The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[bigfield]

Batteries are virtually non-existent, besides the couple that have been built in the last five years. They don't contribute much to anything.

Actually, they do.

The Hornsdale battery, along with another Tesla battery at Lake Bonney and the Dalrymple North battery, were asked to play a key role stabilising the South Australia grid during the 17 days that the state was “isolated” from the rest of the main grid, and it reaped a huge bonus in revenue and profits in return.

That key role delivered a one-off profit boost of €16.4 million ($A27 million) in the first half, allowing Neoen to more than treble its total earnings before interest and tax from battery storage to €23.2 million from €6.9 million, and contributed to a 58 per cent boost to overall earnings in the first half to €148.2 million.
...
It’s important to remember also that the Hornsdale battery has delivered savings to consumers already estimated at more than $A150 million, and played key roles in keeping the lights on in a number of major network events.

September 2020 figures. They are bound to have increased since then.

I was going to mention the HPR's role in FCAS, because I remember how South Australia avoided a blackout a while ago when a QLD coal plant fell over, but it may not have done as good a job as initially reported.

Regulator takes Tesla big battery to court for failing to properly back up broken coal plant

Regulator takes Tesla big battery at Hornsdale to court over its alleged failure to deliver promised FCAS services when the country’s biggest coal unit tripped.

reneweconomy.com.au

However it does seem to be the case that the battery has driven down the spot price for FCAS services by bidding against other generators.

 

[Swammerdami]

This sub-debate is on a topic where my knowledge is very limited. I've no doubt that bilby knows far more on the topic than I do. But that does not mean that he is right and I am wrong

but you still haven't shown that you even understand the point.

.. . But sometimes, people will disagree with you, not because they don't understand your point, but because you are wrong.

This is one of those times.

If I am wrong you should be able to provide some rebuttal, whether short or long. I've made the same point in three posts here. Not only have you NEVER offered a rebuttal, you've never acknowledged it or indicated that you've read it. If you are still unable or unwilling to offer a 20-word rebuttal, then please use the same 20 words to rephrase the point we're debating so I can be sure you even know what we're talking about.

To refresh your memory, here is the central thesis for yet a 4th time:

There are three types of power source.

(1) Throttlable. These sources can be turned on and off economically to match demand. Hydroelectric dams and carbon-fuel engines are obvious examples. I suspect that some renewable sources, e.g. geothermal, will also fit into this category.

(2) and (3). Non-throttlable. These sources can be turned off but, because there is little cost of consumables, they cannot be turned off ECONOMICALLY. One could shutter one's solar panels at high noon, but why would one want to?

To operate a grid ECONOMICALLY when most of the power is non-throttlable, one seeks energy storage, e.g. pumped water or H₂ generation.

There are two non-throttleable cases:
(2) Intermittent sources like wind. During periods of low supply, power must come from storage or from throttlable sources.
(3) Constant sources like nuclear. During periods of low demand, power must be diverted to storage. Note that reducing the reactor output is NOT an economic option since most of the cost is non-recurring cost of construction and (eventual) clean-up.

Yeah, this is the real answer to load leveling. Realtime adjustments to the price of power, communicated to the users so devices can optimize. Even at the residential level there is some optimizing that could be done--when do you charge that EV? When do you run that pool pump?

Or you could just supply electricity whenever customers want it. Supply should follow load; You shouldn't be asking load to follow supply.

I mean, a pizza place can offer cheap pizzas whenever their quiet period are, but it's quite something else to tell customers to fuck off if they want pizza during busy periods. In the latter case, you add production capacity, you don't try to lower sales.

Where I live, mangoes are much cheaper at some times of the year than at others. Nobody gets confused.
Charging car's electric batteries in the afternoon — when electricity demand is high — even though the car won't be used until tomorrow, is NOT good policy REGARDLESS of the supply source. I happily stipulate that you know more about the power grid than I do. But your position here seems blindered.

And UIAM there are ALREADY systems available for the home that will AUTOMATICALLY charge car batteries when electricity is cheapest. More such systems will come into use.

 

[bigfield]

To operate a grid ECONOMICALLY when most of the power is non-throttlable, one seeks energy storage, e.g. pumped water or H2 generation.

