Liquid metal batteries. Take the process for smelting aluminium, and make it reversible. (The metal used need not be aluminium.) There is a good TED talk on this.
Fixed volume compressed gas storage: pump gas into a pressure vessel or abandoned mine
Fixed pressure compressed gas storage: pump gas into a bladder deep under water. This works well for off shore wind farms, as they have the deep water right there. Otherwise you need a convenient lake or flooded mine.
Elevated water reservoir. Needs the right topography and hydrography, so doesn't work everywhere.
Variable output hydro power: similar to the above, but instead of pumping water uphill you just increase/decrease the downhill flow that already exists, to match you output to the production shortfall of the time variable generators. If you already have hydro power, this is very cheap, possibly free. At worst you need to increase peak capacity by adding turbines.
Heat storage: store energy as heat in a large thermal mass, extract it with some form of heat engine.
Complementary to this, we can also try to time-shift demand:
Off-peak water heating. This has been around for many decades.
Off-peak heating/cooling using thermal storage (e.g. an insulated water tank under your house from which your radiators are fed.)
Off-peak charging of plug-in electric cars. (We can even use peak-hour extraction of power from the electric cars.) This is cheap in that those batteries are already there for other purposes. It does cost if they batteries have a limited number of recharge cycles (which currently they do.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Controlled load is a much better option in my opinion for the majority part of solving this problem. Rather than trying to store bulk power at relatively low efficiencies, and relatively high costs, have controlled loads offered power at a discount to consume any excesses, and just scale the power produced to pretty much guarantee oversupply such that when load-shedding runs out of room the peaker plants run for a minimum of time. There are many excellent uses, for example, refining aluminium. Needs massive quantities of electricity, and there's practically no consequences for "turning it down" (the cheaper electricity would directly offset the economic losses from not running full production). Much better systemic efficiency this way. Minimise the conversions, and find maximally useful things to do with the resources available. That said, dual-use of electric car batteries (and engines?) as a ready-made distributed 'peaking' plant is wonderful from a reuse and capital cost perspective. The trick will be managing the pricing so the market aggressively optimises for systemic efficiency measured by 'natural resources' not dollars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-mar...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Can't the wind farms just use gas turbines instead of batteries as long as those are cheaper? I'd assume batteries will be used if/when they become the cheapest way to handle the balancing.
1. Gas turbine designs for wind power exist, but are currently not 'mainstream', ergo more expensive and less efficient per watt produced. You're looking at a 10-15% drop in joules produced per year* for a given turbine size.
2. In order for them to have an effective amount of 'battery' you need some sort of air storage facility. There are underground formations that are ideal for this, but those are often used to store other things and thus, selection is limited. Just building a giant pressure vessel is possible, but currently too expensive.
As for your vision of the future, I can see it happening in Hawaii 'fairly quickly'. Many of their substations have already passed 'Minimum daily load' for solar capacity, which is the point at which you have to start accounting for power actually flowing FROM substations(IE neighborhoods) to the rest of the grid.
As a note, I really like the idea of electric cars. When I did the math using all averages, I figured out that the average family would use about 50% more electricity if they switched completely from fossil fueled vehicles to electric ones. Everybody's actual result would vary, of course. Unless you happen to own 2.2 cars in your house of 2 adults with 2.5 children and drive precisely 15k miles per car every year. ;)
But anyways, in a 'Solar wins bigtime!' scenario I'd actually see daytime power being cheaper than nighttime, and if you have a parallel of EVs win as well, that means that charging during the day at work would be the 'in' thing. At which point, if you start replacing EV batteries that reach 70% of original capacity in order to maintain range & efficiency, you have a bunch of 70% batteries available for relatively cheap. Delay recycling them for about a decade, put them to use providing grid storage. Given that 1 Model S battery at 50%** provides the average family with about 1 days storage, it should be plenty given that the average family has 2.2 cars.
*I use this metric because you're really looking at average power produced, which will vary widely at any given period of time.
**To account for even more aging!
I don't read AC A human right
I like pumped storage:
o Lovely water recreation areas - swimmable, boatable, fishable ...there's lots of pumped storage already (~104 GW). More. More! MOAR!
o So while it costs land, it returns most of that land for public use
o Fish and other aquacritter habitat
o excellent control of recovery rate
o doesn't significantly wear out (and if you were to make it underground, won't even evaporate... expensive, but...)
o easy maintenance
o highly scenic
o No red-hot nothing, no batteries, works fine unless it freezes (so in higher latitudes... not good.)
