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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

#71

Post by bryanlarsen »

bumby wrote: post #66
bryanlarsen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace 2T of engine + fuel with 5T of battery. Regulations allow an 82T limit for electric trucks compared with 80T for diesel trucks. So there's only a ~1T difference in cargo capacity, which is at most 2%.

Now do it with volume. Plus, aren't you forgetting that electric vehicles need an motor too? Also, I think you mean 80k lbs, not 80 tons? And it's the range + time that's a killer. Recharging time would likely be a deal breaker even if you could get the same cargo capacity. FWIW, I agree that electric trucking is the future, just disagree how close we are to that as a reality. My main gripe is how the problem tends t…

You're right. It's a 5% hit, not a 2% hit.

Trucks spend a lot of time loading, unloading and on mandatory driver rest breaks. Charging can and will be done during those times.

The biggest expense in a trucking operation is diesel. Trucking has cut-throat margins. Once electrification starts in the industry, everyone will switch quickly, or go bankrupt. Some routes will be hard to electrify, but the cost savings on the rest will be worth a lot more than a little bit of inconvenience.

It's not easy, but the savings will incentivize overcoming the obstacles.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#72

Post by more_corn »

bell-cot wrote: post #16

The reality is much more complex than "batteries replace gas" - > Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. > Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate. > "It does…

Yes, what type of equipment do you want. And do you want to favor fossil fuels or renewable. If the latter, deploy batteries.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#73

Post by s1artibartfast »

marcosdumay wrote: post #51
samus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?

It's quite likely that in the future electricity sellers will need to pay a tariff to cover the operation of flywheels.

Not sure why the cost would be borne by sellers. More likely consumers will pay for it as part of the grid infrastructure in my opinion.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#74

Post by jacquesm »

Enogoloyo wrote: post #53
samus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?

I believe they just switch on and off fast enough. Tesla power wall does that.

Yes, but the rest of the grid can not, except for some forms of hydro, flywheels, superconducting coils and grid scale batteries. They hydro has a fastest rate of change of about 1 minute from zero to full load and a bit slower to go back again and batteries can more-or-less match renewables for rate of change. The superconductor solution is the fastest but also the most expensive per KWh of storage.

In the time before renewables all of the rate-of-change limitations came from sudden increases or decreases in consumption, never from the supply side and this has subtle implications for the structure of the power grid and how much power companies can do to control the match between the two.

Think of it as a person walking across a rope with a balancing pole: you can overbalance for a short while because you can correct for that with the mass of the pole. But if the overbalance is too large for the mass of the pole then you will inevitably fall (brownout, blackout).

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#75

Post by jacquesm »

VaxWithSex wrote: post #65
samus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?

Batteries can and are used for frequency stabilization, yes. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg...

Superconducting coils as well. Those are popular near windfarms due to their fast response time, both on the uptake as the release.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#76

Post by s1artibartfast »

bumby wrote: post #62
dpierce9 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why call this political uncertainty as opposed to economic uncertainty? The future is intrinsically uncertain. The only thing that has changed is new entrants to the market. If gas plants can be replaced by something cheaper then they will be. If gas plants make economic sense, they will be built. The fact that gas developers have to model additional players in their markets to prove their economic viability seems fi…

> Why call this political uncertainty as opposed to economic uncertainty? I'm assuming this is because so much of the energy market is directed through political mechanisms like subsidies, research funding etc. It's the political uncertainty that undergirds the economic uncertainty.

Not to mention taxes, mandates, sanctions , and even wars

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#77

Post by DexesTTP »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #61
empath-nirvana wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s. I'm not really sure it would have gone faster instead of just having been a very large waste of money. A lot of the reason that renewables are cheaper now has to do with 30 years of advancements in electronics and power storage and semiconductors and solid s…

That is one opinion, and I'm curious if there's a stronger (more expert) case to be made for it anywhere. It's true that many necessary advancements happened recently, but it's also true that some of these developments occurred due to massive research and commercial investments (many of which are still under the radar to people who didn't notice they were occurring.)

