91–100 of 143 posts
Which one is cheaper to build and operate: Pumped hydro or batteries?
In a lot of places pumped hydro is at capacity. There's only so many rivers, but you can generally put batteries anywhere.
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No one has any way to dispose of nuclear waste (except reprocessing, which has significant cost and safety concerns). It sits in storage pools waiting for that day. Lithium batteries have no such issue.
While not cost effective in the slightest, jettisoning nuclear waste into outer space is one proposition. Naturally, launching rockets filled with nuclear waste comes with its own safety concerns.
I looked it up, and underground storage seems to cost about the same as launching into space with falcon heavy launches, at about 1700$ per kg.
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/business/underground-nuclear-waste-fa...
[2] https://www.quora.com/Rockets-What-is-cost-of-sending-1-kg-w...
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The history of business is littered with companies that got into business to do A, discovered they couldn't make that work unless someone tackled B, did B because nobody else was doing it well enough, then stopped doing A because they were doing so well at B.
Do you have a couple of examples?
For obvious reasons there's a lot of focus on Tesla's automobiles, but part of me wonders if these Powerpack grid batteries aren't the real innovation and killer product for the company.
Where's Tesla's secret sauce in this solution: the battery chemistry, the control circuits or well-engineered integration of the parts? How much a threat is constrained lithium supply to the business model?
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The car sales of Tesla are creating the battery production volume that allows to be price competitive for the grid solutions. Grid scale battery storage will be the future, as the car industry alone is going to increase the world battery production by about 100x, driving down the prices strongly, and not even counting the second life of car cells in storage after they are down on capacity.
Hm, I wonder where they will get enough lithium, or they are using some other technology?
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> Mostly the Coalition. Seriously. Pull the other one, the risk is something like what happened in Germany. The cheap, reliable option in Australia is coal. So an investor has 2 options: 1) Invest in coal. At some point a Labor-Green government gets in and copies the German model - all your capital now makes a loss (ie, the plant you just built). 2) Invest in something else. This isn't as politically risky, but if th…
Sorry, that doesn't make any sense. We have no pressing need for additional baseload capacity at the moment. The problem is entirely in high-demand times, and that is entirely sourced from dispatchable generation. This is mostly gas and hydro in Australia, and the price of gas drives the price, given the way the AEMO bidding market works. Renewable energy only takes pressure off this demand (i.e. solar is fairly well…
Australia's number 2 problem is all our power plants are aging and shutting down. I addressed that; because you seemed to be talking to it (eg, Liddel is only achieving something like 46% capacity). That is a looming issue. The problem here is also not the Coalition, as I mentioned.
Now SA appears to have a tertiary problem which is they have lots of wind energy and not enough storage to balance out the grid. The battery is addressing that and seems to be going well. This is also nothing to do with the Coalition, because the SA state government controls SA and the majority bounces between the two majors. The Weatherill government seems to have had the battery installed extremely quickly despite whatever you think the Coalition did to prevent it.
You aren't assigning blame correctly here. The big picture problem isn't that gas prices are high, and power problems aren't happening because of "mostly the Coalition".
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It's 90% cheaper bids into a frequency stability service. It corrects for drift from 50hz. It doesn't supply power in that sense, it supplies a slightly out of phase AC to refocus the frequency back to where it should be. It does it inside milliseconds of a drift and prevents overreaction by other generators with synchronous power, and can do it more often for less "cost" (synchronous flywheel systems lose most of th…
In what sense doesn't it supply power? If demand for power exceeds supply, then the frequency starts to go down. "Maintaining frequency" and "supplying the demanded power" are two different expressions of the same problem.
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Do you have a couple of examples?
Amazon got into the business of selling goods online, but it turns out that renting their computers to others is way more profitable
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> Mostly the Coalition. Seriously. Pull the other one, the risk is something like what happened in Germany. The cheap, reliable option in Australia is coal. So an investor has 2 options: 1) Invest in coal. At some point a Labor-Green government gets in and copies the German model - all your capital now makes a loss (ie, the plant you just built). 2) Invest in something else. This isn't as politically risky, but if th…
Fortunately, people have crunched the numbers: https://reneweconomy.com.au/plunging-costs-make-solar-wind-a... The Coalition doesn't want cheap - they've spun coal so hard it's no longer politically tenable to unspin it.
Which one is cheaper to build and operate: Pumped hydro or batteries?
In a lot of places pumped hydro is at capacity. There's only so many rivers, but you can generally put batteries anywhere.