I *also* like this idea for pumped transport:
Imagine a C shape that is almost closed -- just a few feet short of meeting at the ends. It's an almost circular canal. From one end of the C, you pump water into the other end of the C (and add any replacement volume required by evaporation.) This creates a current that operates the entire length of the C. Now, put two of these next to each other. Pump the second one in the opposite direction. Put cranes (or locks) at the ends, so that transport platforms can be moved from one direction to the other. Cost? Initially, Pumps, cranes, canal, transport platforms. In operation: pump energy (solar, please) and evaporation refill. Unless you roof it. :) Length? very, very amazingly long, and if roofed, even longer.
Air pressure. Gravity. Water. Make it work for us. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
>> 'So as I flip my light switch on at home, there's some little knob somewhere that turns the power up. There is no buffer. It's a very interesting production cycle compared to other consumer goods. It was built a certain way"
Yes, it was built in the most PROFITABLE way - just-in-time delivery, just like every other consumable resource that has no accountability for the public good and no real penalty for failure. ie: oil refineries.
The terrible, poorly-redundant, and easily damaged power grid was designed and implemented based on one simple assumption - that there will always be a limitless supply of energy to convert to electricity on-demand. Whether that is oil, gas, hydropower, geothermal, etc.. it all assumes whenever we need more NOW, we can always press a button and create more NOW. So there's never in a hundred years been any impetus to create reservoirs of stored energy (except in the literal sense with water- and as we see, many of those are being depleted by climate change too!) because those resources are available on-demand, 24/7. But now we need to invest in more than geological means of storing energy.
I am like this guy; looked into all the same stuff over the years.
Additions:
Flywheels: Dept. E helped develop viable designs which scale long ago but the costs keep it a niche product for data centers needing a buffer while the gas generators turn on.
Elevated Mass: ridiculous idea from a green website last year by some german engineer or professor. When I did the math, I figured I'd have to move the whole house 3m upward to get enough mass/power as a $30,000 battery pack (it's more feasible if you have a cliff near bye and your needs are tiny.)
Employer car charging. Not a time-shift; however, storing the massive amount of energy a car uses during the day only to dump that back into the car at night wastes a great deal of energy from all the conversion in that process. Employer parking lots charging to recharge employee cars would make electric cars more realistic for people who are off grid.
Public take over of the grid. The electric grid largely follows the roads (public land, usually public roads) and should be run by the public so we can stop having corrupt grid owners fighting against the distributed grid the future demands. Power suppliers can compete on the grid just as businesses compete while using the roads. This would also lower grid costs as governments are better able to think long term and bury high voltage DC power lines which reduce long term system costs but require upfront investment. This would also foster a market for power storage as the prices on such a grid could spike as a cloud passes bye... it would become a stock market like game.... (where Mr. Burns really could provide by blocking out the sun!)
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What happens when some beer drinking redneck puts a bullet through one of those batteries?
Sure you have 100 windmills and each is able to produce 10,000 watts for about 9 hours per day (on average). And you don't necessarily need that much power (for example) in the middle of the night when the wind is howling, but you do need it in the middle of the day in the middle of summer when everyone's AC is turned up to 11. So you pump water. 1x1million gallon tank on top and 1x1million gallon tank on the bottom, and 1 million gallons of water. Connecting the tanks (besides the pump) is an 8 inch diameter pipe which can be opened or closed at the top, and at the bottom there is a turbine connected to a generator. There might be other ways of storing energy, but this one is reasonably efficient, its safer than storing hydrogen, and you get less 'leak current' than any battery ever made. Oh, and you don't get 'charge memory' like nickel cadmium batteries. Also if you get a leak, the environment people will still yell, but its hard for them to say you destroyed the ecosystem. There are other ways to do it (some are likely more efficient), but they are almost certainly more complicated, more expensive, and less scalable.
With thermal power you need to spin turbines and the greater the volume of steam the less the frictional losses etc matter and the more you can extract with low pressure turbines etc. Also small nuclear plants are expensive anyway due to many things, for example the high temperatures that give you the performance you want. Theoretically, and often in practice, the price per MW drops a lot with scale.
