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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

#91

Post by bumby »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #88
bumby wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about the costs and margins. However, a large portion of the cost disparity is because diesel fuel costs incorporate a lot of taxes to fund road maintenance. The electric costs do not, and I suspect that will have to change. Road maintenance funds will have to come from somewhere, and most states are reluctant to take from other tax areas.

24 cents per gallon of diesel aren't a significant portion of fuel costs nor do they come anywhere close to paying for the roads.

I'm guessing you're just reading federal taxes. There are a barrage of taxes applied to fuel. California shows over $1.24 per gallon in total. Nationally it's over 64 cents/gal. That's tens of billions of dollars nationally, and more than we spend on the energy & environment in total. One of the major problems with infrastructure spending is that these numbers have barely budged in decades. Combine that lack of political will with improvements in fuel mileage and increase in EVs means big budget shortfalls. That money has to be made up from somewhere and I can all but bet it won't come from cutting entitlements. A 'mileage driven' tax seems like a reasonable solution.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#92

Post by bumby »

dpierce9 wrote: post #90
bumby wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just speculation, but I imagine there is much less volatility in terms of fossil fuel policies. Fossil fuels (regretfully) have large and entrenched lobbyists who seem to get continued political support regardless of the office party. Contrast that to policies for/against renewables which have become a signaling mechanism.

What? Gas prices in Europe are extremely volatile [0]. Neither lobbyists nor politicians control prices and even if they did it isn’t obvious the lobbyists would prefer smooth prices. [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas

Volatility in terms of policies, not prices. E.g., the it's fairly certain the subsidies for gas that are in place this year will continue next year. Price volatility has a lot more market dynamics at play.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#94

Post by fmajid »

jacquesm wrote: post #74
Enogoloyo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befo…

"Superconductor solution": did you mean "supercapacitor solution"?

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#95

Post by creer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #78
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 e…

I must say I fail to see how any of this is all that new. Winter affects how much air conditioning and heating is needed - and probably even when people go to work and return. You had to take that into account before solar issues. Now both consumption and production are affected by the season, sure, but that's still a known mechanism. Same for cloudiness vs air conditioning (and heating and lighting).

But wait, in most places hydroelectricity availability has always been a factor. And THAT was already variable depending on the season (and anomalous seasons). So anyway, both production and consumption have always been seasonal and weather-dependent.

With sometimes chaotic results when a winter is exceptionally mild like last winter in Europe, or strong. Not new either.

And then on top of that, in places like the American West, the prices to import electricity from neighboring regions or states have sometimes been chaotic. Also something that had to be taken into account for peaking gas-powered generation.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#96

Post by dpierce9 »

bumby wrote: post #92
dpierce9 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Gas prices in Europe are extremely volatile [0]. Neither lobbyists nor politicians control prices and even if they did it isn’t obvious the lobbyists would prefer smooth prices. [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas

Volatility in terms of policies, not prices. E.g., the it's fairly certain the subsidies for gas that are in place this year will continue next year. Price volatility has a lot more market dynamics at play.

I have lost the thread. The og parent said that political uncertainties were responsible for gas plant economic issues. You are now saying that gas plant lobbyists create more political certainty. I don’t know if that is true but it is beside the point.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#97

Post by gwbas1c »

samus wrote: post #41
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…

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?

Inverters have come a long way in the past few years. They are at the point where they are (subjectively) better than giant flywheels.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#98

Post by jacquesm »

fmajid wrote: post #94
jacquesm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befo…

"Superconductor solution": did you mean "supercapacitor solution"?

No, superconductor. Effectively an electronic version of the flywheel.

There is a company in the United States that has been making these for almost 20 years now, they are used for ride-through in hospitals and for windfarm output stabilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...

https://www.amsc.com/gridtec/renewable-interconnectivity-sol...

Enjoy the read. It's interesting stuff.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#99

Post by QuarterReptile »

bumby wrote: post #47
QuarterReptile wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No discussion of battery trucks can go very far without reaching the conclusion that more freight must travel by rail. That's a correct conclusion, but for the same reasons it has never carried the day in the US for 75 years, that transition will continue to not happen.

I think you're right, but wouldn't this still necessitate freight to travel by truck from rail centers to population centers? That's how a lot of the system currently operates in the US, no?

There should be no population center without a rail center. I don't deny that last-mile would still be on roads, but that's very different from the present state of affairs.

My lazy googling suggests that 40% of freight movement is via rail in US. I can't find a full breakout, but the same site goes on to claim rail is only 1.7% of GHG, which means most of the rest is traveling by road, since waterborne freight is generally more efficient than rail.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#100

Post by gwbas1c »

A few years ago I scraped some publicly-accessible data from https://www.iso-ne.com/ regarding the spot cost of electricity.

Then I fed it into a battery simulator that I wrote.

Based on my estimated cost of a grid-scale battery, I estimated a payoff in ~2 years; and then a lot of profit.

The biggest challenge is the politics and red tape of connecting something to the grid. The grid operators are used to power plants being multi-year projects.

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