7 ms·

A Solar Power Plant designed to deliver 100% of the electricity after sunset

79 points by Osiris30 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Pfhreak 7y ago
I'm not a huge fan of the format of the article, but I am a huge fan of a solar plant that has sufficient storage (and mindset) to provide power when the sun isn't shining. The more like this, the better, imo.
- Ballas 7y ago
  That also irked me. I like memes probably more than the next guy, but the way it's been used here seems distasteful.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  It might be more robust, cheaper and lighter on resources to just build a global electricity network, so there's always daylight powering the grid somewhere. Although for small, remote islands, batteries are probably a reasonable alternative.
  - toast0 7y ago
    The Pacific Ocean is pretty vast. When it's noon in Hawaii, there's not a lot of land area condusive to solar generation. A global grid would be an immense coordination problem with tremendous costs. Some form of storage local to each grid is likely to be more cost effective. There are so many storage options, something should be appropriate as the need becomes real: pumped hydro / other mechanical, battery, synthgas (maybe), heat, pressure.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Yeah, if we ever come to putting little artificial solar gen islands in the Pacific, nice clean synthetic gasoline being shipped from them would be awesome. (Generated from atmospheric carbon dioxide and water.)
    - lgats 7y ago
      We have gone at most 580km/360mi with an undersea cable 95.8% efficient, €600m, 700 MW capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed Repeat that cable 9.6 times over 3,459 miles from London to New York would be 66% efficient and cost €5.8b. If energy is $0.05/kwh in London and you can sell it around the retail rate of $0.12/kwh in New York, your cable will make around $20k/hour ($0.028/kwh,after cable losses). Your cable will pay for itself after 33 years of complete capacity saturation. With free energy at one side and retail prices on the other, the payoff time narrows to less than 8 years. This calculation leaves out so much but it was a fun thought experiment.
  - namibj 7y ago
    Even if it only reduces storage demands it seems potentially worthy. May I add a proposal to convert the mediteranian sea into a pumped hydro storage with long-term capabilities? It would need the same dam as the Atlantropa, but possibly less extreme. There are some basins around northern Africa that might be amenable to slight terraforming, or just a re-activation of Operation Plowshare to blow a cavern which has it's rubble content lifted out and then used for subsurface pumped hydro. Alternatively plan to collapse the cavern roof into itself after filtering persistent radionuclides and waiting for short half-life isotopes to decay. Collapse via conventional quarry techniques (a circle of drilled wells filled with ANFO?) or iteratively with robots that go out towards the center and drill to blast this off somewhat continuously. Then use a nearby water reservoir to pump in-between. Salt content shouldn't matter much except corrosion protection techniques.
toomuchtodo 7y ago
Note that the cost per MWh is less than most fossil generation, and far less than the cheapest nuclear (per Lazard’s most recent LCOE analysis). It’s clear that solar and battery storage can now provide affordable base load power, and can be deployed rapidly (this project is set to turn up in 2022). https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- 666lumberjack 7y ago
  LCOE is a poor measure of whether something can deliver baseload power cost effectively because it assumes all MWh are created equal. What would make it clear whether solar + battery at this proportion is a viable source of baseload power is output volatility figures for a few years of operation (though one year would probably give a reasonable indication). Tangent: The industry has a metric, availability factor, to describe what proportion of the time a plant can supply energy - but conventionally it only considers maintenance-related downtime and ignores periods where no energy is produced because of lack of 'fuel', giving figures of 99 and 100% availability for wind and solar respectively. That needs to change if we're going to measure whether renewables can provide suitable baseload power. The alternative, capacity factor, doesn't ignore periods of no generation in the same way, but it penalises dispatchable sources for having excess capacity so it's not great either.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Most power plants we use today can't deliver baseload cost effectively if you add in the externalized costs of climate change.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      >Most power plants we use today can't deliver baseload cost effectively if you add in the externalized costs of climate change. Like it or not tacking on the cost of climate change to power generation is so far from current reality that adding that hypothetical constraint is meaningless. The people making these decisions have real tangible costs that matter right now that they will prioritize in their comparison.
mdorazio 7y ago
For those not reading the article, it's battery storage. Specifically "Samsung SDI batteries". This is a great use case to see how well grid-scale battery storage will perform at the point of power generation in comparison to things like pumped water or thermal.
- polskibus 7y ago
  How do those batteries fare in terms of capacity loss over time ? My li-ion rechargeable sanyo eneloops AAA batteries seem useless after a couple of years.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    It depends on the depth of discharge and heat management. Laptops, phones, etc have a poor lifespan because they are frequently discharged from 100% to almost 0%. It is better to discharge them from 100% to 50% and then recharge. Batteries generate heat during charging and smart phones can get hot during heavy use. Without good enough cooling the lifespan of the battery drops.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      It also helps to charge them more slowly, so in case of solar farms, you can increase the lifetime of a battery by using more of them and charging them more slowly. Discharge is slower as well, which also benefits lifetime.
    - StreamBright 7y ago
      Usually the best case scenario is 80 - 20 as far as I know.
      - ohduran 7y ago
        I've heard the opposite! Any piece of information that you can share to back it up? Highly interested.
adrianN 7y ago
Great. Let's build a million of them.
moomin 7y ago
Just to point out a subtle distinction I hadn't caught reading the headline: the station is designed to only deliver its power at night. That's the 100% in the headline. The battery storage apparently lasts 7 hours, so there's still a good five hours of the average night not served by the plant.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Vizarddesky 7y ago
I'm not a huge fan of the format of the article, but I am a huge fan of a solar plant that has sufficient storage (and mindset) to provide power when the sun isn't shining. The more like this, the better, imo.
- fallingfrog 7y ago
  Are you a fan of copy pasting posts?
Symmetry 7y ago
I'd just like to point out that there are solar plants that can generate power after sunset too. Solar thermal plants can store their heated working fluid in an insulated container and use that to power their heat engines later on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#CSP_with_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#CSP_w...
- sjwright 7y ago
  I thought the article was going to be about these until I clicked on it.
- kragen 7y ago
  CSP is no longer cost-competitive with PV for raw energy cost because it relies on the same steam turbines that coal and nuclear stations use. PV is now cheaper than those turbines in much of the world—in some cases, so much so that even with batteries, it can beat CSP.
davidhyde 7y ago
> Engie says that the Samsung SDI batteries which it has chosen for the energy storage solution will be able to deliver electricity for up to seven hours For anyone who whats to know what SDI stands for it is "Samsung Display Interface". https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-bytes/posts/samsung-battery https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...
cagenut 7y ago
Here's the vendor datasheet for the batteries: https://www.samsungsdi.com/upload/ess_brochure/201902_Samsung%20SDI%20ESS_EN.pdf https://www.samsungsdi.com/upload/ess_brochure/201902_Samsun... It doesn't say the specific chemistry but it shows a chart estimating 6000 100% charge/discharge cycles at 1C until it hits 80% capacity. So for this system that'd be 16 years of full cycles till it wore down to being "only" a 240MWh system. In reality they'll probably cycle it less aggressively than that (95/5 or 90/10) to meet the expected 25 year lifetime of the overall system.
hakejpc 7y ago
Layman Science Wizard recently explained to me that pumping water up into a storage tower (using solar-based energy) and then using the gravity-drop to generate electricity again (when the sun is gone) was also very effective. A natural battery of sorts. No batteries to wear out, neither. Feasible?

