Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables • Hacker News Board

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#221

Post by DennisP » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

hristov wrote: post #162

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take. There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). Ther…

The trouble is that the factory costs something too. If you're only running half the time, now you need to spend twice as much on factory to make the same amount of stuff each month.

So if we build a wind/solar grid without enough storage, this sort of demand management isn't a free lunch. It's just that instead of the power company paying the cost of intermittency, it'd be externalizing that cost to everybody else, who pay in higher capital costs.

(For aluminum in particular you have another problem: if you shut down more than about six hours, the molten aluminum freezes and you spend a lot of money on repairs.)

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#222

Post by ben_w » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #133

batpangolin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that fusion is a close-to-viable technology which has been held back because it hasn't had enough research resources spent on it?

No,I am suggesting that its as close as the magic solutions to wind and solars intermittency issue we hear so much about and therefore the money would be better spent creating something as powerful as fusion than something to help a inferior and backwards looking type of energy that doesent even provide 1% of the worlds energy.

The low end estimate for the cost of completing ITER is $22 billion, and it’s a 500 MW (thermal) output reactor.

The cost estimate for batteries was about $137/kWh last year.

Therefore, ITER costs about as much as ~160 GWh of storage, which is enough for the entire UK for 4 hours 40 minutes… or the thermal output of ITER for 13 days, 9 hours. Which is enough to cover even the least productive production gaps in combined wind and solar output. Also, those batteries are rechargeable and last at least 1000 cycles, which would be a bit more than 36.5 years of drain (even with negligible recharge time), which is 16.5 years longer than the planned lifetime of ITER.

And remember, the batteries are made at a profit, even including the cost of building the factories.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#223

Post by vijayr02 » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

A really good view onto Great Britain's electricity grid is here: https://grid.iamkate.com/

or alternatively a more old school view, with analog dials!: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Today for example renewables have been >50% of total generation. And I've seen sometimes for as long as a week it's not broken 10-15%. Very interested as to how the grid maintains excess capacity to make up for low wind generation...

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#224

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

[deleted]

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#225

Post by adwn » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

mnw21cam wrote: post #194

adwn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just need space to put them in. What are you talking about? Just take the three phases from your power outlet and stick them in the ground, with some distance between them. There, zero capital costs, and a nice, mostly resistive load for the power plant. A bad time to be an earthworm, though.

Yeah, last time that (accidentally, effectively) happened just down the road from here, it caused some rather interesting smells, and that was just a 300A feed (or rather, it blew a 300A fuse - repeatedly - the technician kept just replacing the fuse a few times until I wandered over and told him about the smelly bit of pavement).

> the technician kept just replacing the fuse a few times

What the fuck?!

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#226

Post by floatrock » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #189

JamesBarney wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Texas a lot of people could get access to spot prices and it didn't work out as well as they'd hoped.

And a lot of Texas power utilities charged fixed rates but had to buy at spot prices. It didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, especially if they didn’t have generation capacity themselves.

Power companies tend to buy hedges and other financial instruments to offset the risk. The ones that went bankrupt like Griddy were strict wholesale passthrough.

That's not say someone isn't eating the cost of the high spot prices, it's just a lot of that cost is borne by sophisticated professionals who's job it is to price risk and black swan events. The problem with wholesale passthrough rates is consumers are rarely sophisticated enough to understand the details of energy markets and the financial instruments to offset the risk.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#227

Post by goodcanadian » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #174

Tade0 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second gen Leafs are equipped with the proper hardware - at least in Japan.

I believe all current-generation LEAFs worldwide are V2G-capable.

Basically every Leaf since 2012. Also Mitsubishi Outlander PHEVs work too though their batteries are quite small.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#228

Post by bluGill » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #210

bluGill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the biggest input cost is energy you are wrong. A plant that is 10% capacity by running only when energy is cheap is more profitable than a plant at 90% running at whatever energy prices are. (in the real world take my numbers and reduce by 75% - between nights, weekends, and maintenance shutdowns a real industrial plant at 25% capacity is already common) The company I work for has two plants near each other, wh…

Without knowing what industry you are talking about it's hard to engage in any meaningful dialog. It clearly doesn't matter what percentage of the input cost is energy to whether the plant is profitable. So long as that percentage is non-zero there will always be an energy cost at which the total cost to produce is higher than the market price to sell (ask any industry in Texas). Clearly there are other factors too,…

Input costs and final price are what matter to profitability. The machines are part input cost, but they are spread across many different products, often over years.

The reason an idle machine is bad is because you have to pay interest on the loan (write downs and all that complexity). You also have to pay rent (taxes) on the building they are in. You need to do basic maintenance (HVAC so they don't deteriorate). You need to ensure the machine operator (which might be a rare skill) is available when you put it back to work, which might mean paying the operator to do nothing just so he doesn't find a new job while laid off. All of these raise the input cost of restarting after a long period of being idle - sometimes you are better off scraping the machines and buying new if you need them.

Against that you have demand and ability to store the finished product. Some things can be stored up (just in time calls this bad, but it isn't always a bad thing), while others degrade quickly. Some things your customers will order well in advance so you can plan around demand, while others you get an order for "yesterday" (if only you had a time machine).

Depending on how all of the above work out idle factories have different economics.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#229

Post by goodcanadian » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #113

CraigJPerry wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be cool if i could use an electric car parked at home during the day to store some of that cheap electricity then spend it from the car back into the house at night. When i looked into this last, it wasn’t common to have that bi-directional power flow capability. There was one, very expensive, Mitsubishi solution on the UK market around 2 years ago.

Nissan were looking into V2H for years but not sure what happened with it. I was registered for a pilot at one point with a third party but never got invited to participate and have since forgotten who the company is. EDIT: Looks like these can now be purchased and imported from China by end users: https://www.setec-power.com/product/vehicle-to-home-v2h-6kw/

We are involved in (so far as we know) the largest residential V2G trial in the world (certainly, the largest in the UK). Some links:

https://www.indra.co.uk/v2v-grid-to-vehicle

https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-char...

https://www.cenex.co.uk/projects-case-studies/sciurus/

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#230

Post by Corazoor » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

sir_bearington wrote: post #212

Corazoor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task Only if you don't look at all available solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas "P2G is often considered the most promising technology for seasonal renewable energy storage" I dunno why this is such an unknown technique, natural gas storage is a very old and proven technology. Yet it is ommitted fro…

Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. No, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a good candidate for this, since it's at very low concentration. Theoretically one could use biomass, but thats a very inefficient method of carbon collection. Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient, just for the power-to-gas step. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, wh…

> Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. Only if you want to produce syngas (methane).

If you store the resulting hydrogen directly, no carbon source is needed. That makes storage more location dependent, because the cost-competitive options are salt-caverns, but we are talking about long term storage here...

Production of SynGas is more important to replace the current use of ground-pumped methane with CO2 neutral variants.

> Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.

Which is why there are proposals to go purely via hydrogen and reversible oxidation cells. That way you can get up to about 70-80%.

But again, we are talking about long term storage. ALL other options of energy storage are more expensive when you reach the "weekly to monthly" storage timeframe. At that timeframe, the low efficiency becomes irrelevant, as storage cost ($/kWh) is dominating, and we are talking about renewables anayway.