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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

#141

Post by 15457345234 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #125
marcosdumay wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infra…

You're using American-centric terminology that doesn't translate well to other countries, most of which have one national grid company that manages the transmission grid (which extends up to the generation facilities) and where 'retail companies' refers to local distributors who may operate their own distribution networks or who may just handle billing etc.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#142

Post by AnthonyMouse »

creer wrote: post #132
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, bu…

I think the article is not so much about how more difficult it is to price the energy of a gas peaking plant but instead about changing strategies by developers of such plants. There is the temptation to switch to battery plants now rather than later. There is the change in the equation that such plants used to be mostly priced by the energy provided (in contracted amounts) and that now they are more charging for con…

> There is the temptation to switch to battery plants now rather than later.

But this is the problem, right? They don't serve the same purpose.

The battery plant allows you to store surplus solar generation during the day and use it at night. That's useful, but it's not the same thing -- because if it's cloudy for an extended period of time, you don't have surplus solar generation during the day, and your batteries are empty. What then?

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#143

Post by AnthonyMouse »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #87
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…

But the capacity needed to top up that battery on a cloudy week is still less than having a gas plant having to meet peak demand. Kinda like the BMW i3 with Rex. You charge it at home (solar), but when it gets low the on-board generator (gasoline 2 cylinder) can trickle charge your battery until you get home (where you have solar again).

That works in a car because a car's energy demands are bursty. The power to accelerate the car from a stop comes from the battery and then the car's energy requirements drop by 95% and the tiny engine can eek out a little more than the 5% needed to maintain cruising speed and use the rest to slowly recharge the battery.

The power grid doesn't work like that. The base load is around half of the peak load. It never drops to 5%.

That doesn't mean the batteries can't be useful. If the average load is 150GW but that's because it's 100GW at night and 200GW during the day, the batteries let you get away with having only 150GW of average generating capacity instead of 200GW, because during the times when the generation exceeds the demand you can put the surplus in the batteries.

But you still need to maintain an average of 150GW of generating capacity or the batteries will get empty and the power goes out.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#144

Post by ZeroGravitas »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #142
creer wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article is not so much about how more difficult it is to price the energy of a gas peaking plant but instead about changing strategies by developers of such plants. There is the temptation to switch to battery plants now rather than later. There is the change in the equation that such plants used to be mostly priced by the energy provided (in contracted amounts) and that now they are more charging for con…

> There is the temptation to switch to battery plants now rather than later. But this is the problem, right? They don't serve the same purpose. The battery plant allows you to store surplus solar generation during the day and use it at night. That's useful, but it's not the same thing -- because if it's cloudy for an extended period of time, you don't have surplus solar generation during the day, and your batteries a…

Batteries can store energy from any source, with solar, wind, nuclear and hydro being top candidates as all might produce in excess of demand.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#145

Post by bryanlarsen »

bumby wrote: post #130
s1artibartfast wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Using off-peak electricity during on-peak hours means installing a stationary battery at the charger. They'll do it if saves money.

It'll be more likely if a high amperage grid connection is also expensive at the charger location. A battery and a low amperage connection can replace a high amperage connection for an infrequently used charger.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#146

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #144
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is the temptation to switch to battery plants now rather than later. But this is the problem, right? They don't serve the same purpose. The battery plant allows you to store surplus solar generation during the day and use it at night. That's useful, but it's not the same thing -- because if it's cloudy for an extended period of time, you don't have surplus solar generation during the day, and your batteries a…

Batteries can store energy from any source, with solar, wind, nuclear and hydro being top candidates as all might produce in excess of demand.

The source isn't really the point. If you normally have 200GW of solar generation but it's cloudy so now you have 10% of that, you don't have surplus generation of any kind. The remaining power plants can't even cover the current load, the batteries are being discharged rather than charged and when they run out, what do you do?

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#147

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #137
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a fallacious argument. If investing earlier leads to earlier results, why aren't you complaining that we didn't start investing in renewables research in Roman antiquity? Premature investment doesn't lead to early results, just wasted money. There is an optimum time for such, and it's almost certainly true that this time wasn't in the 1970s, the technology simply wasn't possible. The 1970s do not repr…

The question I’m asking is how much faster we could have pulled forward widespread renewables deployment with an earlier commitment to the project. My (non-expert) guess is that a decade might have been possible. Your view is that -2000 years probably wasn’t possible. I don’t think we’re in any major disagreement on those points, so the interesting question is about values in between.