79 points by Osiris30 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

I'm not a huge fan of the format of the article, but I am a huge fan of a solar plant that has sufficient storage (and mindset) to provide power when the sun isn't shining. The more like this, the better, imo.

Ballas 7y ago
That also irked me. I like memes probably more than the next guy, but the way it's been used here seems distasteful.
lazyjones 7y ago
It might be more robust, cheaper and lighter on resources to just build a global electricity network, so there's always daylight powering the grid somewhere. Although for small, remote islands, batteries are probably a reasonable alternative.
- toast0 7y ago
  The Pacific Ocean is pretty vast. When it's noon in Hawaii, there's not a lot of land area condusive to solar generation. A global grid would be an immense coordination problem with tremendous costs. Some form of storage local to each grid is likely to be more cost effective. There are so many storage options, something should be appropriate as the need becomes real: pumped hydro / other mechanical, battery, synthgas (maybe), heat, pressure.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Yeah, if we ever come to putting little artificial solar gen islands in the Pacific, nice clean synthetic gasoline being shipped from them would be awesome. (Generated from atmospheric carbon dioxide and water.)
  - lgats 7y ago
    We have gone at most 580km/360mi with an undersea cable 95.8% efficient, €600m, 700 MW capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed Repeat that cable 9.6 times over 3,459 miles from London to New York would be 66% efficient and cost €5.8b. If energy is $0.05/kwh in London and you can sell it around the retail rate of $0.12/kwh in New York, your cable will make around $20k/hour ($0.028/kwh,after cable losses). Your cable will pay for itself after 33 years of complete capacity saturation. With free energy at one side and retail prices on the other, the payoff time narrows to less than 8 years. This calculation leaves out so much but it was a fun thought experiment.
- namibj 7y ago
  Even if it only reduces storage demands it seems potentially worthy. May I add a proposal to convert the mediteranian sea into a pumped hydro storage with long-term capabilities? It would need the same dam as the Atlantropa, but possibly less extreme. There are some basins around northern Africa that might be amenable to slight terraforming, or just a re-activation of Operation Plowshare to blow a cavern which has it's rubble content lifted out and then used for subsurface pumped hydro. Alternatively plan to collapse the cavern roof into itself after filtering persistent radionuclides and waiting for short half-life isotopes to decay. Collapse via conventional quarry techniques (a circle of drilled wells filled with ANFO?) or iteratively with robots that go out towards the center and drill to blast this off somewhat continuously. Then use a nearby water reservoir to pump in-between. Salt content shouldn't matter much except corrosion protection techniques.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

