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Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

theguardian.com

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Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#51

Post by toomuchtodo »

stephen_g wrote: post #49
toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep an eye on Australia, Snowy 2 (whose costs are blowing out) [1], and battery uptake [2]. Based on cost decline curves of lithium scale utility storage, batteries will be cheaper by the time Snowy is commissioned. Battery manufacturing is ramping because every automaker is being forced to electrify, Tesla is preparing to build a second Megafactory factory for battery storage in China [3], and batteries can be inst…

Of course, Snowy 2 was a political project for which the planning was totally under-baked. It was a compromise set off by a centrist who was lukewarmly pro-renewable energy, but leading a party that was mostly dead against it and just wanted the Government to pump money into expanding fossil fuel ('coincidently' many of these MPs in the party have direct or indirect investment and interest in coal mining companies, o…

Agreed, lots of inertia and it will take time to course correct.

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#52

Post by londons_explore »

sambeau wrote: post #40
FFP999 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason that "lakes" (i.e. big holes) can't be dug where they would be useful for this purpose? (Update: for those who are downvoting, it was a serious question.)

I’ve seen a suggestion that you could use two spheres in the sea one deep down, one near the surface.

I don't think so...

You would presumably be pumping air from one sphere to the other.

That air ends up compressing/decompressing, and therefore heating or getting cold. That dramatically lowers efficiency.

And on top of that, a football stadium sized sphere full of compressed air at the bottom of the ocean is going to need hold-down anchors at a scale the world has never seen...

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#53

Post by dano »

sambeau wrote: post #36
squigg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are ever up in Scotland, you can still visit Cruachan - the sister power station at Loch Awe with a very similar design. I took my children there two months ago. They were as amazed as I hoped they would be! Visiting hours here: https://www.visitcruachan.co.uk/ If you are a Harry Potter fan, it's not far from Loch Awe to the famous viaduct at Glenfinnan as well. Details here: https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/place…

If you are a Star Wars fan, Cruachan is the location of The Empire’s base in Andor. As a Scot, who’s done a lot of hillwalking in the past (and been scared witless by airforce jets suddenly appearing over the brim of a hill) it was amazing to see tie-fighters whooshing across the Scottish landscape.

I visited Cruachan in 2019 by happenstance. It is really cool! I'm going to look for the Star Wars tie in - the architecture certainly does fit the theme. You can watch a Pathe video on Royal Opening of the dam and power station here https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/87792/

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#54

Post by becurious »

Neil44 wrote: post #6
Dachande663 wrote: post #5

I had the luck to visit this as a child, before all the tourist side of it was shut down. I remember taking the bus past the giant turbine hall. A few facts I can remember: 1. Carol Vorderman did a lot of the engineering calculations, before she started on Countdown (probably only relevant to the UK lot). 2. They couldn't run powerlines from the facility to the grid as it's an AONB so they had to run them underground…

Sounds like we did a similar set of school trips, I remember standing in a big loud hall on top of the Sellafield reactor, and down inside electric mountain by the big turbines. I was most sad that they don't do tours at the moment, I wanted to take my daughter there.

You could also visit the Wylfa nuclear plant on Anglesey. Not sure when tours stopped (probably due to security) but you could see the reactor. All closed now.

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#55

Post by cogman10 »

bee_rider wrote: post #28
toomuchtodo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison, you could build a replacement for Dinorwig with less than 1 quarter (12 weeks) of Tesla's single Megafactory annual output, and have it installed in less than a year, in any geography (assuming you're ready to run copper and pour slabs; storage enclosures can be installed in parallel, it's trucks, cranes, and human labor bolting them down). Timelines go down as battery manufacturing scales up. TBMs an…

A quarter worth of production from the Megafactory sounds pretty expensive. I mean somebody should make a giant battery backup, but Dinorwig does have a pretty big advantage in terms of existing-ness.

Dinorwig cost 0.5 billion GBP to produce in 1974 (roughly 1 billion pounds in today's money) and took 10 years to build.