> The question I’m asking is how much faster we could have pulled forward widespread renewables deployment with an earlier commitment to the project.

I don't think you could have gotten much of a head start. Maybe 1-2 years. I don't see you getting an extra 10 out of it, even in the best possible circumstances. Half of what makes it possible now simply didn't exist. Changes in global logistics, materials science, manufacturing capacity, and a hundred other things.

If time travel were possible, and you could go back with all the knowledge and plans from today, even then 10 years is about all you could hope for. Some things can't be rushed. Sure, you've eliminated all the false paths, the bad decisions and backtracking, but booting up this part or that part of the supply chain is a slow process.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#148

Post by bumby »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #145
bumby wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Using off-peak electricity during on-peak hours means installing a stationary battery at the charger. They'll do it if saves money. It'll be more likely if a high amperage grid connection is also expensive at the charger location. A battery and a low amperage connection can replace a high amperage connection for an infrequently used charger.

A lot of your arguements seem to hinge on "if". "If a tractor-trailor converts to electric" and "if infrastructure is built to support it" and "if we fund infrastructure from something other than fuel taxes" and "if truckers recharge off-peak" and "if chargers have a stationary battery" and...

The more conditionals that get levied the farther off the solution seems to be and the less of a slam dunk electrification appears. They're solvable, but I think it's reasonable to expect a cost and timeline for each of those before we start touting electrification as a great solution just on the horizon.

The original claim was: out of planes, trains, and automobiles, the only one that's a problem are planes.

Short answer: It's solvable, but a heck of a lot more complicated than that statement lets on.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#149

Post by seec »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #146
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries can store energy from any source, with solar, wind, nuclear and hydro being top candidates as all might produce in excess of demand.

The source isn't really the point. If you normally have 200GW of solar generation but it's cloudy so now you have 10% of that, you don't have surplus generation of any kind. The remaining power plants can't even cover the current load, the batteries are being discharged rather than charged and when they run out, what do you do?

I think most people are delusional about this, including the operators talked about in the article. I believe this is mostly posturing and people trying to find ways to get some of that sweet subvention money flowing for renewable tech and associated. In other words, there are some profits to be made and for this they need to pretend that they don't know better. Because as you said, this is not sustainable. The numbers don't work, if we only build battery with renewables someone has to lose power somewhere some of the time.

I worked around a small model with rather optimistic assumptions with zero concern for cost and a focus on efficient consumption to determine what would be required to make a single 1–2-person habitation completely sustainable off grid but with most of the modern confort. I used past weather data and sunshine/wind values. It doesn't work. The number of batteries you need is ridiculous and unrealistic when you scale up the model, that's before considering costs that are just insane.

I think renewables are a good technology especially because we can use the peaks to our advantage and work/organise society around that. In particular car battery charging and air conditioning are 2 very good candidates. Realistically we still need reliable technology to ensure baseload at all times, especially at night. Personally, I think nuclear is just that but just saying that word is so political that people lose all rationality it seems, so we get sucks in meaningless debates and projections...

In a weird twist, most pro-renewables are also anti electric car, I swear ideological people are really unbelievable. I think the world became too political in general (a feminine way of "solving" problems) but in particular the field of energy is overrun by politics; which is kind of funny when you consider that the core skill to make everything work is rationality.

But I guess when we will get grid shut down like in South Africa they will agree that batteries don't work. It will be too late though...

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#150

Post by creer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #146
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries can store energy from any source, with solar, wind, nuclear and hydro being top candidates as all might produce in excess of demand.

The source isn't really the point. If you normally have 200GW of solar generation but it's cloudy so now you have 10% of that, you don't have surplus generation of any kind. The remaining power plants can't even cover the current load, the batteries are being discharged rather than charged and when they run out, what do you do?

If that's the situation, then you have just demonstrated that you can't do it like that. Solar plus battery. That's fine. You look for something else. For example you get a contract to fund a gas-powered humongous plant from the companies whose mandate it is to not run out of power. (but you probably can't get gas for that plant on a one-off basis - you'll have to store.)

The point is to do that use case planning (and fund a plant based on the results.)

Hopefully nobody is really getting themselves in that situation.

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