Random idea, if batteries are cheap enough could we charge them up and ship them on trains back forth instead of building high voltage transmission lines?
Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
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Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#12>This leads to what seems to be a paradoxical situation. A battery that is more expensive than the average price of grid electricity can nonetheless arbitrage the grid and save one money. That’s math.
Missing in the math is logic. If enough people do this, the price will even out and the arbitrage opportunity will vanish.
It's like an arbitrage trading a model that makes money when paper trading but loses money when live because the effects of live trades on the market wasn't considered.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#13The other reason energy storage could get big in the next several years is an elevated risk of blackouts due to aggressive retirement of coal-fired power plants -- blackouts like the one in Washington last week that shut down several government agencies (e.g. the Department of Energy ) and which was probably related to the shutdown of the Potomac River Generating Station.
Either that or more Gen3+ Nuclear. Why not both I would say.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#14If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…
> If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here.
You still need to get better return on capital before wind and solar are competitive on cost alone. Wind turbines don't last forever (and are hard to recycle well, since they need to be made of tough materials, which leads to some interesting but probably scalability-limited schemes to reuse old blades for things like bus shelters and playground equipment -- look up Wikado Playground in Copenhagen, for instance) and neither do solar panels.
Maybe that's also something they'll fix "in the long run" but it's really not a fundamentally different class of future-problem than improved storage.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#15There's still more ROI for humanity in changing our consumption behavior.
There's resource limitations on lithium ion, lest we run into the same scenario.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#16Random idea, if batteries are cheap enough could we charge them up and ship them on trains back forth instead of building high voltage transmission lines?
I had the same thought reading the article, but after some thought, I doubt it.
Grid transmission can be as low as 0.5% per 100 miles already. Batteries lose about 10% of the energy by storing it, that leaves you with needing to go at least 2000 miles in order to make up the battery loss difference, plus needing the energy to move the batteries physically.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#17If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…
I don't think that's quite true. You don't need a lot of storage to make the peak-shaving, time-arbitrage setup he mostly talked about economic. But you need a whole lot of storage to make a reliable grid out of unpredictable generators. The author briefly touched on this in the context of home battery usage:
"Solar + a small battery may get someone in Germany to 70%, and someone in Southern California to 85%, but the amount of storage you need to deploy to increase that reliability goes up steeply as you approach 99.99%."
I believe the same logic applies to grid-scale storage. Getting rid of those reliable, dispatchable base-load nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants is going to be very expensive.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#18If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…
Storage helps nuclear too, with less demanding requirements. You can keep running your nuclear plants at full blast and use storage to average the load. If the storage is cheap enough that'll cost less than partially idling the nuclear plant. Wind and solar, like nuclear, have costs dominated by capital cost, but with less predictable output. To run civilization on those alone, we'd need quite a bit more storage, to…
Wind and solar have a fairly beneficial failure scenario (ie nothing happens, save for the few turbines that have destroyed themselves during adverse conditions).
You'll never be able to compete with that, fission, fusion, whatever. We still don't know where to put the waste, we still refuse to acknowledge the ability to reprocess said waste, and so forth. You don't even need more storage to run wind and solar as base load; you simply need to overbuild capacity and maintain a sufficiently intelligent transmission network. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Solar and wind will win the day.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#19If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…
Well one stumbling block is that we need to get thousands more people trained to service these energy storage facilities, let alone the windmills and solar panels. There is already a shortage there as the skill set is not one side, part electrician, part mechanical engineer, and so on.
If Tesla is building cells on a massive scale at the gigafactory, nothing stops them or a partner from building these into cargo-container utility scale storage systems and shipping them by rail to strategic utility interconnect points.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#20The other reason energy storage could get big in the next several years is an elevated risk of blackouts due to aggressive retirement of coal-fired power plants -- blackouts like the one in Washington last week that shut down several government agencies (e.g. the Department of Energy ) and which was probably related to the shutdown of the Potomac River Generating Station.
Either that or more Gen3+ Nuclear. Why not both I would say.
Nuclear plants take years to build and have shitty failure scenarios. Best to stopgap coal until renewables take over with combined cycle natural gas plants, fueled by cheap natgas from fracking.
It's not perfect, but those natural gas plants will still be kept around as peaking plants and they're an order of magnitude cleaner than coal plants (as well as producing much less CO2 per unit of power generated).