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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)
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?
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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There's a much easier solution, already in operation - pumped hydro power plants. They're hydro electric power stations, but when there's a surplus of supply, they pump water up into their reservoir. When peaks of power production are needed, they generate. They can be turned on at a moments notice (all it takes is opening a sluice, and dropping the water), and can store vast amounts of energy.
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.
It's a partial solution. Hydro power is only really available in certain areas, and transmission losses kill some of the gains. BC makes a good amount of money this way. North America's hydro capacity is probably as large as it will ever be, because it's extremely destructive of wildlife habitat and of arable land.
Pumped storage costs about $200 million per GWh of electricity stored to build. It 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 to the point of being either deserts or often in drought conditions during the summer. Pumped storage is also lossy, typically about 65% efficient round-trip.
Mass battery technology costs about ten times as much as pumped storage ($2 million per MWh for sodium/sulfur batteries from NGK), flywheels are a bit less but still a lot more than pumped storage. Cheaper methods of energy storage like compressed air tend to be very lossy.
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. 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. Getting wind and solar farm operators to pay for this extra storage probably isn't going to happen, sadly.
Research the S.T.E.P. options. Hydro power storage can be scaled, too. Other possbilities are molten salt and compressed air storage for instance.
Yes, there are losses to all these systems, but the ability to store 50% to 90% of electricity produced through renewables makes them well worth considering.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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)
"Nukes have ramp times on order of 2-3 days...."
Nonsense! You couldn't run nuclear ships if that were true! You can design nuclear reactors to have any ramp time you like.
Current Grid-connected nuclear power stations are designed to provide base load, where ramp time is irrelevant. Bu they don't have to be...
For American readers: gas means a gaseous hydrocarbon, and not a liquid one.
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Nuclear ships have a very simple way around this: They run at full power most of the time, and dump the excess energy when not needed to run the engines. It's horribly inefficient, but even used with such inefficiency nuclear reactors still pack an energy density that puts any diesel engine to shame.
Remember what happened after the Fukushima reactor's unplanned shutdown: Emergency pumps had to be rushed in to keep cooling water running through the core. It's called decay heat: Even if you shove all the control rods in full, it still takes a long time to stop emiting heat. Ramping up is easier, but still not thirty seconds.
Yeah, but everyone on /. from the US claims that all options for those plants (real estate) are used up ;)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's the fact that about half or more of the population is so scientifically illiterate that they actually believe stuff like this, that is leading me, at my age, to begin to just not care anymore. I'm just going to goof off for the few years I might have left on this world.
Look, if these f*cking self-powered generators are real, and are so f*cking simple to build that some guy can build one in his garage (which must be true, since there are literally 1000s of these videos out there) then why the f*ck aren't they making them and selling them? Or even disconnecting their own houses from the grid--without some hidden generator/fuel source going on behind the fraudulent scenes)?
WHAT is stopping these things from being sold at every hardware store and all over Amazon, with 5 star reviews saying "It powers my whole home, I cancelled my utility connection, and when there was a minor break down, the manufacturer sent the repair guy a few hours after I called and had me back up in no time! Love it! Would buy again."
Lemme guess, some "conspiracy" by "big oil" or some other claptrap, right?
The answer of course is that these self-powered generators are bullshit, and the people who believe they work idiots, and the people who believe they made one that works scarier still, with most of them knowing full well that it is bullshit, but they are just sociopathic criminals who hope to defraud others, knowing that most people are stupid enough to believe in these generators, along with other fairy tails, so perhaps there should even be a special exemption in the law that prevents charging them for defrauding people who seriously just plain deserve it.
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.
Umm, no.
Former Naval Nuke guy here...we didn't run the plant at full power most of the time. We seldom ran it at half power.
Yeah, the nuke plant on a sub or surface ship is engineered differently than a power reactor ashore. Among other things, the fraction of the maximum output dedicated to making electricity is generally quite small, since we need steam more than we need electricity.
