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Florida Utility To Close Two Natural Gas Plants, Build World's Largest Solar Battery System (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Florida Power & Light has joined the race to build the world's largest solar battery storage system, announcing plans for its massive Manatee Energy Storage Center. The utility plans to build a 409 MW/900 MWh battery, to be powered by an existing FPL solar plant in Manatee County, Florida. It will begin serving customers in 2021. FPL says the battery system will be able to power 329,000 homes for two hours. For comparison, FPL notes the battery system is equivalent to 100 million iPhone batteries, or 300 million AA batteries. The system will be used in periods of high demand. The utility company also said that it will accelerate the retirement of two natural gas facilities at a nearby power plant. "FPL says the project will save customers more than $100 million while eliminating more than 1 million tons of carbon emissions, though no cost estimates for the project were disclosed," reports Electrek.
And while the Manatee Energy Storage Center is projected to be the "world's largest solar-powered battery storage system," it will have some competition from Texas where there are plans to build a 495 MW battery storage system that would be paired with an equivalent 495 MW solar farm in Borden County, Texas. It too is due to come online in 2021.
And while the Manatee Energy Storage Center is projected to be the "world's largest solar-powered battery storage system," it will have some competition from Texas where there are plans to build a 495 MW battery storage system that would be paired with an equivalent 495 MW solar farm in Borden County, Texas. It too is due to come online in 2021.
But, if the sun doesn't shine, how will you be able to watch TV?
They build it in Texas, they close fossil fuel plants so you can bet your ass that money can be made this way.
So..... Floridans have finally figured out that they can use the sun to run the air conditioning systems they use to escape the heat of the sun?
How exactly does that work? They move too slow to generate a lot of kinetic energy, and burning them is a challenge . . .
What if a combination of a reflective roof, improved sealing and insulation of attic ducts, and a higher-efficiency A/C unit is more cost effective than a solar photovoltaic panel?
The reflective roof is more than covering your house in tin -- there are coatings that reflect sunlight with better combined ability to reflect incoming radiation along with emit heat that gets in as infrared. Florida houses typically lack basements, so the A/C ductwork is in the hot attic -- sealing air leaks and insulating the ducts helps a lot. Newer A/C units are much more efficient.
"Uh, why not do both solar electric and A/C efficiency?" Indeed, why not, but all of the resources and press attention is going into the production side over the demand side. Low-hanging fruit, baby!
the huge manatee!
FPL is still working on a natural gas plan in Okeechobee County that will, among other things, use over 9,000,000 gallons of water a day from Florida’s source of drinking water.
https://www.energycentral.com/news/dep-approves-permit-fpl-plant
https://lakeokeechobeenews.com/government/gas-pipeline-to-connect-with-new-fpl-plant/
http://archive.tcpalm.com/opinion/columnists/laurence-reisman/laurence-reisman-hope-indian-river-county-doesnt-get-zapped-by-power-plant-25ec6c4e-bad7-59c8-e053-0-360609921.html
It's not a problem, because The Sun Always Shines On TV.
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...they're NOT closing anything in relation to this announcement. In fact, had someone clicked on the article they wouldn't have to scan too far to find this:
"Texas’s power grid operator has stressed the need for more electricity resources in the region to power oil and gas drilling operations."
So no, they're not closing fossil fuel plants in favor of this...and the reason they're building this is BECAUSE of fossil fuel efforts.
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First of all, is it true there's only the equivalent of three AA batteries in an iPhone?
Secondly, 100 million iPhone batteries or 300 million AA batteries may sound like a lot, but when divided by the power required by houses, it doesn't seem like much. Can someone convert that in a how-many-tesla-car-batteries-can-fit-in-a-stadium number?
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We used to call Florida Power and Light (FPL) "Florida Flicker and Flash" when I lived in the Orlando area. They had terrible power. Blackouts weren't that bad, though not rare. But constant brownouts, momentary flickers, occasional spikes were daily life. They couldn't control it worth a damn. Then they brought plants like those two natural gas plants online and things got much better. Guess that was too good, so they want to go back to the flickering and flashing...
Will tripple or even quadrupole. So far all this "alternative energy" stuff on a large scale has shown not to be less expensive but more expensive. If they really want to sell solar or wind as a better alternative - they need to make it cheaper in cost. It's still cheaper to use natural gas, coal or fossil fuels. I bought solar panels to put on my property to take advantage of the "free" sun. But wow was it costly. It will take me 20 years to recoup the cost......
The Truth is a Virus!!!
South Australian grid using wind mills widely separated was the first one to go in with a 50 MW system. It stabilized the grid and flattened the spot market prices so much they saved millions of dollars. Every dollar saved by the utility is a dollar NOT EARNED by gas powered plants. The ROI on natural gas plants are going to take a serious rework, they are losing juicy profits in the spot markets.
Now, Florida. Cost of storage batteries is falling so rapidly, it is like the micro chip revolution in computing. There is a Moore's Law for batteries, with a time period of about 7 years.
The neck of the famous "duck curve" is after sunset in CA. Solar has stopped, but a/c load is yet to peak. That one hour after sunset is the last critical piece needed for solar to become totally effective against natural gas. It is at hand. It is very exciting for the renewable energy fans.
