191–200 of 247 posts
> The Morocco-UK Power Project will be powered by a wind and solar farm, approximately 1,500km² in size I'm intrigued by how 1,500km² of partial shade will transform the Sahara ecosystem. I hope it will make more life possible in the shade.
Large wind turbines are spread out so will probably occupy much more land but not cast shadow.
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Just now, money is overwhelmingly better spent on top-line renewable generating capacity. There is no value in storage you are not generating enough power to keep charged up. Furthermore, cost of storage is falling even faster than wind or solar ever did. Wait until next year, and you get lots more storage for your money. Finally, batteries are good for very short-term storage -- their round-trip efficiency and fast…
It doesn’t matter if prices are falling if you make more money this year than you save by waiting an extra year. That’s the issue with hypothetical alternatives, they can’t make you money until you can actually buy them. As to location. All the equipment you need for moving solar power around the grid like long distance power lines is exactly the same equipment you need for moving battery power at that location aroun…
And, storage adjacent to the point of use is less at risk of being wholly unavailable, e.g. if there is a problem with the cable. So, you need good reasons to put it somewhere else. That is not to say there cannot be such reasons, but what they are is of interest.
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Just now, money is overwhelmingly better spent on top-line renewable generating capacity. There is no value in storage you are not generating enough power to keep charged up. Furthermore, cost of storage is falling even faster than wind or solar ever did. Wait until next year, and you get lots more storage for your money. Finally, batteries are good for very short-term storage -- their round-trip efficiency and fast…
> expect to see a lot of anhydrous ammonia long-term storage. Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen. This is wishful thinking. These are very much research projects at present. > Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen. Hydrogen makes no sense as energy storage. The energy costs of compression (and liquefaction, if you do that), and the risks, are just silly. Liquifying and regasifiying nitrogen are energy-expensive too. I…
Hydrogen storage will be mostly underground, at low pressure. So, no compression or liquification needed. But, for transport it will be liquified and shipped just like LNG is today.
Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature technology. A 100MW LN2 storage plant is under construction in Chile. Little hint, again: [ ... ]
"Re-gasifying" liquid nitrogen needs only ambient air, which (little hint) is all well above the boiling point of nitrogen.
If you think liquifying hydrogen takes a lot of energy, wait until you find out how much you need to synthesize hydrocarbons. Little hint: you will need a lot of hydrogen stockpiled. And, a lot of carbon with all the oxygen picked off.
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4 hours is solidly in the middle of what is needed for the daily peak load management tier of the energy storage problem [1], which is how we experience electricity "reliability" on a day to day basis, and it is the upper end of what is economical for lithium ion batteries. Beyond that, other technologies (pumped hydro, perhaps hydrogen electrolysis) are more economical. 1. https://storagewiki.epri.com/index.php/Ener…
Tankage is much cheaper than batteries.
It will be interesting to see how sodium ion batteries will compete since their alkali metal is far more abundant than lithium, especially in stationary applications that don't need high energy/mass or energy/volume.
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It doesn’t matter if prices are falling if you make more money this year than you save by waiting an extra year. That’s the issue with hypothetical alternatives, they can’t make you money until you can actually buy them. As to location. All the equipment you need for moving solar power around the grid like long distance power lines is exactly the same equipment you need for moving battery power at that location aroun…
Money not spent on storage (that you cannot charge anyway) does not evaporate. You can instead spend it on something else more useful, like more panels. Money is always that way. And, storage adjacent to the point of use is less at risk of being wholly unavailable, e.g. if there is a problem with the cable. So, you need good reasons to put it somewhere else. That is not to say there cannot be such reasons, but what t…
Storage closer to consumers has a huge number of issues being more expensive to manage, harder to scale, less efficient, etc etc. It sounds vastly more useful than it is because you end up increasing failure modes and make failing safe much harder.
