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NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard

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Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard

#121

Post by anamax »

jodrellblank wrote: post #85
tialaramex wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends, but in some cases certainly. https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main That top left graph is showing you the (notional) system price for grid electricity in the UK. The x axis is settlement periods, which are 30 minutes long, thus period 14 on that graph ends 0700 local time, before many people are awake, system price was £0 per MWh. You want it? Have it. The evening peak a few hours ago was £327 per MW…

Is it possible to scale that trade down to something one could do at home, without much equipment and therefore not require much in the way of planning permission? Scale that transaction down 1/3000th to get £100 for the trade. If you could do that every day it would set you up for a yearly pre-tax income of £36k; instead of trading 1GWh the trade would be 333KWh, equivalent to 1.2 Gigajoules. Solve the Pumped Hydro…

> And it would need enough pumping power to move it two meters in half an hour for one settlement period

Why do you need to move all of the water in half an hour? (Suppose that you just want to do time-arbitrage for residential use.)

Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard

#122

Post by cinntaile »

woodruffw wrote: post #118
cinntaile wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some projects that want to repurpose old mines for pumped storage.

I'm curious how that would work, given that mines are usually below ground. Or do you mean mountaintop mines?

It works the same in both ways, you just need the height difference and two reservoirs. When you need the electricity, the water flows downstream into the mine reservoir. Then it gets pumped up again when it's cheap. I do wonder about the economic feasability, but maybe I'm underestimating the amount of empty volume available in a mine.

Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard

#123

Post by jodrellblank »

anamax wrote: post #121
jodrellblank wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to scale that trade down to something one could do at home, without much equipment and therefore not require much in the way of planning permission? Scale that transaction down 1/3000th to get £100 for the trade. If you could do that every day it would set you up for a yearly pre-tax income of £36k; instead of trading 1GWh the trade would be 333KWh, equivalent to 1.2 Gigajoules. Solve the Pumped Hydro…

> And it would need enough pumping power to move it two meters in half an hour for one settlement period Why do you need to move all of the water in half an hour? (Suppose that you just want to do time-arbitrage for residential use.)

The parent comment said the price settlement period was a half-hour at a time, I was trying to maximise income to see if it was feasible to scale down to garden size and make a useful amount of money for a small-ish build cost. If it takes longer to pump and longer to drain, it earns less, but you could do it. It doesn't make much difference, it's impractical whatever period.

Going over it again today I'm a factor of a thousand out, in the unhelpful direction, by using mass in grams instead of the correct mass in Kg. So after that adjustment it would take

    ~180,000 Kg = 3.6e6 Joules in a KWh / 9.81 grav accel / 2 meters
approx 180,000 Kg of water, 180 tons raised 2m to store a single KWh. So approx 60,000,000 Kg of water, 60,000 tons raised 2 meters to store my 333KWh to get a salary style income from doing that best possible trade every day. Approx twenty Olympic swimming pools worth of water. So it's even less relevant whether it's half an hour or not.

As well, a UK home power feed tops out about (240Volts * 60Amps = ~15KW) so the max one could store in a half hour period is ~7KWh. Trading that peak-to-trough would get you ~£2.20/day for moving 1200 tons of water up 2m and back with perfect efficiency, or £1.65/day with Dinorwig's 75% efficiency. Much much smaller, simpler and more convenient to get a 10KWh Li-Ion battery pack for £4k[1] and trade that for £700/year (even then it can't charge or discharge quickly enough for one half-hour period).

(I came to the realisation when working out that I could eat a biscuit, use that energy to walk up two flights of stairs, and then have a KWh of potential energy; free energy means I went very wrong somewhere).

[1] https://www.renugen.co.uk/huawei-luna-10kwh-battery-pack/

Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard

#124

Post by idiotsecant »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #61
idiotsecant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infrastructure cost is not nearly the burden that the regulatory process is. Building any kind of hydroelectric in the United States is a massive political and bureaucratic undertaking. If you plan on building pumped storage you better set aside a decade or two of constant effort to get through that process. Once you have that part done the actual building of it is comparatively simple. I am an engineer in hydro…

Pumped hydro is cool, but we already have more storage than we need, its called "not burning gas". And until we run out of opportunities to not burn gas, theres no real demand for storage. Hopefully well get there soon, but the more people say "we can't build more renewables until we have storage", the longer that is going to take.

I don't know how to respond to this comment. You seem to be saying that not burning natural gas would somehow negate the need for electrical storage on the grid? If that's what you're trying to say you're definitely incorrect, there's no real argument to be made otherwise. Not burning natural gas means that we need to supply more electricity for heating loads, typically at times that solar is less able to serve that load. This increases the need for storage if your assumption is that the load will be served by renewable sources and not, for example, by natural gas thermal generation. The physics of this are pretty simple and obvious, I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard

#125

Post by cupofpython »

pfdietz wrote: post #106
cupofpython wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nuclear is also incredibly hard to build an accurate model for because the concern tends to revolve around the risk of human stupidity causing major issues. on top of that, i feel like there is a lot of hand waving involved with the waste. if we really industrialized nuclear fuel worldwide - we would be creating a lot of nuclear waste. theoretically, this isnt a problem. what id like to see, and may do one day if i r…

Fossil fuels have enormous global risk, so that's not bad for nuclear. The problem is that nuclear is competing against renewables, not fossil fuels. So, new nuclear needs an argument for why it's better than renewables, not why it's better than something that's on its way out anyway. The usual arguments, intermittency of renewables and land use, don't work well when examined closely, at least when justifying new nuc…

i am equally interested in seeing it compared it to alternative fuels in the same manner. the point is more about putting nuclear into perspective with human error. and what kinds of human error are necessary to make nuclear dangerous.

I feel there is an assumption that there will always be enough people at every plant who are fully competent, which i do not think is the reality we would see if we replace most energy needs with nuclear

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