Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start" • Hacker News Board

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#151

Post by ahartmetz » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

rurban wrote: post #145

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really not sure about that. There is a recent "renovation" of a pumped storage site in Germany for more than 300EUR per kWh of storage capacity. Unfortunately I cannot find the original "Bürgerinformationen"-slides again. And it is a local, probably heavily politics-influenced provider, so maybe a lot of that is political landscaping. But I haven't been able to find a lot of anything with respect to storage price…

German has no height. For their 11m pumped storage a battery may come close. But for the mountainous countries around hydro storage is much more effective and cheaper. They do have up to 1000m and more. And they are terribly effective to hold the peaks and spikes. Austria and Switzerland are getting rich selling their peak capacity to the big countries nearby.

That particular reservoir may not have much elevation difference, but Germany is far from flat. There are many mountain ranges of a few hundred to over 1000 meters of elevation in the southern 65% or so of the country. They aren't impressive, but enough for pumped storage, at least if you only consider elevation differences.

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#152

Post by Incipient » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #144

Incipient wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $1.6bn for 2000MWh is the current price, so that includes all recent drops. I'm not saying "at some point" batteries won't be viable as grid "storage", I'm just saying today they aren't.

I'm really not sure about that. There is a recent "renovation" of a pumped storage site in Germany for more than 300EUR per kWh of storage capacity. Unfortunately I cannot find the original "Bürgerinformationen"-slides again. And it is a local, probably heavily politics-influenced provider, so maybe a lot of that is political landscaping. But I haven't been able to find a lot of anything with respect to storage price…

This is our local Australian one, and the build price is an absolute joke which pretty much everyone puts down to incompetence, is 12bn. It's 5x the cost of the above linked battery for 120x the capacity (350GWh vs 2GWh). And this should be in operation for a lot longer than batteries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_2.0_Pumped_Storage_Pow...

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#153

Post by abe_m » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

whyever wrote: post #87

justlikereddit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The groundwork for the blackout will inevitably come back to a buildout and reliance of renewable sources that do not have spinning mass that can do frequency synchronization. There are costly means to compensate for the lack of spinning baseload but actually building these devices have been neglected, to no ones surprise.

Do you mean solar energy sources? Wind turbines have plenty of "spinning mass"...

But not in the context of the grid. Most (all that I'm aware of) commercial grid-scale wind turbines have an output inverter. That allows the turbine to rotate at optimal speed for wind conditions, while still outputting the required 50hZ or 60Hz grid frequency. The output inverter has the same "inertia" as a solar inverter. From a grid stability and regulation perspective, they are the same.

Thermal and hydro plants use synchronous rotating generators that have physical inertia, and the generator rotational speed is exactly locked to the electrical frequency. (proportional to the number of poles in the generator).

Re: Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

#154

Post by hnaccount_rng » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 7:38 PM UTC

rurban wrote: post #150

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some sources to their actual pricing? Some while ago I tried and came up blank. I assume your statements to be correct, because otherwise what would be the point of discussion, but I haven't been able to find any hard(ish) data

My source is a manager from a local energy company

Fair enough, unfortunately doesn’t help me. But thanks for the answer anyways