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> expect to see a lot of anhydrous ammonia long-term storage. Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen. This is wishful thinking. These are very much research projects at present. > Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen. Hydrogen makes no sense as energy storage. The energy costs of compression (and liquefaction, if you do that), and the risks, are just silly. Liquifying and regasifiying nitrogen are energy-expensive too. I…
A GW ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. Little hint: nobody builds GW-scale anything that is just a "research project". Hydrogen storage will be mostly underground, at low pressure. So, no compression or liquification needed. But, for transport it will be liquified and shipped just like LNG is today. Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature technology. A 100MW LN2 storage plant is under construction in Chi…
Plenty of experimental GW scale nuclear reactors have been built, just look at the history of CANDU design for an example. That’s just the scale this stuff operates at, you need real world data to demonstrate it’s actually cost effective at scale and actually building stuff still requires actual R&D. Further, you don’t want to just build one you want multiple examples to see what costs look like when people building the thing have relevant experience.
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Tankage is much cheaper than batteries.
Tankage for what? Tanks for things like compressed air might be cheaper, but round trip energy efficiency is much lower (50%ish) than batteries. It will be interesting to see how sodium ion batteries will compete since their alkali metal is far more abundant than lithium, especially in stationary applications that don't need high energy/mass or energy/volume.
Perhaps surprisingly, round-trip efficiency matters a lot less than other things, for storage not drawn down often. And, it matters a lot less everywhere than only a short time ago, because top-line generating capacity has got so cheap, you can just build out enough more of that to make up the difference. If your liquified hydrogen is slowly boiling away, you just top up your tanks now and again.
The important difference from batteries I call attention to is that in batteries, you can only store exactly as much energy as you buy expensive batteries to keep it in. But for synthetic chemicals (and liquified nitrogen), the only expensive parts are what you use to synthesize them in, and maybe the way you get the energy back. Those capacities are measured in watts. Saying tankage is cheap is to note that there is no upper limit on the amount of tankage you can have, and the watt-hours you can bank; your bottleneck is only the conversion rate.
This is all aside from the fact that tankage can be shipped, both out, generating revenue from excess generating capacity, and in, if local storage gets drawn down too far.
So, batteries will be used for short-term storage. Iron-air battery factories are under construction, and those will be much cheaper than lithium, and will be used, but however much cheaper they are than other batteries, they cannot match empty tankage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money not spent on storage (that you cannot charge anyway) does not evaporate. You can instead spend it on something else more useful, like more panels. Money is always that way. And, storage adjacent to the point of use is less at risk of being wholly unavailable, e.g. if there is a problem with the cable. So, you need good reasons to put it somewhere else. That is not to say there cannot be such reasons, but what t…
It isn’t easy to just dump unlimited money into panels, you need a distribution network to support such instillations and these batteries are leveraging that. Storage closer to consumers has a huge number of issues being more expensive to manage, harder to scale, less efficient, etc etc. It sounds vastly more useful than it is because you end up increasing failure modes and make failing safe much harder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A GW ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. Little hint: nobody builds GW-scale anything that is just a "research project". Hydrogen storage will be mostly underground, at low pressure. So, no compression or liquification needed. But, for transport it will be liquified and shipped just like LNG is today. Liquifying nitrogen is extremely mature technology. A 100MW LN2 storage plant is under construction in Chi…
> nobody builds GW-scale anything that is just a "research project". Plenty of experimental GW scale nuclear reactors have been built, just look at the history of CANDU design for an example. That’s just the scale this stuff operates at, you need real world data to demonstrate it’s actually cost effective at scale and actually building stuff still requires actual R&D. Further, you don’t want to just build one you wan…
Nuclear reactors have very difficult engineering problems unknown in most other technologies. For a nuke, you might actually need to build a GW-scale pilot plant to discover the failure modes that show up there. Not so, most things. A bigger dam just needs more turbines. A bigger wind farm just needs more wind turbines. A bigger solar farm just needs more panels. A bigger ammonia plant just needs more catalyzer units. You can start it running after the first one, and add more at leisure.
That is a thing that makes renewables + storage so much more attractive than nukes: You are guaranteed no unpleasant surprises, and no existential disasters. That it is also radically cheaper, and starts working immediately, is icing on a very nice cake.