The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[lpetrich]

You searched for flow batteries - CleanTechnica

Vanadium Flow Batteries Are Coming For Your Gas Power Plants - "The US Department of Energy has tapped six sites to host new vanadium flow batteries, aiming to replace fossil energy with renewables."

Here’s the Top 10 List of Flow Battery Companies | Blackridge Research
Listed chemistries: vanadium, iron, zinc-bromine

• Vanadium: V2+ - V3+ (- half-cell), V4+ - V5+ (+ half-cell) -  Vanadium redox battery
• Iron: Fe - Fe2+ (- half-cell), Fe2+ - Fe3+ (+ half-cell) -  Iron redox flow battery
• Zinc-bromine: Zn - Zn2+ (- half-cell), 2Br- - Br2 (+ half-cell) -  Zinc–bromine battery and Sandia: Zinc/Bromine Batteries

 

[Jarhyn]

The maximum output is 3,500 MW, 5 times greater.

Yeah, because it's almost all generated in a 4-5 hour period of each day. For 19 hours a day there is NO ELECTRICITY.

Would you be happy if you only had electricity when the sun was shining?

As happy as an advocate of nuclear electricity generation is to endure partial blackouts because nuclear reactors aren't very adjustable in their output.

Yeah, that's not an actual thing. But then, solar power advocates really don't care much for reality.

I'm judging nuclear energy by the standard that you judge solar energy. Nuclear reactors are usually run on constant throttle, and unless they are heavily overbuilt, they cannot meet peak demand. A way to get around that is what I mentioned: partial blackouts, with only some customers getting electricity from the reactors.

That's why you build "customers" that don't have a problem with being blacked out. Specifically, processes where much of the cost is the energy and they convert it directly into output.

The problem exists for any system that doesn't reality throttle and the only renewables that throttle are hydro and geothermal. Thus any ecologically friendly grid must be able to cope with supply not matching demand. It's much easier to dump the extra power into things like cracking water than it is to make up the shortage of power.

You can throttle wind too, just by freeing the turbine.

I would argue though that we do absolutely need "time insensitive ala-carte consumers" that can soak excess load.

 

[bilby]

Wind or solar can be curtailed, but most grids have policies to use them first, so that this happens very rarely.

If those policies were removed, it would become obviously pointless (and deeply unprofitable) to build grid scale wind or solar power. But doing anything that might expose the underlying pointlessness of these technologies would be heretical, so such policies will remain.

 

[bilby]

I would argue though that we do absolutely need "time insensitive ala-carte consumers" that can soak excess load.

I would argue that horses should pull carts, rather than vice-versa.

Customer demand for electricity is the reason we build and operate electricity generating facilities.

We absolutely should NOT build ersatz customer demand in order to justify the existence of electricity generating facilities that shouldn't be (or have been) built at all.

 

[Jarhyn]

I would argue though that we do absolutely need "time insensitive ala-carte consumers" that can soak excess load.

I would argue that horses should pull carts, rather than vice-versa.

Customer demand for electricity is the reason we build and operate electricity generating facilities.

We absolutely should NOT build ersatz customer demand in order to justify the existence of electricity generating facilities that shouldn't be (or have been) built at all.

We absolutely should, because we have a society which has the need for water purification, carbon sequestration, and a number of other concerns that don't matter as to what time of day they happen at.

We need to do something with excess load, and it's more efficient to use the load when it exists rather than to store all of it for later.

 

[bilby]

We need to do something with excess load, and it's more efficient to use the load when it exists rather than to store all of it for later.

Presuming that by "load" you actually mean "supply", the something we need to do with it is "not generate it".

If there's something useful we can do with it, it's not "excess".

If we need to purify water, or sequester carbon, or make Hydrogen, or whatever, then it is far better and more efficient to do these things as continuous processes - as with pretty much all industrial work.

 

[Jarhyn]

We need to do something with excess load, and it's more efficient to use the load when it exists rather than to store all of it for later.

Presuming that by "load" you actually mean "supply", the something we need to do with it is "not generate it".

If there's something useful we can do with it, it's not "excess".

