Slashdot Mirror
Battery Advance Could Lead To a Cleaner Way To Store Energy
sciencehabit writes: With the continuing rise of solar and wind power, the hunt is on for cheap batteries that are able to store large amounts of energy and deliver it when it's dark and the wind is still. Last year researchers reported an advance on one potentially cheap, energy-packing battery. But it required toxic and caustic materials. Now, the same team has revised its chemistry, doing away with the noxious constituents—an advance that could make future such batteries far cheaper and simpler to build.
When is it ever dark and windless at the same time across the USA? It happens about as often as EVERY SINGLE NUCLEAR POWER GENERATOR is offline at the same time. Yet we don't bang on and on about how we need backup generation for nuclear (we do, about a third over capacity to get to 90%+ capacity factor), nor how we need a huge amount of fast generation to handle unexpected outages until some larger and slower (and cheaper) generator can get up to speed.
NOTE: coal power has this problem too, along with needing a continued resupply of resources to continue operating giving another option for failure.
We have blackouts because cheapskates running the power industry don't want to spend for proper backup and capacity planning with our nuclear/coal/oil/gas infrastructure. IT IS A GOOD THING that we're insisting on having that done for renewables. But I can't help feeling this is just a way to make sure that power utilities can keep their old infrastructure going (which has already sunk the cost of building, so is in high profit mode) and also hike prices for renewables roll out (making them hugely profitable, since it's getting cheaper by the day and already comparable or cheaper than current generation fossil fuel plants). Whether they'll ACTUALLY spend the money doing this proper backup I seriously doubt. I believe that this is entirely a "reason" to not roll out renewables and mothball the highly profitable sunk capital infrastructure. "Oh, we have to wait until we get this new battery!" Of course, NEW fossil fuel (and nuclear) builds will go ahead and even be shoehorned past state or local objection under the alarmist guise of "We NEED this generation because we closed the old plants!", whereas what they SHOULD do is build out any replacement of closed generation with renewables.
However, the meme of "When it's dark and windless" is a shibboleth and bogeyman to stop or at least slow take-up of renewables (or demonise those who do it privately). It pretends that we ONLY use solar PV, pretends that "not even half of expected average" is "windless" and we only use wind. And entirely ignores tidal, hydro, biomass, geothermal, wave and solar thermal. Or that we can build up to 200-400% capacity for the same price as nuclear replacement (when ignoring the need for 1/3rd more nuclear because of downtime). The higher figure would be putting it all where it does the most good, not the most convenient or profitable per-acre.
When we have 100% renewable infrastructure, THEN we can go carefully and without haste into the new generator types for nuclear and find the best and most secure way of using nuclear without the rush of replacing coal. When we know we have a solution we can retire the overcapacity on renewables and replace what we know we need with reliable and safe nuclear.
A nuclear power we could use in space travel or on extra-terrestrial bases, where renewables would be untenable for obvious reasons.