The advances of renewables are definitely dependent on strong compute and widespread global (or at least widespread local) networking. Smart grids need all of the different tools from different manufacturers to talk to each other, which an agreed-upon networking protocol like IP on top of an existing internet backbone makes very easy to ipmlement. On-demand energy storage and providing from battery banks - or even hydroelectric storage or (as mentioned in the article) gas-powered backup turbines need the analytics power to study and predict load variations on all of the collected data, which existing data centers for search or even apps makes trivial to acquire.

Now, there could have been technical solutions for these issues found in the 80s or 90s, but more probably than not the engineers back then would not have thought about this beyond the obvious corporate aspects - after all, it's much more "practical" to focus on connecting the big power plants together and just vaguely estimate the required consumption.

It's probable that, if you sat at a design meeting in the 80s and proposed, as "an energy-efficient solution", to have a small computer in every consumer's breaker box that monitors the incoming electricity, sends the info through a combination of radio and country-spanning wires to a central server, and then do analytics on it to predict when the power is needed, you'd have been laughed out of the room. And yet, that's how smart grids work nowadays and it is the correct solution to this problem.

The improvements in energy storage and solar/wind renewables would have started decades earlier, sure, and that would have mattered. But I don't think anybody would have been able to use them the way we can use them today if it was done twenty or thirty years ago, and the technology might have died down instead. It's hard to know for sure, but it's a very plausible outcome.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#78

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bell-cot wrote: post #16

The reality is much more complex than "batteries replace gas" - > Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. > Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate. > "It does…

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 enough in the summer, so anything that can make up the shortfall in winter is only going to be used in winter. Duty cycle for whatever that is just got cut in half or worse.

Then sometimes it's cloudy for a week. Having enough battery capacity to make it through the night is very different than having enough to make it a whole week, or two. By the second or third day you need enough traditional generating capacity to run the whole grid at night -- but that capacity only gets used one week out of the year.

Now you want to say that gas is too expensive if it can only amortize its costs in those limited circumstances. But what do you want to do instead? You need something that can run the whole grid the week that it's cloudy, none of the options for that are cheap, but the alternative is everybody loses power that week.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#79

Post by marcosdumay »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67
marcosdumay wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero Yes, and that means generation will become unprofitable. We seem to be a decade or so away from the point where the investment on generation can't be decided by direct ROI. And nobody is preparing for this. Governments need a long time to regulate that kind of thing... so we can expect some problems on the near future.

> that means generation will become unprofitable For that time period. At the same time, using energy becomes supremely profitable. This isn’t a weird quirk of the power markets; compute time is also instantaneous. It’s just less noticeable because we haven’t unified a market for it. These are amply solvable problems.

> For that time period.

For the time period that the most common generators generate the most energy. By itself, that guarantees that there won't be enough investment to create excess renewables. Or at least that markets won't make that investment.

If you want excess renewables (and they are a safety and security necessity), you need to fund it by something that isn't interested on direct ROI.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#80

Post by dpierce9 »

bumby wrote: post #62
dpierce9 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why call this political uncertainty as opposed to economic uncertainty? The future is intrinsically uncertain. The only thing that has changed is new entrants to the market. If gas plants can be replaced by something cheaper then they will be. If gas plants make economic sense, they will be built. The fact that gas developers have to model additional players in their markets to prove their economic viability seems fi…

> Why call this political uncertainty as opposed to economic uncertainty? I'm assuming this is because so much of the energy market is directed through political mechanisms like subsidies, research funding etc. It's the political uncertainty that undergirds the economic uncertainty.

Sure, but why is that special for gas plants? CTs are expensive to run so if they run less that is generally good for people using electricity. I am not saying political uncertainty doesn’t exist or that the grid systems are apolitical or that building plants is easy. I don’t know much about the UK grid or rules which is why I was asking for specifics on what makes this specific case political.
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