Even so, we didn't operate near max electrical output all that often either, much less maximum steam output.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's a partial solution. Hydro power is only really available in certain areas, and transmission losses kill some of the gains. BC makes a good amount of money this way. North America's hydro capacity is probably as large as it will ever be, because it's extremely destructive of wildlife habitat and of arable land.
There is a variation on this which has huge potential and can be done on a large scale. It requires large construction efforts, but what hydro-power options don't?
Construct a huge vertical cylinder in the ocean. During periods of surplus, pump water OUT of the cylinder. During peak periods, let water back in (and of course turn turbines with it).
I read about this not long ago, and I think (I am not certain) someone is building one right now, or has applied to build one.
and transmission losses kill some of the gains
This is true of any storage solution. It is hardly unique to pumped storage.
There's a much easier solution, already in operation - pumped hydro power plants.
Pumped hydro works but just cannot be scaled to provide sufficient storage. Hence other solutions are needed. Actually it's likely nothing short of a combination of many approaches will be enough.
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?
No, HVDC is good enough. You don't need 99% efficiency at 10x the cost of 90% efficiency. It's just not worth it. Besides, I doubt the efficiency of superconductors with their associated refrigeration would be competitive with HVDC anyway, or why else is it that HVDC is the market leader for long haul transmission right now?
Simpler tech. wins. HVDC is simple, in the sense that the failure modes are rather localized and not terribly difficult to repair and/or design in some redundancy to mitigate so as to achieve very high reliability. All you need is some spare power electronic converter channels at both ends, and if you loose one you can switch to another in a few seconds, while the remaining channels handle the short term surge load.
Blow one seal on a superconducting line, and the whole thing is down for a long time before it's fixed and cooled back down, assuming that the loss of cooling didn't result in vaporizing a part of the line that you now have to go searching for and dig up.
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'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.)
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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.
A small reactor on a ship can be ramped quite quickly, but a large multi gigawatt land based reactor takes a lot of time in orde to minimize thermal stresses.
Who says we have to build huge?
which is why the program to turn seawater into fuel, while ineffecient on land, is going to be awesome on nuclear powered boats.
The energy would have been lost anyway. Now you reduce the supply line.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/13/newser-navy-seawater-fuel/7668665/
all that unused 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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But it's already built. Wherever there was a big river, dams have been constructed to take advantage of it, and they've been extremely profitable investments. Adding a pump to an existing dam to convert it to pumped-storage operation, is rather inexpensive.
Deserts are classified by rainfall, not available water resources. Las Vegas is a desert despite Lake Mead and Hoover dam. The Southern California deserts have lots of water available in aquifers, just not quite enough for the opulent water-wasting lifestyles of the astronomically huge population after several years of drought. Even Antarctica is a desert.
The power loss is overwhelmingly because of evaporation from the dam reservoir. If you're building a dedicated pumped-storage facility, particularly in the desert, you simply need to cover it and you can get those losses down to next to nothing.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I like your sig quote.
What happens when some beer drinking redneck puts a bullet through one of those batteries?
Non-moderated, aka breeder or fast neutron reactors that burn 99% of the fuel rods as opposed to only 1% presently in all moderated, aka slowed down neutron reactors. All the depleted uranium the military has stockpiled declaring it radiation free and with no useful uses other than awesome bullets, because of the huge density of near gold for metallic uranium, so all this depleted uranium, or U235 depleted U238 leftovers the army shoots around is actually awesome nuclear fuel in a breeder reactor.
However, because a breeder reactor is not as reactive as a moderated one based on very fissile U235, the critical mass is huge comparatively, so you have to build the thing huge compared to conventional moderated reactors. But it's worth to build it huge, as it can burn thorium, which is like 3 to 5 times as abundant as uranium, and does not cause as much a proliferation risk - a statement that has to be taken with a grain of salt, because once anyone is expert at nuclear technology, there are clever ways to make things blow up, even from thorium fuel. So it's like, if you wanna fight nuclear technology proliferation, it comes down to how dumb and illiterate, and scientifically retarded you can keep people. So far it works great in places full of retards up to the highest levels in command like Iraq, for buying stupid nonscientific things such as dowsers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... (a link I found at the Slashdot topic Drought Inspires a Boom In Pseudoscience, From Rain Machines To 'Water Witches')
It's like the biggest obstacle to general safe adoption of clean nuclear power is the prevalence of mental retardation around the world, in places like Iraq where people blow each other up, so all you gotta do is IQ test the whole world population, and gas-chamber all the retards to clean up the gene pool, then you don't have to worry about nuclear technology proliferation. It's an easy and simple solution, I don't understand what's so complicated about this?