There are two non-throttleable cases:
(2) Intermittent sources like wind. During periods of low supply, power must come from storage or from throttlable sources.
(3) Constant sources like nuclear. During periods of low demand, power must be diverted to storage. Note that reducing the reactor output is NOT an economic option since most of the cost is non-recurring cost of construction and (eventual) clean-up.

That makes sense.

The problem then becomes the storage technology.

1. While hydro has a significant share of some energy markets, the majority of hydro stations can't pump the water back up and therefore would need to be upgraded. Pumped hydro is also constrained by the number of suitable sites and the environmental damage caused by building dams.
2. We don't have an economic means to store energy in batteries. There's talk of non-lithium a batteries but they might as well be fusion reactors at this point.
3. We don't have an economic means to store and generate electricity from hydrogen. Maybe one day gas fired generators will all run on H2 or synfuels, but its theoretical at this point.

Given only technology that actually exists, we've got two choices:
1. Use gas-fired power to fill the gaps left by wind and solar.
2. Build enough nuclear to supply everyone and just ban gas entirely.

Both of those options can make a role for storage once it becomes available, but only one of them actually achieves the emissions reductions necessary to mitigate global warming.

 

[Swammerdami]

Given only technology that actually exists, we've got two choices:
1. Use gas-fired power to fill the gaps left by wind and solar.
2. Build enough nuclear to supply everyone and just ban gas entirely.

Both of those options can make a role for storage once it becomes available, but only one of them actually achieves the emissions reductions necessary to mitigate global warming.

This is probably quite correct. (Though better storage methods and non-intermittent renewables like geothermal should still be pursued.)

I am NOT an advocate for carbon-based energy, nor do I advocate against nuclear.

I can only be a learner, not a teacher, in these threads. But it is my quibbling nature to respond when I see pedantic and overly simplistic half-truths.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Or you could just supply electricity whenever customers want it. Supply should follow load; You shouldn't be asking load to follow supply.

I mean, a pizza place can offer cheap pizzas whenever their quiet period are, but it's quite something else to tell customers to fuck off if they want pizza during busy periods. In the latter case, you add production capacity, you don't try to lower sales.

If your supply is intermittent, and you are as a result forced to turn away customers, then you are doing it wrong. You need to fix the supply side, not the demand side.

From a technological standpoint there will always be a load problem.

And I'm not saying to tell them to fuck off in busy times--there would be a normal rate and then discounts below that when demand dropped below the supply that isn't easily throttleable. That's telling the customers to run their time-insensitive stuff now.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That would be very difficult to implement for retail electricity, as each customer is usually contracted to a single retailer who then has the freedom to vary that price in real time, however they want. It would take a very diligent and data-literate customer to figure out whether they are choosing bad times to consume electricity or just getting cheated.

I would rather we just found a way to make the price of electricity less dependent on the weather. Or even better, let's stop creating that problem in the first place.

The problem is we can't stop creating the problem. It's inherent.

 

[bilby]

There are three types of power source

This is a false dichotomy, despite your attempt to break one half of it into a second false dichotomy.

Any power source can be switched off. The weasel word in your argument is 'economically'. The degree to which switching off costs money varies, but is not an absolute; It's not a choice of lose some money or lose no money, but a choice of lose some money or lose more money - and whether that is worthwhile depends on analysing all the pros and cons.

On a grid with certain types of gas turbines, those get turned off first, because they are quick and easy to turn back on, and because fuel is a significant cost, and can be saved by turning them off.

Next are wind turbines and once-through hydro - easy to turn on and off, but you don't save any money by doing so; There's a capital loss due to having expensive equipment idle.

Next is modern nuclear. You save trivial fuel cost, and have a larger capital loss due to both idle equipment, and possibly an opportunity cost if the curtailment is brief and you need to wait for Xenon; This delay varies between designs and with how long the fuel has been in the reactor.

Then you have older nuclear and coal plants, which are very slow to bring back on line once curtailed. They can still be shut down to respond to load variations, but it's generally not done because it's expensive.

It's a spectrum from less to more expensive; There are no hard divisions between categories of 'despatchible' and 'non-dispatchible', though the two ends of the spectrum are sufficiently far apart that they are often referred to in that way for convenience.

