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

sciencemag.org

311–320 of 432 posts

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

#311

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…

That's really cool. I like seeing other off grid solutions. I live in a bus with 1800W of solar. I still burn a lot of diesel driving around but very rarely have to run a generator or plug in for electric, even when I run my AC. I love being off the electric grid. There's something so satisfying about using electric power and knowing it incurs no additional negative environmental cost. I never think twice about using…

Musks's satellite internet project (in progress) should perform very close to landline internet (unlike existing sats), with potentially even better latency.

Makes going off the grid even more enticing…

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wholesale price is definitely not “zero”. It fluctuates wildly, and if a retailer is exposed to the real time market at the flow date, they can expect to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. RTM prices can easily spike from $50/MW to $8000/MW in an instant if a generator trips. So, retailers buy hedges to cover this risk, at price premiums that reflect the inherent exposure insurance.

I didn't know this, thanks for clarifying. Further investigation for my local area: Here's a link to the Australian wholesale spot price and peak price https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Mar... Where I live, Tasmania, the average for 2019 is $147.91 / MWh and the peak is $163. That works out to Au$0.163. I pay AU$0.26 / kWh, plus a daily supply charge of, if memory serves me correctly, $2.30 - t…

That seems very odd to me. Maybe Australian regulations or trade situation is different and makes the math different, but in my area (SoCal), TCO for my rooftop solar installation was $0.08/KWh using a Net Present Value calculation, and utility solar is more than 2x cheaper than that. It’s very odd to hear wholesale prices above 10c when rooftop is so cheap.

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

#313
post #289
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option would be to electrify the highways so that long-range batteries are rarely needed.

That's a boil the oceans solution, though - it's doesn't do anything useful until you've converted a large percentage of all roads, and it's very expensive.

I wonder how much it would cost per mile of road to do this. I suspect you could get a huge benefit by electrifying major highways to start, for example:

* The 5 on the west coast, connecting Seattle/Portland/Sacramento/SF/LA/San Diego

* Route 94 in the midwest, connecting Minneapolis/Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago/Detroit

* Route 95 on the east coast, connecting Boston/NY/Philly/Baltimore/DC

Meaning that if you drive any of those routes, including a few hundred miles off the highway, you never have to worry about gas or electricity.

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

#314
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the “engine”/“power generator” distinction you are attempting to make, not the statement “gas burns at a higher energy than steam”, is physically meaningful. It is true that supercritical steam turbines operate at a lower temperature than gas turbines, and if the cold reservoir of the Carnot engines in question were at the same temperature, that would indeed make gas turbines potentially more efficient. But i…

Thanks for taking the time to write this informative post. I am grateful that HN is home to real engineers. :)

I am not a real engineer; I have never built a working heat engine, unless you count rebuilding a Volkswagen engine. But I'm glad my comment was helpful!

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

#315
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct but will talk about Australia. Australian rooftop solar is less than half the US prices. A 6.6 kW system installed retails at(AUD 2700 /USD 1870) and yet we have some of the most expensive electricity in the world at USD 0.25 per kW-h. In many places, 1 in 3 houses having rooftop solar. We have over 9GW currently installed and increasing at 1.5GW per year. All this new production is taking market shar…

|A 6.6 kW system installed retails at(AUD 2700 /USD 1870) Is that right? Pretty sure in the US most kits that size are literally 10x that cost?

Yeah, or 20x? In LA I just got exactly that size installed from Tesla and I think it was about $35K? That did include one powerwall (they tried to suggest two but I realized with net metering even one only made sense for the fun of it).

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

#316
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…

A decent amount of your electricity bill is related to supply. Modern countries have a lot of rules around the reliability of their energy supply so companies spend a lot of money to guarantee that infrastructure is up to scratch. You're not paying for just the energy but for the transport of that energy.

A home system that uses its own electricity has the advantage of reducing the demand on the grid. A commercial system doesn't.

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

#317
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynically: to first approximation no one lives in Saudi Arabia. Even if it devolves to a Venezuela style anarchy, we'd still be more worried about Venezuela. Practically: Saudia Arabia is an oil source. Petroleum fuels are going to be with us forever. It's coal (first) and gas (eventually) which are being displaced by better electrical generation options. But if you want to fly an airplane, you really can't replace t…

You _can_, certainly. But I still have the suspicion that a good chunk of the political Left will be dissatisfied that the carbon emissions will plummet without any changes in political beliefs or policies being involved. As for Saudi Arabia: there's a lot more people living there, than did before there was oil. Yes, we will still use _some_ oil for many years, but if the oil revenue drops to, say, 50% of current lev…

> carbon emissions will plummet without any changes in [..] policies being involved.