No, HVDC is good enough. You don't need 99% efficiency at 10x the cost of 90% efficiency. It's just not worth it. Besides, I doubt the efficiency of superconductors with their associated refrigeration would be competitive with HVDC anyway, or why else is it that HVDC is the market leader for long haul transmission right now?
I agree, HVDC can be made to work above or (preferably) below ground with a suitable amount of aluminum cross section and/or heat sink. There are some interesting calculations for 5-288GW transmission lines in this paper Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security which I use as a reference for raw capacity and conductor size. But Faulkner's 1-4 million VDC dream is unlikely in an age where practical Voltage Source Converters operate at ~345kV.
Faulkner is a hero of mine, we seem to share a feeling of urgency about re-structuring the grid to HVDC. His firm is desperately trying to make trench-friendly passively cooled HVDC 'elpipe' a reality, which sadly, is not gaining traction. In the supposed richest and cleverest country on Earth it grieves me to read this,
Forgive me... but will someone please give this man some fucking money?
There is a proposal afoot to build an HVDC submarine ring around the UK. A ring structure is the way to go -- with several overlapping rings across North America. They provide fault tolerance and (I've read recently somewhere) it would simplify load management if sources would design for and 'push' towards loads in a particular direction. Ring HVDC also optimizes plant design.
Tres Amigas SuperStation aims to bridge the North American East/West/Texas interconnects with superconducting HVDC at 5GW (scalable to 30GW). Their business model seems ENRONian with the twist they they'd actually own some unique infrastructure and not just leech-suck from others'. But is this project just a proving ground for superconductors? I wonder how the non-superconductor options would work out.
___
Please see Thorium
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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.
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?
Adding a pump to an existing dam to convert it to pumped-storage operation, is rather inexpensive.
You have no idea how dams work. Water that leaves a dam flows down river and is not available to be pumped up again. Even if you added another dam to catch the water it would decrease the efficiency of the original dam as the drop would be decreased.
The power loss is overwhelmingly because of evaporation from the dam reservoir.
Again you need to look into facts before commenting. The no electric motor or generator is 100% efficient. For example, water turbines have an efficiency as high as 95%. Since that is for a turbine optimized for generation and pumped storage uses the same turbine to pump and it does to generate the efficiency would be less. Assuming losses from the pump are the same at least 10% of the electricity is lost due to converting the electricity into potential energy and back again.
yep. Driest place on Earth, according to an early edition of the Guinness Book, is the leeward slope of Mount Erebus. Not a drop of rain for 50 million years.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You'd have to build a turbine hall under the sea with all the ongoing maintenance arrangements. Easier said than done.
Yes, indeed. I did mention that it would involve major construction. But I am convinced that if they can do oil wells, they can do this.
The majority of the construction, though, is of course a massive concrete and steel wall. We do have the requisite experience to do that well enough underwater, or (more likely? I'm not sure) above ground and hauled out in sections.
Unless you dig a nice big hole at the bottom that can hold a day's worth of water. Then there's no loss of head pressure and plenty of water available to be pumped.
It's not like I imagined any of this. Dams ARE converted to pumped-storage.
That's just a little bit high, but still a tiny fraction of the 35% losses previously stated, and much better than any battery technology plus AC-DC-AC conversion that exists today.
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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.
Unless you dig a nice big hole at the bottom that can hold a day's worth of water.
Do you even realize how much water that is? For example Taum Sauk is a 550MW plant that has a reservoir with 1.5billion gallons of water in it that would drain in 24 hours. A hole big enough to hold that water would be 46 acres and 100 feet deep. Digging a hole that big is not a viable solution. Can you show a reference where this has been done or even contemplated?
