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Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

sciencemag.org

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Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#211

Post by jillesvangurp »

option wrote: post #66

Maybe this isn’t a problem, but I am curious about how and where all those solar cells and batteries will be disposed at the end of their usefulness?

It's pretty much a non issue. Battery recycling is going to be a great business once currently produced batteries start reaching their rather long end of life. We're in a weird situation right now where we are producing vastly more than just a few years ago so the recycling market is lagging the production market by about 10-15 years or so. However, lithium is easily recovered and the incentives for recovering it are very high given how scarce and expensive this stuff is.

Solar recycling is much less of an issue since we're mostly talking about silicon. There's probably enough precious metals involved that recycling them after a few decades is going to be a thing. But compared to the extremely dirty business that is coal mining this is a complete non issue.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#212

Post by state_less »

nexuist wrote: post #101
darksaints wrote: post #46

I know someone who has gone fully off the grid via sailboat and is currently on his way around the world. He converted his sailboat to a hybrid setup (electric engines powered by the same batteries that power his stovetop, refrigerator, etc.). His power sources keeping those batteries charged are solar (1200W) and sail regeneration [0]. He has an 18kw diesel generator as a safety measure. His story is particularly in…

>At this point, I feel like the only reason fossil fuels are used anymore in new projects is inertia Solar might work for boats and trains, but can it work for a plane? What about drones? No renewable energy source can beat gasoline, sans nuclear power (which I think we should be transitioning to, along with the rest of the renewables). MIT built a gas powered drone that lasts 5 days (not minutes!) in the air[1] - th…

You might be interested in the sun seeker duo. It's in the ballpark for personal air travel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBA4XeMddMY

In flight charging (refueling) could be a possibility too.

The drone based solar planes can stay up longer than 5 days. I think the defense companies can keep them up for months.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#213

Post by ip26 »

js2 wrote: post #100
Animats wrote: post #7

$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…

[deleted]

You're drawing an average of 2.3kW around the clock, what are you doing with all that power? If it's AC, IMO the place to start is air sealing, insulation, and shade structures.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#215

Post by emanuensis »

Much better than batteries or gravity storage mechanisms is liquid air storage. It is not for small scale sites, but the bigger, the more economical, it becomes. As an OTS (off the shelf) solution i do not know why it is not used more...

Liquid air storage offers cheapest route to 24 hour wind and solar

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20424313

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#216

Post by mikestew »

sp332 wrote: post #75
mikestew wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

Person A: I'd like you to store one megawatt-hour of electricity that I will give you, and then later, I want you to give that electricity back to me. Person B: Certainly. That will be $187. It's not the cost of the battery. It's the cost of storing and releasing one megawatt-hour of electricity once. This has to pay for the capital cost over time, as well as overhead and depreciation.

Cool, that makes more sense. I will still complain that the terms are overloaded unnecessarily, but at least I know what they’re talking about.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#217

Post by m463 »

dmitriy_ko wrote: post #82
m463 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. What's terrible is that PG&E charges the end customers $0.28-$0.42/kwh even though it purchases even the most expensive wholesale power below 5c/kwh

Cost of transmission is higher than cost of generation.

I think we're looking at regulatory capture here.

With just about every other commodity (and even with electricity in other parts of the country), you are given a discount if you purchase more. In the case of California, the regulators have been influenced by PG&E and have terrible pricing and tiering.

It's worth noting in Santa Clara, CA, the local power company Silicon Valley Power prices their electricity about .10-11c/kwh.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#218

Post by rmuesi »

cortesoft wrote: post #189
rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

As others have pointed out, wholesale energy cost is only about $0.02 per KW/H, yet retail is usually over $0.2 KW/H. Even if the wholesale cost of energy drops to $0, you are only dropping about 10% of the total cost of energy. Of course, this brings up another interesting question that has been a hot button issue; if power companies are supplying less and less power (since more and more people are getting their own…

>wholesale energy cost is only about $0.02 per KW/H

Doesn’t this contradict the oft repeated news that solar is so much cheaper than our predominantly oil generated power?

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#219

Post by StreamBright »

kragen wrote: post #146
StreamBright wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other limitations as well. Amount of lithium available, # of cycles before you have to replace the batteries, and so on.

Amount of lithium available is not a limitation for several orders of magnitude more (at least until well after Kardashev Type 1), and the lithium is not consumed when you have to replace the batteries, a cost which is already included in these calculations.

Might be. Other sources claim it to be otherwise.

"As of January 2010, the USGS estimated world total lithium reserves at 9.9×109 kg (economically extractable now) and identified lithium resources at 2.55 × 1010 kg (potentially economic). Most of the identified resources are in Bolivia and Chile (9 × 109 kg and 7.5 × 109 kg, respectively). World lithium production is currently on the order of 2 × 107 kg per year.

If we would like to have a North American standard of living for everyone in the world – say, 1 car for every 2 people – then we would need about 3.4 billion Nissan Leafs. This would use 32% of the identified resources (all known lithium in the world), or 82% of the reserves (all lithium that is currently economic to produce). Even with widespread recycling, that seems like an unsustainable prospect.

Remember that the limits on battery capacity are fundamental. The only ways this percentage can go down are:

Battery capacity exceeds 73% of the theoretical maximum (unlikely) New deposits of lithium are discovered and made economic (unknowable) Smaller lithium-ion batteries are used (shorter range) Fewer cars are built with lithium-ion batteries."

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#220

Post by torpfactory »

nexuist wrote: post #206
torpfactory wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that it would take a fair number of new workers to help burn that $4.5T. They wouldn't work for oil companies, but they might still be involved in energy production. Besides, it's not like we have some choice here. We can either decarbonize our world economy or perish. I'm awful sick of the 'but the jobs' arguments. We don't need jobs in outdated, polluting industries. That is outright theft of healthy ecos…

>We don't need jobs in outdated, polluting industries Man, we don't need jobs at all. I want to live in an all-renewable automated world. But I realize that's not realistic in the short term, and it will take decades - perhaps even another century - until that desire is realized. Hence my reservation.

Well we are definitely in agreement about the long term then. Cheers
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