Some of the gas plants operating in the peak load are "quick response" gas turbine plants. Their quick response is still measured in tens of minutes. The batteries are responding in milliseconds. The key thing about spot market electricity is, the price can go negative. If the gas plant is producing power and the grid could not absorb it they need to pay someone to take their power. The gas plant will not throttle down for several minutes. Who can absorb that power and get paid? The Batteries! Once the battery systems reach a critical mass, all natural gas fired power will be sold at long term pre negotiated fixed contract prices. Not the spot market. This will seriously change the ROI calculations of these plants that were already built. I am expecting the owners of these plants to cry uncle and come with hat in hand asking for "relief" from the utility rate payers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They use the cavitation of the manitee fart bubbles collapsing. these get instantaneously hotter than the sun, cause fusion and also photons streaming out of the squeezed vacuum states.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
battery storage makes sense even if it is not coupled to solar. Fast start gas turbines are expensive to run because they required a lot of maintenance and they are inefficient when the outside temperature is hot. The batteries are not competing against base load power plants but against peakers which are more expensive. In addition batteries are getting cheaper every year.
" But right now there isn't a lower cost yet. " - Wrong. You're just apparently too stupid to know how to design a system.
Expect to hear of some kind of "tax" being imposed on companies who don't use coal, or any fossil fuel. The excuse will be they're killing jobs as well as falling for that Chinese hoax of climate change. The same hoax the con artist cited in his need to build a sea wall around his failing Irish golf course.
Maybe the con artist will suddenly be into regulations and force the company do years of environmental studies to determine the effects of not pouring CO2 into the atmosphere when producing electricity.
Stupid Slashdot - "storage icon".
What if a leprechaun emerged from my anus and proceeded to knife you with a shitty knife?
I just thought I'd asked since your post seems to open the floor to completely baseless flights of fantasy with zero basis in reality or fact, posed as a legitimate argument couched in a question.
What if you educated yourself on the matter and got a clue before presenting veiled "solutions" to problems that far better than you have been trying to solve for centuries? Do you actually believe that no one else thought to use reflective covering and insulation? Do you actually believe that we don't currently use the most efficient solutions, when balanced against cost and practicality?
What if you STFU?
Have you seen how fat those fuckers are? All that blubber? I'd expect one to burn for days.
If the sun hasn't been shining. Like during a hurricane.
Captcha: atrophy
It's Oil and Gas combined cycle power plants
You can get the info easily enough from the state public service commission
http://www.psc.state.fl.us/Fil...
And the consumer savings are b.s. as well FPL is playing games with the Solar Base rate adjustment program and fuel recovery cost programs
http://www.psc.state.fl.us/lib...
What will you watch TV with? Since failures of power stations happen already, though frequently they're less catastrophic, though they CAN still mean the power station is out for many months, even years (See UK's Didcot, a coal station out for 6 months while there was a nonusable Hinkley reactor that was out for over two years), but you NEVER ask about it, you clearly do not ACTUALLY care about power stations going down, only scoring meaningless talking points to enthrone your personally preferred political ideology on society as a whole.
Pretty fucking shitty of you.
Nobody is forcing you to change to combat climate change. But if you keep fucking it up, like any polluter or antisocial asshat, you will be arrested and jailed. It's no different than forcing pedophiles to change by making laws against child molestation.
And demanding that we continue to change the climate to something less salubrious to the current situation is mandating change to the future generations, where they have no ability to do anything else, unlike your lazy greedy ass.
Of course, depends WHAT coal, but solar is now below coal. Wind has been below coal for nearly a decade.
But, if the sun doesn't shine, how will you be able to watch TV?
By using a BATTERY that got CHARGED WHEN THE SUN WAS SHINING.
Which is what TFA was abuot. I know you didn't read it. But did you even read the title of the Slashdot article? It's in that, too.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm curious about what battery technology they plan to use. It would have been nice if TFA had mentioned that. (Or did I miss it?)
Lithium Ion? Vanadium Redox? Something else?
Who's the manufacturer?
Does anybody happen to know?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Only totally brain dead assholes will forget this fact:
Florida has a very big friend which pays annaul visits --- HURRICANES
Hurricanes will bring with it high gusts of wind, which, incidentally, is very attractive to the solar panels.
Best of luck, Florida, because ya sure need it !!
What about when the sun goes down! There will be blackouts and famine!!!
That's when gas power stations get to be a problem. When coal transport fails, that's when coal fired power stations get to be a problem. When oil supplies run out, that's when oil plants get to be a problem. When your nuclear power has a fault, that's when you stop the plant to avoid CATASTROPHE, but now you have when nuclear is a problem.
Got any power source that isn't a problem? If not, what the fuck difference does it make yammering on and on about "but when sun stops?!?!?!?"?
Funnily enough, the huge hydro storage was built at huge cost and damage because of nuclear power: when one of those goes down, you lose GW at a time, and you cannot balance THAT out in 15 seconds, so you HAVE TO have a backup generator for those lost GW that can spool up in seconds.
Never heard you whine about the hidden and unexplained costs of nuclear when that happened. But every time you demand an increase in nuclear, you're having to pay for a new hydro dam to back up its loss.
If it's a hurricane, then the sun is still shining. You can see without streetlights. Dumbass.
PS how do you use power when the hurricane has removed the power lines that connect you to the (now out of action) coal plant?
Indeed some have been known facts for several hundred years. Look up carbonic acid. The rest is also 100% known to be factually true. CO2 does trap heat, and has for the entire existence of CO2 in this universe. And since the power source of storms is the temperature of the air and the water evaporated by that temperature, that connection, too, is a fact, just as knowing that you are aerobically burning O2 to get CO2 which you expel by your breath is a fact, even though we haven't proven YOU are breathing at the moment. Reality happens even before we understand it. Science just explains it when we've understood it.
Ice melting is also well comprehended. And since CO2 has always caused warming when it rises, is doing so now, and therefore ice will melt, that too is a fact.
We don't have to push you off a tall building to test gravity any more. It's settled science. Even if flatearthers don't believe any such thing as gravity exists. Same for CO2