It's not like I imagined any of this. Dams ARE converted to pumped-storage.
References please.The only places I can find where conventional dams are used for pumped storage us where there is a lake close downstream and those locations are few and far between.
That's just a little bit high, but still a tiny fraction of the 35% losses previously stated,
You need to learn a bit of math. Ten percent is not a tiny fraction of 35%. It is in fact 29% of the loss. It also does not take into account moving water the horizontal distance between the lower reservoir and the upper reservoir. Most references to pumped storage efficiency refer to 70% to 85% efficiency. Losing up to 30% of the energy attempted to be stored is not a good thing. Add together the cost of electricity generation, losses during conversion and the cost of running the pumped hydro station and you get very expensive electricity.
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Try reading whole sentences. The following is a quote from this article.
Due to evaporation losses from the exposed water surface and mechanical efficiency losses during conversion, only between 70% and 85% of the electrical energy used to pump the water into the elevated reservoir can be regained in this process.
Here is a quote from another article
The cycle is generally about 80% efficient, with losses due to water evaporation and engine non-idealities.
And another article.
Pumps and turbines (often implemented as the same physical unit, actually) can be something like 90% efficient, so the round-trip storage comes at only modest cost.
Please note that 90% pump efficiency + 90% turbine efficiency equals 81% overall efficiency.
Here is another;
First, the charging process in pumped hydro storage is affected by the pump efficiency that pumps the water into the upper reservoir at times of low electrical demand. The losses during discharging process on the other hand are caused by the turbine operation to generate electricity at peak load periods. The total charging and discharging rate is given by calculating the product of the efficiencies of pipe (friction losses) and the mechanical equipments
The hourly evaporation losses is assumed to be negligible because the amount of water evaporated is far too small compared to the total water volume in the reservoir
That paper quotes efficiency at 75 – 85 percent.
Here is an article stating that evaporative losses are minor;
North Eden Creek will be the primary source of water for the initial fill of the lower reservoir. Water rights will need to be secured, both for the initial fill and annual evaporation maintenance. The advantages of this system are that once the initial fill has occurred, the only water needed will be a small amount to offset annual evaporation from the reservoirs. The precipitation and evaporation balance will result in an annual water loss of approximately 0.2m over the total surface area of both reservoirs.
While higher in the desert evaporative losses do not effect cycle efficiency significantly.
Need I go on? Yelling without up backing you statement with references just weakens your case.
Most of your sources that just state total losses and don't bother to separate out the evaporative losses, don't lend ANY support to your assertion at all.
Some you are using out of context... "something like 90%", "assumed" and "small amount" are obviously not meant as rigorous and exact figures, yet you try to use them as such.
You never asked, nor even argued with my statement... You just acted like it didn't exist and then quoted more nonsense that doesn't speak to the issue either way...
How would you feel about a source for 87% real-world efficiency?
http://www.heco.com/portal/sit...
And as for conversions of dams to pumped storage, the first one that comes up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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The Cruachan dam in Scotland was converted from being a regular hydroelectric dam to pumped-storage with a power rating of 440MW and a total capacity of about 8GWh. The other substantial pumped-storage facility in Britain, Dinorwig in Wales (1.6GW peak output, 8GWh total) was purpose-built in the 1970s with its high reservoir in a worked-out slate quarry high in the hills. Note that both Scotland and Wales do not suffer from a lack of water.
Some of the losses in pumped-storage are due to friction in the pipes as the water is pumped up into the high reservoir and also on the trip back down through the turbines to generate electricity. The further apart the two reservoirs are the greater the losses hence the need for good geography to build an efficient pumped storage facility.
Most of your sources that just state total losses and don't bother to separate out the evaporative losses
You have no sources for evaporative loss numbers. Look up the efficiencies of electric motors and water turbines. They are nowhere near 100%.
How would you feel about a source for 87% real-world efficiency?