If we need to purify water, or sequester carbon, or make Hydrogen, or whatever, then it is far better and more efficient to do these things as continuous processes - as with pretty much all industrial work.

No, we should absolutely use renewables to capture the energy when it is there to capture for the sake of using it on things that are time independent on when they happen.

Continuous processes capable of scaling as needed with available energy are far preferable to processes that need to spin up and down slowly, anyway.

 

[bilby]

No, we should absolutely use renewables to capture the energy when it is there to capture for the sake of using it on things that are time independent on when they happen.

Only if it costs nothing to do so.

Solar panels and wind turbines don't grow on trees.

In fact, if you want to capture solar energy for later use, you are better off planting trees. They do grow on trees.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The maximum output is 3,500 MW, 5 times greater.

Yeah, because it's almost all generated in a 4-5 hour period of each day. For 19 hours a day there is NO ELECTRICITY.

Would you be happy if you only had electricity when the sun was shining?

As happy as an advocate of nuclear electricity generation is to endure partial blackouts because nuclear reactors aren't very adjustable in their output.

Yeah, that's not an actual thing. But then, solar power advocates really don't care much for reality.

I'm judging nuclear energy by the standard that you judge solar energy. Nuclear reactors are usually run on constant throttle, and unless they are heavily overbuilt, they cannot meet peak demand. A way to get around that is what I mentioned: partial blackouts, with only some customers getting electricity from the reactors.

That's why you build "customers" that don't have a problem with being blacked out. Specifically, processes where much of the cost is the energy and they convert it directly into output.

The problem exists for any system that doesn't reality throttle and the only renewables that throttle are hydro and geothermal. Thus any ecologically friendly grid must be able to cope with supply not matching demand. It's much easier to dump the extra power into things like cracking water than it is to make up the shortage of power.

You can throttle wind too, just by freeing the turbine.

I would argue though that we do absolutely need "time insensitive ala-carte consumers" that can soak excess load.

I meant it the other way around in this case.

Any system can simply discard energy, the question is whether the energy will be available later.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I would argue though that we do absolutely need "time insensitive ala-carte consumers" that can soak excess load.

I would argue that horses should pull carts, rather than vice-versa.

Customer demand for electricity is the reason we build and operate electricity generating facilities.

We absolutely should NOT build ersatz customer demand in order to justify the existence of electricity generating facilities that shouldn't be (or have been) built at all.

A fully green system needs water cracking. It's not waste.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We need to do something with excess load, and it's more efficient to use the load when it exists rather than to store all of it for later.

Presuming that by "load" you actually mean "supply", the something we need to do with it is "not generate it".

If there's something useful we can do with it, it's not "excess".

If we need to purify water, or sequester carbon, or make Hydrogen, or whatever, then it is far better and more efficient to do these things as continuous processes - as with pretty much all industrial work.

Something will be overbuilt.

Is it your reactors, to allow the cracker to run all the time, or is it the cracker to use the otherwise useless power from the reactor?

I strongly suspect overbuilding the cracker is cheaper.

 

[Jarhyn]

We need to do something with excess load, and it's more efficient to use the load when it exists rather than to store all of it for later.

Presuming that by "load" you actually mean "supply", the something we need to do with it is "not generate it".

If there's something useful we can do with it, it's not "excess".

If we need to purify water, or sequester carbon, or make Hydrogen, or whatever, then it is far better and more efficient to do these things as continuous processes - as with pretty much all industrial work.

Something will be overbuilt.

Is it your reactors, to allow the cracker to run all the time, or is it the cracker to use the otherwise useless power from the reactor?

I strongly suspect overbuilding the cracker is cheaper.

Pretty much. Anything that is continuous, but for which continuous through process scales with available energy -- either through small lines that open or close in cyclic patterns to enforce a duty cycle, or through a throttling of feedstock flow -- and you have a pretty cheaply over built cracker.

I would also expect the best course is to put most energy-intensive processes on a bid process.

It would work well to put such automated processes on load standby, and if we want more capabilities, build more renewables.

Then we can build nukes for the base load.

I've been saying this for a decade: we need to "waste" energy to undo all the damage we caused. There will be no "profiting" from this, only sacrifice. That's why we need to build out renewables.