As I said earlier, France has demonstrated load following with nuclear. It's an unusual case, only seen in grids totally dominated by nuclear power, but it's not an engineering nor an economic constraint on such grids. It does, however become more expensive as you introduce sharper and less predictable fluctuations - such as by connecting wind or solar power to your grid. This is a hidden cost of intermittent generating, and is usually externalised on their competitors - hence my description of it as vandalism. I guess you could say that's unfair, as the damage others must pay for isn't entirely without benefit to those doing the damage; Perhaps it would be fairer to describe it as terrorism.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Given only technology that actually exists, we've got two choices:
1. Use gas-fired power to fill the gaps left by wind and solar.
2. Build enough nuclear to supply everyone and just ban gas entirely.

Both of those options can make a role for storage once it becomes available, but only one of them actually achieves the emissions reductions necessary to mitigate global warming.

This is probably quite correct. (Though better storage methods and non-intermittent renewables like geothermal should still be pursued.)

Simple thought experiment. Create a natural gas plant that is 1/10th the size of a current one to generate the same amount of power. Now do it with 1/100th the size.

How do you store a massive power plant in a much smaller box in a set of batteries?

I am NOT an advocate for carbon-based energy, nor do I advocate against nuclear.

I can only be a learner, not a teacher, in these threads. But it is my quibbling nature to respond when I see pedantic and overly simplistic half-truths.

The Physics breaks down after a bit. Power storage doesn't work. You can only store so much energy in the form of hydrogen or electrons in any amount of space. Battery storage is grossfully ungreen! It might be carbon free, but it is ugly and a waste of our resources. The only remaining renewables are Dyson sphering the sun and wires in the Van Allen belts, but we are quite the way from being able to harness that energy. Nuclear is here now, and we needed to get on that bus a while ago. Solar and wind are incapable of providing us the energy we need.

 

[barbos]

Battery storage is getting better. they have 450WH/kg lithium ion now.

that's basically twice what they had recently. And there are new materials which allow lithium-ion to last 1500 cycles with only 10 drop in performance. Compare with 300-500 with significant drop at the end of it.

And It's green alright.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Battery storage is getting better. they have 450WH/kg lithium ion now.

that's basically twice what they had recently. And there are new materials which allow lithium-ion to last 1500 cycles with only 10 drop in performance. Compare with 300-500 with significant drop at the end of it.

And It's green alright.

So, get it to 1.1 KWhr/kg. What have we accomplished? We've reduced the size of the needed battery by less than a magnitude. And at that point, aren't we bumping into the physical storage capacity of Li ion? Sure, this is great for all the legitimate uses of rechargeable batteries. But reducing the mass by half isn't particularly useful when trying to create a massive energy bank to supplement nighttime or low wind power in lieu of major energy sources, and this presumes we are creating surplus green energy without fossil fuels.

We need a vacuum tube to transistor like Eureka to make power storage viable. And that doesn't exist. You can't shrink a gas plant into a battery.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Battery storage is getting better. they have 450WH/kg lithium ion now.

that's basically twice what they had recently. And there are new materials which allow lithium-ion to last 1500 cycles with only 10 drop in performance. Compare with 300-500 with significant drop at the end of it.

And It's green alright.

For grid-scale use the size of the battery is irrelevant. It's pretty much irrelevant even for residential-scale use. What really counts is the cost per kWh-cycle.

 

[barbos]

Battery storage is getting better. they have 450WH/kg lithium ion now.

that's basically twice what they had recently. And there are new materials which allow lithium-ion to last 1500 cycles with only 10 drop in performance. Compare with 300-500 with significant drop at the end of it.

And It's green alright.

So, get it to 1.1 KWhr/kg. What have we accomplished? We've reduced the size of the needed battery by less than a magnitude. And at that point, aren't we bumping into the physical storage capacity of Li ion? Sure, this is great for all the legitimate uses of rechargeable batteries. But reducing the mass by half isn't particularly useful when trying to create a massive energy bank to supplement nighttime or low wind power in lieu of major energy sources, and this presumes we are creating surplus green energy without fossil fuels.

We need a vacuum tube to transistor like Eureka to make power storage viable. And that doesn't exist. You can't shrink a gas plant into a battery.