Sorry but your link was broken. The only link I can find that mentions efficiency of pumped storage is this one and it is a summary of all US pumped hydro storage. As far as I can find Hawaii has no pumped storage facilities. All I can find are proposals but no completed projects.
How about an actual efficiency rating from a real US plant.
Overall plant cycle efficiency is today 73%.
Notice that it is in New York State so evaporation would be minimal.
Or this one;
While generating electricity, the pump-generators produce 2,010 million kWh annually but consumes 2,642 million kWh when pumping.
2010/2642 = 76%
Or this one.
It generates about 1 million MWh annually and consumes about 20 percent more in pumping mode.
That would be 80% efficiency.
This one
The plant runs on average at 74–75% efficiency.
This one
The plant generates 737 GWh annually but consumes 1,021 GWh pumping.
That is 72% efficiency.
this one.
On an annual basis, the power station generates 1,420 GWh of electricity and consumes 1,720 GWh in pumping mode.
82.5%
So for real world figure all I can come up with are between 72% and 82.5% with most in the mid 70%. Don't you think that if evaporative losses were a big factor and easily remedied that these installations would not have done it by now?
And as for conversions of dams to pumped storage, the first one that comes up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Helms Pumped Storage Plant is a power station that uses Helms Creek canyon for off-river water storage. It never was a conventional dam.
You don't know what you are talking about.
Sorry but here is some information on the Cruachan Power Station;
Construction began in 1959 to coincide with the Hunterston A nuclear power station in Ayrshire. Cruachan uses electricity generated at night to pump water to the higher reservoir, which can then be released during the day to provide power as necessary.
It is a purpose built dam to work with a nearby nuclear plant and not a conversion.
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?...
In France, not all nukes are base load.
Running nuclear power plants at full power is more efficient but it doesn't mean they can't follow the load, at least for newer designs.
The ramp time is probably not in the seconds but to buffer rapid changes we still have hydro.
Of course I never said either was 100% efficient. Why you're wasting my time with volumes of mindless drivel, I may never understand.
New York State doesn't have any evaporation? I guess that must mean they don't ever get any rain, then. It takes a twisted mind to throw around accusations at others when you're completely ignorant of the topic.
And how does that, in your twisted mind, make the 87% figure less relevant? How is it that you're now just ignoring it, since it doesn't agree with you, and firing off a bunch more anecdotal numbers?
Nope, there are innumerable reasons not to do so. Even 70% efficiency is pretty good with cheap electricity, and it's not a trivial effort to combat the evaporation, nor would it be popular with residents, and free of environmental consequences.
No? Everyone else in the world seems to think Courtright Dam and Wishon Dam are... wait for it... dams.
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If you are looking for large deep holes to use why not make use of old mines. Up in norther Minnesota there are a number of old mine pits hundreds of feet deep with a foot print much larger than 46 acres. Even something like using an old gravel pit would work since those can be fairly deep and large (the one I like fishing in is ~95 feet deep and ~200 acres)
Time to offend someone
but regarding the first question - how long were the ramp-times of your plants?
because a moderately high iq (say around 120) unfornunately doesn't make you socially competent - there are plenty of assholes around that range. i'd argue that if you were smart enough - say 140 or above - you'd see the futility of being a total dick. but you'd probably have no energy problems anyways if you gas anybody below that. also, tv would be better.
From what we called "hotel load" to full power? Pretty sure that's classified.
That said, we're talking in the timezone of "how long does it take you to finish that cup of coffee?", not hours....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Why you're wasting my time with volumes of mindless drivel, I may never understand.
If you can't understand all the concepts involved then why are you so adamant that you are correct in thinking most of the losses are from evaporation? here is your original statement;
The power loss is overwhelmingly because of evaporation from the dam reservoir. If you're building a dedicated pumped-storage facility, particularly in the desert, you simply need to cover it and you can get those losses down to next to nothing.
And how does that, in your twisted mind, make the 87% figure less relevant?
Because it is inaccurate as shown by the figures for the individual American installations. For example the first two links I sent were from American plants. They showed efficiencies of 73% and 76% and that is far from 87%. What you were looking it is called a secondary source. You need to look at primary sources to get actual figures. It is a basic research technique.
