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Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

reuters.com

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Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#121

Post by jacquesm »

fmajid wrote: post #118
jacquesm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, superconductor. Effectively an electronic version of the flywheel. There is a company in the United States that has been making these for almost 20 years now, they are used for ride-through in hospitals and for windfarm output stabilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ... https://www.amsc.com/gridtec/renewable-interconnectivity-sol... Enjoy the read. It's interesting stuff.

It is indeed, but the refrigeration needed would seem cumbersome for most applications.

Not really, I've seen these units in the middle of the mountains sitting right next to a windfarm. About as inaccessible as it gets and yet they were there and humming along. Note that there is plenty of energy available for the refrigeration and that those units run for years unattended. Occasionally you need to top off the refrigeration gear but that's once every two years or so, a bit more involved than your average HVAC setup but not that much more involved.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#122

Post by s1artibartfast »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #115
s1artibartfast wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think density would go out of style in that scenario. IF the time and cost of commuting were drastically reduced, many people would prefer a suburban lifestyle. This reminds me of many high GDP parts of Europe where there are towns of 500-1000 people every few km, connected by rail and busses.

I don't think the time of commuting seems to change much: people just re-equilibrate and reconfigure to use the newly saved time/distance. But, yes, you would expect to see significant clustering. Nonetheless, the most effective clustering since the advent of indoor plumbing is the cluster of clusters, the city, and I doubt that would change. The connectivity is just so much better than a lineal expansion of small to…

I think most people place negative value on living in that connectivity, especially if it can be accessed easily via public transports.

I agree time wouldnt change that much, but presumably that time would translate to greater distances with better throughput and speed.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#123

Post by AnthonyMouse »

creer wrote: post #95
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major problem here is that intermittency isn't consistent. Okay, solar doesn't generate at night, so you would need to charge some batteries during the day and discharge them at night. Maybe that's fine. But solar also generates less in winter. If we want to transition heating from oil and gas to electric, we need a lot of generation in the winter. If we build some more solar to do that, now there's way more than e…

I must say I fail to see how any of this is all that new. Winter affects how much air conditioning and heating is needed - and probably even when people go to work and return. You had to take that into account before solar issues. Now both consumption and production are affected by the season, sure, but that's still a known mechanism. Same for cloudiness vs air conditioning (and heating and lighting). But wait, in mo…

> I must say I fail to see how any of this is all that new.

The difference is the scale. Traditionally you had a particular amount of base load that would run all the time. Nuclear and coal. The load never dropped below their generation capacity so they never had to stop generating and making money to recover their construction costs.

Then you would have natural gas peaker plants that only ran for part of the day, but they still ran pretty much every day. And these would also allow you to shut down base load plants for maintenance during the lower demand season. So they still got plenty of use.

Now you want to have solar and batteries which can satisfy the demand 98% of the time -- meaning some backup system has to recover its costs out of the remaining 2% of the time. But that backup system doesn't just have to pick up the extra 10% load because it's extra hot today. If it's cloudy long enough for the batteries to run down and it's night, your output from that system is now zero, but you still have the entire load of the power grid to satisfy. Where does it come from? An entirely parallel generating system that only gets used 2% of the time?

The alternative is to keep something like nuclear as e.g. 40% of the grid, and have it generate all the time as it does now. At which point that 40% of the generating capacity is more like 80% of the nighttime load and you're in much better shape to have to make up the last 20% than the entire 100%.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#124

Post by s1artibartfast »

bumby wrote: post #116
s1artibartfast wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty interesting question actually. I think for an honest accounting you would have to take into account the positive externalities as well. One way to start thinking about the question is to benchmark society before gasoline. Mass use of gasoline kicked off around 1900, with the popularization of the automobile. You can compare life now versus 1900 to get one estimate. The world definitely had problems and Wa…

I suspect you're right. That's why I think it's important to get a transition right, because it would be a shame to squander the type of bootstrapping that oil afforded us as a society. > You can compare life now versus 1900 to get one estimate. I think this is probably too broad because it assumes a causal connection between gasoline and all of those differences. The industrial revolution had been decades underway b…

>The industrial revolution had been decades underway before cheap oil, and would have continued if oil was never found in Pennslyvania. But cheap oil definitely helped speed it along faster.

That is certainly true. I meant using it a benchmark to extrapolate from. In many ways it seems to me that the industrialization at that time had a pretty negative trajectory, with a heavy basis in coal and brutal industrial towns. It is quite possible that we are living one of the best possible timelines from 1900.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#125

Post by s1artibartfast »

marcosdumay wrote: post #112
s1artibartfast wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think I agree. Typically electric companies pay for the grid infrastructure and operation currently. Electricity producers like solar plants out in the desert is not paying to maintain the poles to your house.