There is no way to do this without spending shitloads of time and energy on something that we bury in the fucking ground (all that GD excess carbon).

And sure. Water cracking or whatever.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Texas is now facing a problem. Its grid cannot handle the renewable energy from big projects getting underway or being planned. Texas needs more transmission lines to transport renewable energy state wide.

 

[ZiprHead]

Texas is now facing a problem. Its grid cannot handle the renewable energy from big projects getting underway or being planned. Texas needs more transmission lines to transport renewable energy state wide.

Nah. When things break down that's an opportunity to go to Cancun.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

It is a big business opportunity for those who can build robust electrical grids. So eventually it is a problem that will solve itself.

 

[bilby]

Texas is now facing a problem. Its grid cannot handle the renewable uncontrollably intermittent energy from big projects getting underway or being planned. Texas needs more transmission lines to transport renewable energy state wide continous generation, close to the big population centres where consumers live.

FTFY.

Renewables are causing problems, and simultaneously failing to solve the problem they are intended to solve. The solution is NOT to add further expensive and useless infrastructure, throwing good money after bad.

People want 24x7 power, and they mostly want it in the cities. But they don't want it to generate vast amounts of carbon dioxide.

"Solving" this problem by providing power for a few hours of the day, mostly in rural areas, and then demanding that this half-arsed solution be supported by buying an expensive transmission grid that is only needed because of the shortcomings of your solution, might just be reasonable, if there wasn't already a cleaner, cheaper, safer and more reliable solution that is being largely ignored, and routinely villified by people who have moved heaven and earth for seventy years to make it as expensive as possible, and then declared it "too expensive", when the cost of a complete solution exceeds that of their preferred option (in ideal conditions when you ignore the additional costs, such as grid infrastructure, needed to make it work at all).

Engineering should not be a fucking popularity contest.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Renewables forge ahead

.....
Renewable power investment continues to outperform fossil fuel investment across the globe, according to the latest research. This provides a strong signal regarding the decline of fossil fuel investment.
....
The report just published by the Centre for Climate Finance at Imperial College Business School and the International Energy Agency says that renewable power generated significantly higher total returns over the last ten years, at 422.7% against 59% for fossil fuels or over 7 times the return.
......

Meanwhile Oklahoma governor Stitt is bloviating about unleashing big oil. And ranting about that old meany Biden. No, the problem is more money is to be made with renewables.

Global Renewables Investment Return 7 Times Higher Than Fossil Fuels

New research proves massively increased return for investment in renewables over fossil fuels. With 2050 targets requiring $4.4 trillion annual investment in low carbon energy, this can only be a positive for achieving climate goals.

www.forbes.com

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

How is that relevant? Investment returns are impacted based on how new a company is. Newer companies are smaller and there is room for large growth. Big Oil has been established for over a century, and growth isn't going to be a thing.

 

[Swammerdami]

If we need to purify water, or sequester carbon, or make Hydrogen, or whatever, then it is far better and more efficient to do these things as continuous processes - as with pretty much all industrial work.

Only slightly more efficient in many cases. And "whatever" includes EV charging, Bitcoin mining, various pumpings, and so on.

Anyway, there's no need to predict or mandate throttlings or exploitations. Just price electricity at its actual true cost (including "externals", future disposal, etc.) and let The Market determine untilization.

 

[lpetrich]

Michael Thomas on X: "One of the most common critiques you'll hear of clean energy is that it's too expensive.
But if you look at where electricity prices are growing, it's the states powered by natural gas.
States with clean energy growth saw much slower rises in electricity bills.
New report (pix link)" / X
Clean Energy Isn't Driving Power Price Spikes - Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology

Claiming that "... states with high levels of wind and solar generation like New Mexico, Iowa, and Oklahoma have experienced the lowest rate increases." and

• Wildfire costs and risk driving up prices
• Natural gas price volatility in regions heavily dependent on the fuel
• Utility investments in aging, uneconomic coal plants
• Transmission and distribution costs rising faster than inflation
• And utility business models favoring big capital expenditures

Some graphs from the report are reproduced in that xweet.