Thus building huge - at least in terms of the amount of steam if not the actual reactor/s, is the only thing that makes sense if it's a civilian plant designed to generate electricity for sale. If it's a research reactor, powering a specific thing (like a ship), or a front for a weapons program then it doesn't need to be huge.
It already is providing sufficient storage in plenty of places. The confusion arising here is about some journalist dumbing things down to a monoculture and assuming everything should be baseload at a much higher capacity than present and storing everything that isn't being used at a given time should be stored for later. Given the losses of every single type of storage, even pump storage, that's a rather stupid and wasteful way to do things instead of generating what is needed at any given time and using storage as a occasionally used buffer. Load following with a mixture of energy sources instead of the lossy processes of store and release.
So that's dealt with the article that kicked off the discussion - now for the one you've linked. A key assumption is a point source where the electricity is coming from and not a large distributed grid which is the only sane way to model a very large number of little generators all over the place. So there's no wind - look at a weather chart - of course there's wind, plenty of wind, it's just not where you are standing, and there's more than one windmill in the country. So there's cloud - does it cover Vegas as well? It's early/late - timeszones guys? An east/west grid even means the peaks are spread over hours. Having lots of tiny wind and solar generators all over the place does not mean needing storage to back it up, especially since there are also lots of little gas turbines all over the place which are probably going to be less wasteful to spin up than a silly idea of having a higher base and storing some of it.
Stuff like this is, to be frank, is just people out of their depth railing against change and looking for a feeble excuse to keep them afloat, and it's designed to mislead. So I'm sorry to say fgouget and many others, you've been suckered by a journalist that probably knows less about the topic than yourselves but can spin a convincing enough tale for you to accept it instead of thinking for yourselves. All for the purpose of saying that change is bad. It's bad for those that pay this journalists salary, but not so bad for the rest of us.
"...[T]he exploding need for enormous battery banks..." I see what you did there.
Regardless of how good battery tech gets, it will always be easier to store money than to store energy. How can the former substitute for the latter? There are some latency-insensitive electricity consumers, like heating, cooling, pumping water, etc. While there's a shortage of supply, give the consumers an incentive to store money (not pay for expensive electricity) until there's more supply, and they can make up for the backlog then.
Letting the electricity price float is a natural way to give consumers an incentive to shift their consumption. If a smart thermostat could pay for itself in less than a year by monitoring prices and price forecasts, we'd all buy them, and then we'd be able to store money rather than energy, which is technologically a much easier prospect.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
This again? Where does this shit come from? Substations feed large areas. It should be obvious that a couple of hundred PV panels cannot feed entire collections of suburbs that contain shops, light industry etc. Even with a vast increase in the number of panels on roofs, maybe ten or twenty times what there is now, it's still going to fall short of powering all those things without - THERE IS NO SURPLUS TO BACKFLOW THROUGH THE SUBSTATION.
I'm curious - where the fuck are you guys getting this from? Did you make it up or did some "thinktank" intern with a political science degree make it up ans expel it into the world?
I found a very interesting report from California ISO about the difficulties of integratong large amounts of solar into the grid. It is all about the Duck Chart. It revolves around how conventional supply has to adjust to compensate for the supply of solar based electricity. You can read the report to get the fine points but the issue is the steepness of the duck's neck. During the day solar can supply a lot of electricity. During that time demand on conventional supply is low. That is called the belly of the duck. As sundown occurs the production of solar drops off quickly but demand stays high. That rise is called the neck of the duck. That requires a lot of conventional power to need to come on line quickly. If not controlled correctly over/under supply can occur. Over supply is even more dangerous as it can damage equipment. Under supply causes brown/blackouts. As more solar is integrated and demand increases due to population growth and use of electric vehicles the neck gets steeper and the risk increases.
Part of the renewable integration analysis conducted by the ISO uncovered concerns about frequency response capabilities due to the displacement of conventional generators on the system. The 2020 33% studies show that in times of low load and high renewable generation, as much as 60% of the energy production would come from renewable generators that displace conventional generation and frequency response capability. Under these operating conditions, the grid may not be able to prevent frequency decline following the loss of a large conventional generator or transmission asset. This situation arises because renewable generators are not currently required to include automated frequency response capability and are operated at full output (they can not increase power). Without this automated capability,the system becomes increasingly exposed to blackouts when generation or transmission outages occur.
Times of low load and high supply occur daily around noon.