Smaller weight means less material and less cost. And increased durability directly translates into lower cost. Imagine a battery with 50,000 cycles. That practically immortal battery. All you need to do is to add capacity and eventually you will get there. And there are 20,000 cycles batteries now. They are not yer economical yet but there are no laws of physics which prevent batteries to last 50-100 years.

 

[barbos]

Battery storage is getting better. they have 450WH/kg lithium ion now.

that's basically twice what they had recently. And there are new materials which allow lithium-ion to last 1500 cycles with only 10 drop in performance. Compare with 300-500 with significant drop at the end of it.

And It's green alright.

For grid-scale use the size of the battery is irrelevant. It's pretty much irrelevant even for residential-scale use. What really counts is the cost per kWh-cycle.

cost per kWh-cycle of a immortal battery is zero.
And even if it is mortal, it would still be close to zero because you pay cost of the materials (lithium, nickel, etc) only once, after that it gets recycled.
And cost of recycling old battery into a new one can be essentially zero, becasue it's essentially manufacturing cost.

 

[Swammerdami]

I have no idea when or whether cost-effective batteries will be available. Perhaps other technologies, e.g. the newish idea of Buoyancy Energy Storage with 85%+ round-trip efficiency, will provide grid storage and obviate the need for giant batteries.

(I'm not going to predict the future. Back in the 1970's I nodded my head when reading that Moore's Law was over, that stray gamma rays would interfere with sub-micron circuits. But now every kid carries around a supercomputer thousands of times more powerful than the awe-inspiring supercomputers of the 1970's!)

But one thing makes a big gong sound on the Irony Meter. In another thread we learn that tens of billions of humans do not overload the Earth's ecosystem. The future promises unlimited power (fusion? dilithium crystals?); smart humans will develop technology to produce artificial meat, to produce fertilizers economically, to pump water from Lake Michigan to the California desert, etc. In just two decades the weight of plastics in the oceans will exceed the total weight of fish? No problem! Man is very very smart and will find a technological solution! Honeybees might go extinct? Don't worry! Man will build nanobots to do the pollination!

Yet the same people telling us in the other thread how smart man is and how rapidly technology advances, consider energy storage to be an insurmountable problem in this thread!

 

[bigfield]

I have no idea when or whether cost-effective batteries will be available. Perhaps other technologies, e.g. the newish idea of Buoyancy Energy Storage with 85%+ round-trip efficiency, will provide grid storage and obviate the need for giant batteries.

(I'm not going to predict the future. Back in the 1970's I nodded my head when reading that Moore's Law was over, that stray gamma rays would interfere with sub-micron circuits. But now every kid carries around a supercomputer thousands of times more powerful than the awe-inspiring supercomputers of the 1970's!)

But one thing makes a big gong sound on the Irony Meter. In another thread we learn that tens of billions of humans do not overload the Earth's ecosystem. The future promises unlimited power (fusion? dilithium crystals?); smart humans will develop technology to produce artificial meat, to produce fertilizers economically, to pump water from Lake Michigan to the California desert, etc. In just two decades the weight of plastics in the oceans will exceed the total weight of fish? No problem! Man is very very smart and will find a technological solution! Honeybees might go extinct? Don't worry! Man will build nanobots to do the pollination!

Yet the same people telling us in the other thread how smart man is and how rapidly technology advances, consider energy storage to be an insurmountable problem in this thread!

I checked the other thread to see what this is apparently referring to:

The high population is unsustainable. Levels of water tables are plummeting in India and elsewhere. Feeding the many billions relies on huge consumption of phosphate fertilizer; but easily recoverable phosphate is fast being exhausted. An increasing portion of the Earth's fertile surface is now used to grow food for humans (or the beef they like to eat); this impacts biodiversity — in fact scientists are already calling out time The Sixth Great Extinction.

The ocean is being degraded horribly; there are giant piles of plastic in the middle of oceans; coral reefs are being destroyed. Parts of the ocean once dominated by fish are now dominated by jellyfish.

IMO, climate change is just one of several problems that can be directly attributed to human over-population.

People have different aspirations. There are posters on this board that honestly think 30 billion humans is perfectly okay. Maybe it is okay if all you want are humans, air conditioners and sidewalks and roads and nothing else. I can't imagine being content in such a vast wasteland. It would be like everyone living in a nursing home.

