81–90 of 257 posts
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Nobody needs 1 full day of storage.
One could imagine a series of cloudy windless days in the northern latitudes during the winter. Perhaps a large enough gird solves that problem? I have no clue.
If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?
Play with the assumptions and find out.
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What is the typical efficiency of a charge-discharge cycle?
It's relatively high, the problem is that building new dams is an environmental disaster, and existing dams are two orders of magnitude below needed capacity. Also, hydro dams kill a lot of people when they have accidents.
If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?
Would need $20/KWh battery storage to be competitive with nuclear for baseload according to https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 At the moment, we're at about $800/KWh.
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The factor that drives up price for grid level storage is scale. Only ~300 GWh worth of batteries is produced globally each year. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity each hour. If anyone tries to install battery storage at a significant scale, demand will vastly outstrip supply and drive prices up.
Assuming there aren't economies of scale. Demand for solar had gone way up in recent decades (e.g. in germany, before it was cheap), and the price subsequently went down.
I would bet on price going down slightly with scale, but one can't really tell now what will happen: it might go up a lot, it might go down a lot, or it might stay flat.
This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn mea…
It's a combination of solar, wind, and hydrogen (with a little battery storage).
What if instead of pulling carbon above ground, we inject oxygen underground, produce electricity and CO2 below ground and then leave the CO2 down there. Has anyone tried this?
CCS power stations are substantially more expensive than the usual kind of fossil-fuel power station, and they are generally considered to be economically uncompetitive.
It's probably better to do the actual combustion aboveground in many cases—although it makes your power plants easier to blow up with bombs, it also makes them enormously easier to build and maintain, and much less dangerous to work in when nobody is trying to blow them up.
It doesn't matter that solar itself is cheap, it still needs backup plants which are the reason Germany has the highest electricity prices - world-wide. > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ It's really strange that users on HN keep rehashing the myth that solar and wind energy will result in lower electricity prices for consumers - they won't, never. Even if solar and wind energy was free, consume…
Cost of a simple cycle gas turbine powerplant: $400/kW (combined cycle, $1000/kW)
Go ahead and back up those renewables. It's still less expensive than installing nuclear, even if the turbines burn renewable-derived hydrogen.
I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable. I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, an…
I suspect most of the intermittency of wind and solar will be addressed through super-capacity (500% of peak demand, not 100%) and geographic diversity. Batteries will be used for very short-term local balancing and power regulation ... then for those occasional times when hydro, wind and solar don’t cut it, we’ll still burn a little gas but it will be bio gas or green hydrogen, rather than fossil gas. This gas will…
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Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc. Realistically we should saturate daytime en…
Why would we use lithium ion batteries? I would imagine the approach to store the energy would be to use the energy from solar panels to do work that can be used to produce electricity later. For example, you could use solar energy to pump water back uphill to flow down through a hydro electric dam later. Even if it isn't the most efficient, in the long run it would likely provide the best scalability and least long…