Wow, you really go as far as saying government was not involved? The only reason prices for renewables have gone down to where they are now is due to government policies that promote that tech. Details available on wiki [0]. This only happens if parties do care about environment & co. Here in germany it was actually done by a centre-right party by local standards, though obviously that would translate to "Left" when compared to the current US political landscape. Just like pretty much all parties here. Btw, we have more than two... this makes it quite a bit harder to group all you dislike as "the other".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

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

#318
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm assuming that you mean 9.9 × 10⁹ kg of economically-extractable-now reserves and 2.55 × 10¹⁰ kg of potentially economic reserves, not 2575.5 kg, which is what 2.55 × 1010 would work out to.

The estimates of lithium abundance in the earth's crust have a low end of 20 ppm. The crust averages about 40 km thick and 3 g/cc in the 29% of the Earth that has continents, which works out to 1.5 × 10¹⁴ m², 5.9 × 10¹⁸ m³, 1.8 × 10²² kg of rock, and 3.6 × 10¹⁷ kg of lithium. This is a bit over ten million times more lithium than the USGS's estimated "potentially economic world lithium reserves".

There's also 2.3 × 10¹⁴ kg of lithium dissolved in seawater, but that is a much smaller amount than the amount in the crust. However, it's still ten thousand times larger than the USGS's estimate.

I think world lithium production is actually about 4.3 × 10⁷ kg per year (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Reserves) which would take 200 years to exhaust the "economically extractable now" number you give (rather than the 500 years you'd get with the numbers you give). It seems like a safe bet that some new mining technologies will become available before even 2100, let alone 2219.

How much energy is that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Table_of_energy... says Li-ion batteries contain 0.36–0.88 MJ/kg, or slightly higher if you only count the mass of the lithium rather than the entire battery. Conservatively taking 0.36 MJ per kg of lithium (which assumes battery technology doesn't improve — almost-nonrechargeable lithium-metal batteries get five times that much energy per kg of lithium), the 9.9 × 10⁹ kg of lithium "economically extractable now" would hold 3.6 petajoules; the 2.3 × 10¹⁴ kg of lithium in seawater would hold 83 exajoules; and the 3.6 × 10¹⁷ kg of lithium in the continental crust would hold 130 zettajoules.

Current world marketed energy consumption is on the order of 5.7 × 10²⁰ joules per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption), which is 18 terawatts. Incident solar power on the Earth (the Kardashev Type 1 benchmark) is 130 petawatts. So the 3.6 PJ of "economically extractable now" lithium is only three minutes of world marketed energy consumption, but the 83 EJ of seawater lithium is about 1.7 months of world marketed energy consumption. Even so, that's only 10 minutes of total terrestrial insolation. But the 130 zettajoules of continental crustal lithium is 12 days' worth of total terrestrial insolation.

So, that's the basis of my conclusion about terrestrial lithium being sufficient to provide energy storage until we pass Kardashev Type 1. Can you check my calculations, please?

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

#319
post #239

Seriously! I'm an old time R/C enthusiast who romps frequently and still buys a toy here and there. I got out of R/C for a little bit so the last pack I bought was a 4,200mah 7.4 volt LiPo from a tiny mom+pop manufacturer. The pack is well taken care of and probably 7 or 8 years old. It's time for a new one. I just looked up a replacement battery by the same manufacturer and their 7.4v LiPo's are up to 22,000 mah! Th…

Is there a theoretical limit to (current generation) battery capacity, like there is with solar panel power output?

There probably is. I'm no chemical engineer, but this is a question they would be best suited to answer. From my experience observing the technology from an R/C standpoint, it seems appearant that the maximum capacity you can achieve with a NiCd (nickel cadmium) battery in a 1.2v "Sub-C" form factor is about 2,000 MaH. The max capacity for a NiMH (nickel metal-hydride) is about 6,000 Mah. Anything lithium is capable of anything nickel can do, but with approximately 50% the weight.

Lithium cells are where the technology currently lies and it seems that there is plenty of potential, although graphene is also promising.

We haven't hit the limit for lithium batteries yet (or nickel for that matter, but the remaining potential is no longer relevant) Li-Ion (lithium ion) are less stable than Li-Po (lithium-polymer). Also, since Lithium cells are usually 3.4v rectangles and Nickel cells are 1.2v cylinders there are some form-factor differences to consider.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not that complicated. There are countries in Europe that, in addition to metered price per kWh used also have a fixed price for grid usage. If you feel you're completely self-sufficient and can survive without the grid, you can cut it off and pay nothing. If you use your own power but want to keep the grid connection for backup, you pay for grid access but nothing for power (or get a discount or a refund, or mon…

In most of the US, industrial users pay a fixed price for grid usage, plus a variable charge for energy.

It's residential users who usually don't have a split bill like that.

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