Note that the cost per MWh is less than most fossil generation, and far less than the cheapest nuclear (per Lazard’s most recent LCOE analysis). It’s clear that solar and battery storage can now provide affordable base load power, and can be deployed rapidly (this project is set to turn up in 2022). https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

666lumberjack 7y ago
LCOE is a poor measure of whether something can deliver baseload power cost effectively because it assumes all MWh are created equal. What would make it clear whether solar + battery at this proportion is a viable source of baseload power is output volatility figures for a few years of operation (though one year would probably give a reasonable indication). Tangent: The industry has a metric, availability factor, to describe what proportion of the time a plant can supply energy - but conventionally it only considers maintenance-related downtime and ignores periods where no energy is produced because of lack of 'fuel', giving figures of 99 and 100% availability for wind and solar respectively. That needs to change if we're going to measure whether renewables can provide suitable baseload power. The alternative, capacity factor, doesn't ignore periods of no generation in the same way, but it penalises dispatchable sources for having excess capacity so it's not great either.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Most power plants we use today can't deliver baseload cost effectively if you add in the externalized costs of climate change.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >Most power plants we use today can't deliver baseload cost effectively if you add in the externalized costs of climate change. Like it or not tacking on the cost of climate change to power generation is so far from current reality that adding that hypothetical constraint is meaningless. The people making these decisions have real tangible costs that matter right now that they will prioritize in their comparison.

mdorazio 7y ago

For those not reading the article, it's battery storage. Specifically "Samsung SDI batteries". This is a great use case to see how well grid-scale battery storage will perform at the point of power generation in comparison to things like pumped water or thermal.

polskibus 7y ago
How do those batteries fare in terms of capacity loss over time ? My li-ion rechargeable sanyo eneloops AAA batteries seem useless after a couple of years.
- imtringued 7y ago
  It depends on the depth of discharge and heat management. Laptops, phones, etc have a poor lifespan because they are frequently discharged from 100% to almost 0%. It is better to discharge them from 100% to 50% and then recharge. Batteries generate heat during charging and smart phones can get hot during heavy use. Without good enough cooling the lifespan of the battery drops.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    It also helps to charge them more slowly, so in case of solar farms, you can increase the lifetime of a battery by using more of them and charging them more slowly. Discharge is slower as well, which also benefits lifetime.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    Usually the best case scenario is 80 - 20 as far as I know.
    - ohduran 7y ago
      I've heard the opposite! Any piece of information that you can share to back it up? Highly interested.

adrianN 7y ago

Great. Let's build a million of them.

moomin 7y ago

Just to point out a subtle distinction I hadn't caught reading the headline: the station is designed to only deliver its power at night. That's the 100% in the headline. The battery storage apparently lasts 7 hours, so there's still a good five hours of the average night not served by the plant.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Vizarddesky 7y ago

fallingfrog 7y ago
Are you a fan of copy pasting posts?

Symmetry 7y ago

I'd just like to point out that there are solar plants that can generate power after sunset too. Solar thermal plants can store their heated working fluid in an insulated container and use that to power their heat engines later on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#CSP_with_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#CSP_w...

sjwright 7y ago
I thought the article was going to be about these until I clicked on it.
kragen 7y ago
CSP is no longer cost-competitive with PV for raw energy cost because it relies on the same steam turbines that coal and nuclear stations use. PV is now cheaper than those turbines in much of the world—in some cases, so much so that even with batteries, it can beat CSP.

davidhyde 7y ago

> Engie says that the Samsung SDI batteries which it has chosen for the energy storage solution will be able to deliver electricity for up to seven hours For anyone who whats to know what SDI stands for it is "Samsung Display Interface". https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-bytes/posts/samsung-battery https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...

cagenut 7y ago

Here's the vendor datasheet for the batteries: https://www.samsungsdi.com/upload/ess_brochure/201902_Samsung%20SDI%20ESS_EN.pdf https://www.samsungsdi.com/upload/ess_brochure/201902_Samsun... It doesn't say the specific chemistry but it shows a chart estimating 6000 100% charge/discharge cycles at 1C until it hits 80% capacity. So for this system that'd be 16 years of full cycles till it wore down to being "only" a 240MWh system. In reality they'll probably cycle it less aggressively than that (95/5 or 90/10) to meet the expected 25 year lifetime of the overall system.

hakejpc 7y ago

Layman Science Wizard recently explained to me that pumping water up into a storage tower (using solar-based energy) and then using the gravity-drop to generate electricity again (when the sun is gone) was also very effective. A natural battery of sorts. No batteries to wear out, neither. Feasible?