Retail electricity companies pay only for their own grid. They aren't paying for the link between your city and the plant out in the desert.

maybe we have a difference in terminology. The interconnects between the grid and primary producers are often owned an managed by the retail company. Who pays for them is often a sticking point and can go both ways.

What I think is indisputable is that it is the retail electric company who manages and maintains their grid, and manages it's demand and stability.

>sellers are the ones directly paying for the grid infrastructure.

This is absolutely not the case for the vast majority of that infrastructure. You just mentioned small connections. If you look at the grid, it is basically all retail companies[1]

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-electric-grid...

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#126

Post by Symbiote »

wolfram74 wrote: post #24
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #11

> "Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run." This is the crucial point. Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects withou…

When thinking of load balancing over years, you need to weigh seasonal loads that have low capital costs and high energy costs running for 30~50% of the year vs a battery that only discharges ~once a year. The amortization prospects of such a storage medium are grim.

A gas storage facility is closer to a once-a-year battery medium.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_(facility)

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#127

Post by bumby »

dpierce9 wrote: post #114
bumby wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it is. If we agree that lobbyists affect political outcomes, and we can agree that some industries have entrenched lobbyists, then we can connect the two to say that lobbyists create more political certainty. That’s not to conflate “more certainty about policy” with “good policy.” It’s only beside the point if you think policy doesn’t impact energy prices, which is fairly easy to disprove. In other word…

From the parent: “Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects without contracted revenues.” Your argument about lobbyists creating certainty doesn’t follow. Not all people in an industry have the same interests (gas generators and gas producers both like gas but price impacting regulation will create divergences). Lobbyists may re…

Ok, I'll try to be more explicit with the caveat that it's possible I'm reading too much between the OP's lines.

"future energy systems" means, in this case, battery and EV tech. Had it said "legacy energy systems" I agree that it does not follow. However, as stated, they are saying "we just don't know what's going to be on the political horizon. Maybe a ultra-conservative will be in the white house and all of these subsidies that help foster future energy systems will go out the window." Again, it's about the volatility of less-entrenched, prospective industries that are more reliant on policies to make them viable.

Entrenched lobbyists, almost by definition, want to keep the status quo. So I don't think we can agree that they are likely to institute massive changes. Put differently, do you think it's more likely that fossil fuel subsidies or that renewable subsidies will be dramatically reduced if the WH changes parties in the next election?

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#128

Post by bumby »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #124
bumby wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you're right. That's why I think it's important to get a transition right, because it would be a shame to squander the type of bootstrapping that oil afforded us as a society. > You can compare life now versus 1900 to get one estimate. I think this is probably too broad because it assumes a causal connection between gasoline and all of those differences. The industrial revolution had been decades underway b…

>The industrial revolution had been decades underway before cheap oil, and would have continued if oil was never found in Pennslyvania. But cheap oil definitely helped speed it along faster. That is certainly true. I meant using it a benchmark to extrapolate from. In many ways it seems to me that the industrialization at that time had a pretty negative trajectory, with a heavy basis in coal and brutal industrial town…

I don't think the fuel type, but rather the labor and regulatory environment, was the driver of those conditions. We can't know for sure, obviously, but had oil been used before coal, I have a feeling those towns would still exist.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#129

Post by wolpoli »

samus wrote: post #41
bell-cot wrote: post #16

The reality is much more complex than "batteries replace gas" - > Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. > Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate. > "It does…

It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?

It doesn't necessarily need to be non-renewables through. There just has to be spare capacity that the grid could count on being there. There just needs to be a way for the grid to pay for the capacity that's going to go unused a lot of times, whether it's batteries, extra water and turbine in a dam, or standby power plants.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#130

Post by bumby »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #120
bryanlarsen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuel taxes collect $50B/year and road maintenance is $200B/year. Significant, but obviously not a roadblock.

If California Fuel tax is $1.24 per gallon in total (20%), which is about $0.15 per mile revenue. Tesla semi is supposably about 2kwh/mile. PG&E commercial vehicle electric rates for off peak are about $0.20 per Kwh, which translates to $0.40/mile. If California wanted to collect similar revenue, that 0.15 would be about 35% of the operational fuel cost.

Appreciate the breakdown. The part that I would question is whether it's reasonable to expect all long-haul truckers to charge off-peak. I think electric will (over time) still be considerably cheaper, but I also don't think it will be as good as the back-of-the-envelope calculations people tend to tout.
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