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Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

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Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#31

Post by jn1234 »

breischl wrote: post #17
api wrote: post #3

If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…

I don't think that's quite true. You don't need a lot of storage to make the peak-shaving, time-arbitrage setup he mostly talked about economic. But you need a whole lot of storage to make a reliable grid out of unpredictable generators. The author briefly touched on this in the context of home battery usage: "Solar + a small battery may get someone in Germany to 70%, and someone in Southern California to 85%, but th…

It makes sense to have the base load be something that is easily dispatchable and reliable. Renewables are an option in the short term, however the holy frail is nuclear fusion, which is clean, reliable and relatively cheap (building the infrastructure). In the short term, it actually only makes sense to replace generation that becomes retired with renewables because of the carbon costs associated with building new infrastructure. It makes sense that an inefficient natural gas plant that runs a couple of times a year at extreme peaks, will have a smaller carbon footprint than building new infrastructure.

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#32

Post by eigenvector »

breischl wrote: post #17
api wrote: post #3

If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…

I don't think that's quite true. You don't need a lot of storage to make the peak-shaving, time-arbitrage setup he mostly talked about economic. But you need a whole lot of storage to make a reliable grid out of unpredictable generators. The author briefly touched on this in the context of home battery usage: "Solar + a small battery may get someone in Germany to 70%, and someone in Southern California to 85%, but th…

Base-load nuclear is the opposite of dispatchable. Dispatchable means you can turn it on and off at will. It takes a long time to shut down a nuclear plant and start it back up again (on the order of days not minutes). By contrast, natural gas plants can be highly dispatchable hence their use as operating reserve in many ISOs.

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#33

Post by exelius »

api wrote: post #3

If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…

Actually; cheap storage makes the argument for nuclear energy even better. Nuclear is very bad at responding to demand because it can take weeks or months to restart a nuclear reactor.

Under any scenario, you're going to need some kind of power grid. That grid is going to have a non-zero "base" load as batteries charge, etc. Nuclear is perfect for generating this base load - it's reliable, clean and not subject to the variability that solar and wind are. Don't get me wrong, solar and wind are going to be a big part of the grid, but you want diversification of technology so that if you have a cloudy, but not very windy day, the grid can still keep up.

Also, fission reactors are being miniaturized, and at the timescale we're talking about, fusion may be an option as well. I don't think nuclear will be 50% of energy generation or anything, but it's a good, reliable technology that can supply a consistent amount of energy in any weather conditions.

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#34

Post by cwal37 »

It stands out to me that pumped storage only gets a passing mention. We've had that as a proven energy storage technology for decades. People in the industry love to talk about it and file FERC applications for preliminary permits on the same sites over and over (I would know, I've had to read nearly all of them over the last year at work), but it's never deployed at the scale people expected.

It'll be interesting to see if if PSH ever really takes off, or if it really does get left in the dust by batteries and other things.

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#35

Post by a8da6b0c91d »

breischl wrote: post #17
api wrote: post #3

If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…

I don't think that's quite true. You don't need a lot of storage to make the peak-shaving, time-arbitrage setup he mostly talked about economic. But you need a whole lot of storage to make a reliable grid out of unpredictable generators. The author briefly touched on this in the context of home battery usage: "Solar + a small battery may get someone in Germany to 70%, and someone in Southern California to 85%, but th…

Given gobs of cheap electricity, what are the options for synthesizing methane? Storing huge amounts of methane and using it to handle grid load is already a solved problem.

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#36

Post by toomuchtodo »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #29
toomuchtodo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear plants take years to build and have shitty failure scenarios. Best to stopgap coal until renewables take over with combined cycle natural gas plants, fueled by cheap natgas from fracking. It's not perfect, but those natural gas plants will still be kept around as peaking plants and they're an order of magnitude cleaner than coal plants (as well as producing much less CO2 per unit of power generated).

> Nuclear plants take years to build and have shitty failure scenarios That's only because we won't build any newer designs that don't have shitty failure modes and insist that we keep old reactors with very shitty failure modes online, though.

I don't disagree that we can build better designs. I disagree that we can build them quickly and cheap.

According to the OECD:

"As nuclear power plants are complex construction projects, their construction periods are longer than other large power plants. It is typically expected to take 5 to 7 years to build a large nuclear unit (not including the time required for planning and licensing)."

"Between 2002 and 2008, for example, cost estimates for new nuclear plant construction rose from between $2 billion and $4 billion per unit to $9 billion per unit, according to a 2009 UCS report, while experience with new construction in Europe has seen costs continue to soar."

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#37

Post by Guvante »

IanDrake wrote: post #12

>This leads to what seems to be a paradoxical situation. A battery that is more expensive than the average price of grid electricity can nonetheless arbitrage the grid and save one money. That’s math. Missing in the math is logic. If enough people do this, the price will even out and the arbitrage opportunity will vanish. It's like an arbitrage trading a model that makes money when paper trading but loses money when…

The fact that an arbitrage opportunity will not always be available does not mean that arbitrage opportunity does not exist.

Also electricity companies would be very slow to adjust to reduced demand by lowering prices, making this work for longer than a naive analysis would predict.

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#38

Post by intrasight »

marze wrote: post #7
Shivetya wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one stumbling block is that we need to get thousands more people trained to service these energy storage facilities, let alone the windmills and solar panels. There is already a shortage there as the skill set is not one side, part electrician, part mechanical engineer, and so on.

Fortunately, solar photovoltaic doesn't need servicing. Energy is big business, revenue will be there for servicing once market share is there.

Solar photovoltaic probably needs more servicing per kWh than any other method. If those panels aren't clean, you don't get the expected return.

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#39

Post by 7952 »

IanDrake wrote: post #12

>This leads to what seems to be a paradoxical situation. A battery that is more expensive than the average price of grid electricity can nonetheless arbitrage the grid and save one money. That’s math. Missing in the math is logic. If enough people do this, the price will even out and the arbitrage opportunity will vanish. It's like an arbitrage trading a model that makes money when paper trading but loses money when…

Also, it will usually be more profitable to build more generating capacity, reduce demand or improve the grid. You can build massive arrays of expensive batteries but you probably don't want to.

Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap

#40

Post by IgorPartola »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #18
DennisP wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage helps nuclear too, with less demanding requirements. You can keep running your nuclear plants at full blast and use storage to average the load. If the storage is cheap enough that'll cost less than partially idling the nuclear plant. Wind and solar, like nuclear, have costs dominated by capital cost, but with less predictable output. To run civilization on those alone, we'd need quite a bit more storage, to…

Wind and solar have a fairly beneficial failure scenario (ie nothing happens, save for the few turbines that have destroyed themselves during adverse conditions). You'll never be able to compete with that, fission, fusion, whatever. We still don't know where to put the waste, we still refuse to acknowledge the ability to reprocess said waste, and so forth. You don't even need more storage to run wind and solar as bas…

So cold fusion (as in cold enough to run on Earth, not cold enough to power your laptop) may compete with it, depending on what it will end up being. Unlike fission, fusion requires very specific parameters and if those are not present the reaction stops. My understanding and memory of this subject is rather dim, but I remember discussion benefits of fusion over fission as a potential power source in college. Relevant Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Magnetic_confineme...
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