No? Everyone else in the world seems to think Courtright Dam and Wishon Dam are... wait for it... dams.
You claim that there has been at least one dam that was built to produce electricity the conventional way and was converted to work with pumped storage. Here is your original statement;
But it's already built. Wherever there was a big river, dams have been constructed to take advantage of it, and they've been extremely profitable investments. Adding a pump to an existing dam to convert it to pumped-storage operation, is rather inexpensive.
None of the examples you have referred to have done that. Yes they are dams but they never were conventional run-of river dams. They are called off-river storage dams. Perhaps you could educate yourself about the difference.
Again, educate yourself before commenting.
Because it takes 2 reservoirs with height between them. You need a surface and sub-surface reservoir.The other issue is that you need to install the generators as low as possible. Running a generation turbine hundreds of feet below ground is not easy. Also, a few hundred feet is not enough drop to make it viable. The relevant height difference is between the top of the upper reservoir and the top of the lower reservoir. It does not matter how deep the lower reservoir is if it is filled almost to the level of the upper reservoir.
While the cost of pumped storage is not going to change, battery costs can and likely will come down. One example http://www.technologyreview.co... would cost about $30,000 per MWh, 1/6 or less of current tech. That's $30 million per GWh, almost 10 times cheaper than pumped storage.
I know battery breakthrough stories are a dime a dozen, but progress in this area is quite likely since you don't have the power density constraint of small devices. The primary driver is material cost, not power density. The amount of energy stored is arbitrary as these batteries consist of components which can be individually adjusted (e.g. use larger tanks for liquids).
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.
You are right that storage has losses. In fact, with EOS energy, you will lose about 15-25% but with much of it coming from line losses. That is why ideally, utilities will not do single large storage, but will instead, work on the 100 MWh size storage while creating microgrids.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
As you say battery breakthrough stories are a dime a dozen (a bit like solar cell breakthrough stories -- I'm still waiting for the $1/watt printed solar cells we were promised in a breathless article on Slashdot about eight years ago). Reality is what you can buy off the shelf now, the ticket price, the lifespan in terms of cycles or years in place, disposal costs at end-of-life etc. etc. Glossy brochures are not the same.
Current off-the-shelf static battery tech like NGK's sodium-sulfur units cost about $2 million per MWh, not $200,000 per MWh but they are expected to last for decades. If they ever solve the little "bursting into flames" problem they've been plagued with they might fit a niche as they're a lot smaller than an equivalent flywheel or other storage system for the same capacity. A drop in price to 1/100 of the NGK batteries is probably going to take a while though.
The Dinorwig pumped storage station in Wales (about 8GWh capacity) cost about $1.5 billion to build but it's been operational for forty years now and will probably last another forty years with a maintenance bill of a few hundred million bucks total. A static battery built of Li-ion cells could match the capacity and performance of Dinorwig at much less capital cost but the half-billion bucks worth of cells would need replacing every five years or so.
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.
For the benefit of anyone reading, jklovanc is still talking out of his ass, but I've wasted too much time on this nonsense already. Goodbye.
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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.
Wow, the person with one reference that has been proven inaccurate is saying someone else is talking out their ass.
I decided to look up evaporation from a pond. For example, Bath County Pumped Storage Station has an upper reservoir with n area of surface area of 265-acre (110 ha) and storage capacity of 35,599 acreft (43,910,720 m3). Using standard calculationswith 20km winds, 0% humidity and max holding of.020kg/kg I get a daily evaporation of about 73 acre-ft/day. That is a loss of 0.2% of the water in the upper reservoir per day. Sure if you let the water sit for 50 days you would get a 10% loss but that would be rare. So in 365 days one would lose 0.73 of a complete fill. If the reservoir let out ten percent a day there would be 36.5 fils per year. 0.73/36.5 = 2% loss due to evaporation. While evaporation causes losses it is not significant.
dude, I was trying to be funny.. there is no such thing as an IQ test that works well, to begin with..and even if there were.. etc, etc...jeez
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.