No need to stretch to your conspiracy theory, the technology to do storage hasn't been there in a sufficiently large, cheap and efficient way, and it's also significantly more expensive to generate with baseload, store at 70% efficiency just to fill in the peak periods, it's actually more efficient to burn the fuel when you need it than trying to store pre-burnt fuel. The need for storage is only driven by cheap renewables - it needs to systemically be cheaper than the losses in the storage, including the efficiency losses in storage (including the wear-costs on the storage medium) AND be a substantial percentage of the total energy production such that there's an excess of renewables (while all the fuel burning generators are turned to minimum) or you'd be better off turning the fuel burning generator down to regulate the grid and burning the fuel during the peak when you need it. Of course, if you get it 'free' with shallow discharges of grid-connected cars, there's some extra strategies one could use, but it's STILL not worth leveling the grid with the cars from fossil fuels, since one can just turn the generators up and down to level it without incurring the losses in charge/discharge (and wear and tear)
Relevant video, shows how the surplus power is dissipated, to make sure demand always matches production. Unfortunately only in Norwegian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I augment my power needs for the off grid production facility by utilizing large breasted, fat bottom Mexican women on bicycles powering generators.
The cost is similar to on grid, but fills in my needs for power. When it's not needed the women fill other needs. Win/win!
Who's to judge? Ride one for a few kw hours and see!
with a "smart grid" we could use batteries in vehicles or devices as temporary storage as well, couldn't we?
"Grid-scale batteries should cost no more than $100 per kilowatt hour, down from over $500 per kWh today". Really? My generator which is the same idea as a battery costs an expensive $1 per kilowatt hour.
I'm sure this is obvious to most here, but I've never actually seen anyone put it down in writing
The widespread adoption of batteries suggests that the electrical infrastructure of the US would go hybrid electric, like a Chevy Volt. The result is that we run generators at their best performance, store power in batteries, and then provide it on demand. So the overall system becomes a bit more agnostic about sources, just as a hybrid electric car is (can be).
Of course, being able to bypass the batteries for a certain base load would likely make sense. It would eliminate the various conversion losses from going that route.
From there, folks can argue about where the batteries should be located. Should my home have a battery so that it can store the power that it uses? Can I sign up with the power company to deliver a constant 1 kilowatt feed where I'm them obliged to do my own load leveling throughout the day, month and year? That would include my car's charging at night. Do I buy a 0.2 kilowatt feed ('trickle charging') to supplement my own 1 kilowatt solar panel set that delivers varying levels of power? That would be an unlikely thing to do in northern latitudes, but would I do it in the south?
So the aggregate feed rate guaranteed to be 'trickling' out to charge all those batteries in our homes would form the base load. It would likely be straightforward to maintain/sustain.
Is the resulting situation one where we have a fixed amount of power available to us, and we're always searching for ways to use it more efficiently? Many people do that already, but will it become a ubiquitous behavior?
Lastly, if manufacturing produces the greatest swings in power demand, will fully robotic plants allow for ubiquitous 24/7 manufacturing, leveling that portion of electrical demand?
The theory behind grid-tied home solar systems is that you can give your surplus power to the utility company who will give you credit in return for times when you need more power than you are generating. In effect, you are using the utility company as your storage battery, so you don't have to buy and maintain your own. This only works as long as there are always enough customers paying for electricity rather than generating their own. Eventually it's no longer cost effective for the utility company to provide storage service for free. They make their money charging for electricity, but if enough people only need them to store it temporarily, they are going to have to start charging for that service.
That does not mean that it will be.
What is needed is for the utilities to change direction. The profit should be in providing grid and storage. Basically, they need to spin off the electricity production and focus on the monopoly. By doing this, they can change their large grids into small 100 MW grids, use the storage to meet say 2 hours of demand. Then pay the same price for electricity no matter if it is from coal, nukes, nat gas, wind, geo-thermal, solar, etc. Then they make the money CHARGING for the difference (whole sale vs. retail).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
On the flow batteries, nothing.
OTOH, put a bullet through li-ion, and it will heat up over time.
BUT, put a leak into a nat gas line, near some sparks, well, then you have a REAL EXPLOSION.
And that is exactly why gas/diesel cars have many times more death per car mile, than do real electric cars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The battery market that only people who don't like science never knew existed. Which means they probably aren't reading this article either.
