Good. Could not have happened soon enough.
Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
21–30 of 432 posts
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#22$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…
I have been wonder why can't we convert outside heat into indoor cooling naturally, i.e. in Texas can we convert summer heat to AC power in real time for at least each residence house?
As others have said, you can't use ambient outdoor heat to power air conditioning, because of thermodynamics.
It's possible to use solar heating to directly power indoor cooling, without converting to electricity as an intermediate step. My rough understanding is that this is potentially more efficient, but it adds mechanical complexity and loses flexibility (since it only really works in direct sunlight). And it's probably becoming less cost-effective in comparison as PV prices continue to drop.
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#23$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…
There should be also more focus on proper thermal insulation of houses in warm climate, which is something that is not often mentioned. Lots of energy gets lost on AC simply because heat easily enters the houses.
Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, especially of windows. My parents had a lot of big windows too and recently have started upgrading them to insulated windows and it makes a huge difference. The US needs to heavily encourage these sorts of improvements to buildings, it's good for everyone.
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#24$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…
I have been wonder why can't we convert outside heat into indoor cooling naturally, i.e. in Texas can we convert summer heat to AC power in real time for at least each residence house?
You have to have a temperature delta to make this work. (Thermodynamics 101.) A ground source heat pump is one way to do that: In Texas in the summer, a few meters underground is always cooler than the air.
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#25> In March, an analysis of more than 7000 global storage projects by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by 35% in just the past 18 months, to $187 per MWh. I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. That's the amortized cost of $187 per MWh cycle, not the battery's upfront cost. Assuming 2000 cycles…
I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading.
Misleading to some, flat-out useless to others. The replacement cost of the 24KWh battery in our Nissan Leaf is about $5K. So I'll take two of those $187 MWh batteries, please.
Oh, of course they're not speaking the same language as I am with that kind of price difference. But then I guess I don't know what in the hell they're talking about if not XWh of energy storage.
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#26$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…
I have been wonder why can't we convert outside heat into indoor cooling naturally, i.e. in Texas can we convert summer heat to AC power in real time for at least each residence house?
Once you do that, you can then run a thermal generator on the resulting temperature differential, to generate even more energy, and now you've created a perpetual motion machine, oops.
(without an existing cool place to dump heat, you can't generate energy, otherwise you could just extract heat from everything everywhere and cool it all down to absolute zero, solving both the energy problem and global warming with a single stroke)
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#27> In March, an analysis of more than 7000 global storage projects by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by 35% in just the past 18 months, to $187 per MWh. I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. That's the amortized cost of $187 per MWh cycle, not the battery's upfront cost. Assuming 2000 cycles…
Does it at least use a TVM calculation? If so it's indeed quite misleading, considering that at max 1 cycle per day (e.g. solar) that's 6 years to spread the cost across.
If the battery storage is directly connected to the DC side of a solar farm, that's one charging opportunity per day. If it's just hooked into the grid, two charging opportunities per day would be more typical in California. Wind power output tends to be highest at night after the daily demand peak is already past.
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx
Look at yesterday (11 July 2019) on the renewables trend graph, for example.
Wind reaches its daily minimum around noon, while solar is peaking. Wind's maximum output is at 10:00 PM, long after the sun has set and after the demand peak has passed.
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#28I wonder what the wider economic effect will be if the price of solar continues to improve and the fossil fuel industry can't find a way to remain competitive. Since some places are far more suitable for solar power generation than others, will those areas end up with a significant advantage in the cost of living? Could that in turn lead to a major migration of people and economic activity to those areas?
Houston might end up with a significant advantage in the cost of living in the low carbon future, because our economy is based on oil and there won't be nearly as many jobs here anymore.
Hopefully we get diversifying...
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#29Why lithium ion batteries — are they much cheaper to make than new gravitational potential (i.e. hydroelectric) storage systems?
You need the existing terrain to provide a significant elevation change, and building that artificially is probably not worthwhile in most cases.
Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid
#30> In March, an analysis of more than 7000 global storage projects by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by 35% in just the past 18 months, to $187 per MWh. I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. That's the amortized cost of $187 per MWh cycle, not the battery's upfront cost. Assuming 2000 cycles…
They are comparing it with building a new power plant costs for which are calculated similarly for 20-30 year life cycle. Same is for Solar and wind power plants. Many people assume that prices of grid scale solar and wind power are coming down because of technology improvements that is partly true but another reason for the price decreases is that the investors are finding out the calculated life of these is actually 50-100% more than their previous assumptions.