30 billion humans is about three times the plausible maximum number that will ever simultaneously inhabit the planet, so it's completely irrelevant to reality whether or not that population is OK.

Overpopulation is a stupid idea. It was a reasonable fear in the mid to late twentieth century, but it's long since been resolved.

There are no resource issues we cannot solve that would prevent us sustaining the ~10 billion humans that represent our likely peak population. Of course, we might not be smart enough to actually implement those solutions - look at the reluctance we have to completely replace the burning of fossil fuels with nuclear fission - but the problems are political and ideological, they're not resource, technology, or population driven.

Population is just people. "Overpopulation" is a fundamentally anti-human concept, and belongs in the same ideological dustbin as other anti-humanitarian ideas such as apartheid, slavery, and fascism.

Where Bilby says that the world's population will cap out around ten billion, but you represent it as "tens of billions of humans do not overload the Earth's ecosystem."

I count myself as someone who believes humans will find technological solutions to environmental problems, and that overpopulation is a red herring.

In the case of carbon emissions, we have had the technology to solve, or at least massively reduce, that problem since before James Hansen predicted the dangerous rate of global warming caused by carbon emissions. We just aren't using it.

 

[bigfield]

Yet the same people telling us in the other thread how smart man is and how rapidly technology advances, consider energy storage to be an insurmountable problem in this thread!

Is anyone actually claiming that?

It's certain that humans will develop a variety of storage technologies. and probably relatively soon, as in the next few decades. And when it is available, I'll be in favour of using it.

Until then, nuclear is preferable to renewables + storage for one overriding reason: it exists.

 

[ZiprHead]

to pump water from Lake Michigan to the California desert

So they can fuck up our Great Lakes like they've fucked up the Colorado river? NO!

 

[lpetrich]

Link with full title: Buoyancy Energy Storage Technology: An energy storage solution for islands, coastal regions, offshore wind power and hydrogen compression - ScienceDirect

Pulling down buoys to store energy, then letting them return upward to release energy. Like for dry land, hanging weights that are alternately pulled up and allowed to descend. Or pulling loaded railcars uphill and letting them return downhill.

• Gravity energy storage with suspended weights for abandoned mine shafts - ScienceDirect
• Gravity Energy Storage Will Show Its Potential in 2021 - IEEE Spectrum
• Energy Vault - gravity storage
• Home - Gravitricity renewable energy storage - gravity storage
• The train goes up, the train goes down: a simple new way to store energy - Vox
• ARES North America - The Power of Gravity

 

[bilby]

As a rule of thumb, for any engineering problem, there are a million crackpot ideas that don't and can't work. If a genuine and workable solution exists, these get little attention. People just go with the optimum solution for their application - typically no more than a few such solutions are required to cover the vast majority of situations.

So a good indication of an unsolved problem is the large amount of attention given to a bewildering array of different proposals to solve it.

Every newspaper article about a new energy storage concept represents further evidence that this is an intractible problem whose solution will be a long time coming - if it can be solved at all.

The truly insane thing is that this 'search for storage' is an attempt to solve a wider problem using a non-viable and unnecessary approach that is popular only due to the wide adherence to the appeal to nature fallacy.

The brief is to find a way to make enough electricity constantly available to run our technologically developed society, without causing severe damage to our environment in the process.

Only one currently available technology can meet that brief.

That people are currently engaged in trashing the environment in pursuit of another option is insane. That they put vast effort into blocking the implementation of the solution we have, and even successfully lobby to have instances of that solution closed down, is madness beyond words.

There is nothing so useless as striving to do efficiently that which need not be done at all. The solution to the grid scale energy storage problem is to only use, at grid scale, generating technologies that are reliable and controllable - then storage is suddenly a minimal and easily managed issue requiring no new solutions.

Engineering is based on physics, not magic. Not everything we can imagine is possible or practical. Really really wanting something to work, and wishing as hard as possible for it, isn't effective or sensible.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I have no idea when or whether cost-effective batteries will be available. Perhaps other technologies, e.g. the newish idea of Buoyancy Energy Storage with 85%+ round-trip efficiency, will provide grid storage and obviate the need for giant batteries.

Buoyancy storage is just another version of the same old gravity storage. It suffers from extremely low energy density.