Nobody is arguing Dinorwig should be torn down. However, it took 10 years to build dinorwig. It takes less than a year to build a battery version of Dinorwig with basically 0 geographic requirements. The cost would be roughly comparable for a battery backup (at $200USD/kWh, it'd be $1.8 billion to build a similarly sized plant. or 1.4 billion GBP)

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#56

Post by Gud »

sambeau wrote: post #10
londons_explore wrote: post #3

Not stated in the article: There are very few places in the world with two large lakes, separated by a lot of height and not much distance. Wherever that happens, it is probably financially a good idea to build one of these. But that geography is really rather rare, so the rest of the world will probably have to use gas peaker plants (environment-killing) or battery storage (expensive).

Pump-storage hydro is for load balancing as it can’t store anything on a grid scale and is very inefficient. Sadly, it could never replace gas — the U.K. alone would need thousands.

It is absolutely "grid scale". Did you read the article?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#57

Post by hwillis »

FFP999 wrote: post #21
londons_explore wrote: post #3

Not stated in the article: There are very few places in the world with two large lakes, separated by a lot of height and not much distance. Wherever that happens, it is probably financially a good idea to build one of these. But that geography is really rather rare, so the rest of the world will probably have to use gas peaker plants (environment-killing) or battery storage (expensive).

Is there any reason that "lakes" (i.e. big holes) can't be dug where they would be useful for this purpose? (Update: for those who are downvoting, it was a serious question.)

1. The lower lake still needs to be substantially above sea level and the local water table etc. so that it can actually be drained and so that it doesn't just fill up with local water. You can't do this by the hoover dam, since you'd also have to lower the river another few dozen meters. That's more challenging than it sounds, since you'd have to continue digging all along its path until you reached the place that the river naturally fell to that lower altitude.

2. Reservoirs are very large. The lower reservoir in this article is 7 million cubic meters[1]. The Hoover dam passes 289 million cubic meters of water daily, with around 78.3 million cubic meters of that generating electricity. The largest land vehicle in the world can excavate 700k cubic meters per day[2].

[1]: https://coflein.gov.uk/en/site/423380 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overburden_Conveyor_Bridge_F60

3. We do dig them out- the reservoir in the article was substantially enlarged. But it's still rare to find places you can actually do that.

4. The upper reservoir is a totally different question. It would take over 125 years to dig out a hole the size of Lake Mead for the Hoover Dam. It would take almost a million of the bombs used the Sedan nuclear test[3] to dig that hole.

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#58

Post by arethuza »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #43
mindracer wrote: post #31

Incredible place, while at Bangor university I did my dissertation on electric mountain and now spend my weekend hiking round Snowdonia. Lovely part of the world

I went to Aberystwyth and often went out into Snowdonia, particularly Bala. It's definitely one of the prettiest parts of the UK! I really regret not learning Welsh while I lived in such a Welsh-speaking part of Wales.

I have to say that I really like the Welsh names: Eryri for Snowdonia and Yr Wyddfa for Snowdon itself.

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#59

Post by sambeau »

Gud wrote: post #56
sambeau wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pump-storage hydro is for load balancing as it can’t store anything on a grid scale and is very inefficient. Sadly, it could never replace gas — the U.K. alone would need thousands.

It is absolutely "grid scale". Did you read the article? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...

It's grid-scale load balancing, not grid-scale storage. Grid-scale storage is hundreds and thousands of GWh. The UK needs 30-50 TWh to be secure without fossil fuels.

Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure

#60

Post by sambeau »

londons_explore wrote: post #52
sambeau wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen a suggestion that you could use two spheres in the sea one deep down, one near the surface.

I don't think so... You would presumably be pumping air from one sphere to the other. That air ends up compressing/decompressing, and therefore heating or getting cold. That dramatically lowers efficiency. And on top of that, a football stadium sized sphere full of compressed air at the bottom of the ocean is going to need hold-down anchors at a scale the world has never seen...

> "The general idea is to have a closed vessel sitting on the seafloor. Surplus energy is then used to pump water out of this vessel, leaving the inside at a near-vacuum. When it’s desired to recover energy from the system, water can be allowed to flow back into the vessel under the pressure generated by the seawater above. As the vessel is filled, the water flowing in turns a turbine, generating electricity in just the same way as a traditional pumped hydro system."

https://hackaday.com/2022/02/02/underwater-tanks-turn-energy...

https://www.iee.fraunhofer.de/en/topics/stensea.html

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