Sooooo, we're being told we never knew the market existed even though the vast majority of people who actually read past the headline did indeed know it existed.
Thanks for wasting my time samzenpus.
Oh, and btw, great name, makes you sound like a frickin' genius when you have the word pus in your name. I have an excuse, since my last name is lterally Goatcher, samzenpus doesn't really sound legit unless you're foreign and didn't understand what you're getting into.
Of course, I didn't say 20% hydro, did I? I said 20% 'other, including hydro'. As in a subset of the 20%, meaning less than 20%. The other category would be a grab-bag of stuff including hydro, biomass, geothermal, tidal, etc...
I'm well aware that hydro in the USA is effectively maxed. New dam construction barely keeps up with demolishing badly placed old ones and increasing efficiency through upgrading existing ones such as installing new turbines can only do so much.
If I don't list hydro, people complain. I list it people complain. I can't win, can I?
I don't read AC A human right
Centralized electric production and long distance xmission are over. Distributed power is practical now. Barriers to adoption are low; Costs are already at parity and will only get cheaper in the next few years as adoption grows and technology improves.. If I have a natural gas fuel cell providing my baseline 5kw's 24 hours a day and a solar array on my roof providing me 3k peak watts during the day when I need the air conditioning and a used battery from my Leaf with 25kwh to smooth out my demand and my new Leaf's battery as another battery backup and I'm hooked to the intelligent grid we're spending billions on so my excess kw's can be fed into the grid, why do I need giant batteries at giant power stations generating giant AC over thousands of miles of giant xmission lines? Is this a pipe dream? 50,000 stationary residential SOFC fuel cells in Japan. In the EU they've started field trials for the ene-farm program. For PV, 36 states are at grid parity. If you don't need to tie in and you're only running DC so you don't need inverters and you're only supplementing your baseline wattage, then the PV is really cheap including installation when compared to your electric utility. And you get the added extra benefit of not losing power several days a year due to weather. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
That's making an assumption of solar capacity far beyond the wildest dreams of those that wish to supply it. I'll assume it's a simple error instead of a deliberate attempt to mislead.
However the person I referred to is not Tom Murphy is it? However on the topic of the blog you linked, an assumption halfway down the page was enough capacity to supply power for a week. That really show that while interesting anything derived from such an assumption is somewhat irrelevant to what we are discussing and cannot be used as an example of there not being enough storage one way or another - it just shows it can't be done for a week. Due to the nature of grids and distributed power generation it's the wrong approach anyway since there is no requirement to provide enough storage for a single second.
Quite true, and that's starting to happen a bit as electricity utilities such as my former employer indulge in price gouging. However we'll still need new generating capacity as the operating generators are being shut down faster than that rate of decline simply due to it being too expensive to patch up old equipment beyond a certain point.
It is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist that is worse than the status quo - so most definitely misleading. The research is into better ways of filling small gaps and unexpected outages just like pump storage has been doing for a few decades and it has been misrepresented as "grid storage". I've been told by a transmission engineer in his late 70's that distributing power used to be almost as difficult as that journalist and some others here seem to think - and then transistors started getting used in control systems.
He also wished there were a lot of solar panels around back in the day since they pump out nice clean sine waves at whatever timing you wish at the control room so can be used for power factor correction, plus they are spread around a lot and can be brought online or taken offline with ease. As a bonus the capital cost was paid for by someone other than the power utility.
I thought you Americans got used to such things when you embraced deregulation and let Enron et all in the door? With a huge east-west grid and a lot of HVDC connections to make line loss almost irrelevant there is so much stuff pumping power into that grid that it should take a massive event for such a thing to happen in a widespread manner for any reason other than gross mismanagement. For a start there are so many gas turbines sitting on coal seam gas or similar just waiting for a chance to spin up for more than an hour or two every few days. There are baseline units of hundreds of Megawatts mothballed until the base demand increases again.
Also why do you keep providing links to some guy that straying so far off practical models that he was describing enough energy storage to power a continent for a week? Surely his "enough solar to power everything" is a similar wide ranging thought experiment and not intended to be taken as a serious suggestion as well? I suggest you take such things as intended instead of "proof" of something completely different.
You are being too tightly focused. Think like an engineer and think of systems instead of components - for instance look at the grid as a whole and you'll see a shitload of peaking power sources already in place such as gas turbines and using a bit more hydro.