8 ms·
There's still the problem of what to do between 4pm and 8 am on a day without wind, which means we won't be able to shut down too many power plants until cheap
by the_economist 6y ago
There's still the problem of what to do between 4pm and 8 am on a day without wind, which means we won't be able to shut down too many power plants until cheap energy storage exists.
- simongr3dal 6y agoGlobal energy grid?
- gruez 6y agoYou really want to be dependent on other countries for your vital infrastructure? Imagine if we go to war with china/russia, and they shut down energy exports to the US causing rolling blackouts everywhere.
- simongr3dal 6y agoThen get your electricity nationaly, or from france, or from germany, or from saudi arabia, or from australia, or from argentina. The point of a global energy grid would be that there's always sun and wind somewhere on the planet and you would smooth out time-of-day differences in usage. The point is NOT to outsource your country's entire electricity production.
- gruez 6y ago> Then get your electricity nationaly, or from france, or from germany, or from saudi arabia, or from australia, or from argentina. Ah yes, because the other countries will magically have the spare capacity (both in terms of generation and transmission)? We already see this play out in Europe: nobody there wants to do anything about russia because they control the natural gas supply. >The point is NOT to outsource your country's entire electricity production. Maybe, but the effects are the same. If you can't produce enough electricity to make it through the night, that puts you in very vulurable position. Even if it doesn't completely shut down the country, it might cause enough unrest to topple the current administration (eg. if they're only leading in the polls by a few percentage points and there's an election in a few months).
- ben_w 6y ago> Ah yes, because the other countries will magically have the spare capacity (both in terms of generation and transmission)? I believe simongr3dal’s argument is the invisible hand of the free market, not magic. Optimistically, solar resources are more evenly distributed than oil and gas, so no country can act like Russia; pessimistically, Russia isn’t the first country to exert influence by threatening to cease supply of its resources, and it won’t be the last; the optimistic response to which is that there are many ways to solve seasonal issues, for example the UK (personal familiarity, no other reason for this example) could plan 18-hours local storage and enough local production for winter rather than summer.
- red75prime 6y agoMagnetic field of power cables is easily detectable and you can't realistically defend thousands miles of them.
- _ph_ 6y agoThe obvious solution would be not to go to war with china/russia unless they shut down energy exports. And of course they wouldn't, as they depend on selling and also importing electricity at times. We even have practical experiences with that. Germany for many decades got their natural gas from the sovjet union and russia. Despite of the cold war, and it indeed was just short of a war state, gas supplies never were cut. Because cutting gas supply to Germany would have been a simple way to apply pressure, but not a cheap one. It would either have triggered a war or at minimum that after recovering from the cut, Germany would have been permanentely lost as a trading partner. So there was never a supply cut in many decades.
- pan69 6y agoSo that North Americas energy can come from China during the night? The sun is always shining somewhere but this does doesn't sound feasible simply due to geo-political and infrastructure reasons. Have any serious plans been put forward for this idea?
- bregma 6y agoRunning a power cable across the Pacific is going to be rife with expensive engineering problems, but sure, you could send electrons from Three Gorges to Google at some cost. I wouldn't call it cheaper, though.
- BurningFrog 6y agoIn the spirit of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." I wonder if shipping big piles of fully charged batteries around has any chance of being a practical power distribution method?
- jpollock 6y agoThe value of the electricity can be measured by comparing it to the value of a petroleum product. transportable energy can be made using from CO2 in the air using Fischer-Tropsch. It's energy intensive, and uneconomic - which is why people are stringing HVDC links across bodies of water - Denmark/Sweden, Australia/Tasmania, NZ North/South Islands instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
- chartpath 6y agoSneakernet 4.0
- sremani 6y agoBatteries are heavy - unless you are sending these station wagons downhill, its probably not such a great idea.
- gruez 6y agoI highly doubt this. According to wikipedia[1], three high voltage towers can transmit 7079 MW of power. To beat that with lipo batteries you'd need to move 26,713 metric tons worth of batteries per hour[2], and that's not even including time to charge. I don't think any sort of freight transportation method can do that cheaper than some transmission towers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7079+MWh+%2F+265Wh%2Fkg https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7079+MWh+%2F+265Wh%2Fk...
- BurningFrog 6y agoTrue, that part is lagging behind, but it is also improving fast.
- outworlder 6y agoSolar beamed power from orbital facilities?
- marshray 6y agoBeaming power from space has huge losses, and I really don't think we need to a system of remote-controlled death rays orbiting the planet right now.
- matthias509 6y agoMaybe use excess electricity to produce hydrogen using electrolysis and then burn it in a turbine later?
- nomel 6y agoHere's a comparison: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/energy-storage-2019 https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/energy-storage-2019 Electrolysis isn't very efficient without nasty electrolytes. For massive scale, pumped water/air is still probably the most feasible in a reasonable timeframe and cost.
- pjc50 6y agoIt's more or less impossible for there to be no wind over a large area at the same time - low wind areas are surrounded by circulating air in a cyclonic structure.
- thu2111 6y agoI think you must have missed this event from just a few weeks ago: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/blackout-alert-from-national-grid-as-britain-sails-close-to-wind-3xd5f2stj https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/blackout-alert-from-natio... Last week, National Grid issued two electricity margin notices, the most serious security-of-supply alerts since 2016, both citing low wind farm output among the causes and urgently appealing for more power plants. To keep the lights on, Britain burnt coal in polluting old power stations that are due to close within a few years. “Unusually low wind output coinciding with a number of generator outages means the cushion of spare capacity we operate the system with has been reduced,” it said last month, warning of “tight margins” on Britain’s power grid in the days to come.
- ben_w 6y agoI guess you and pjc50 have a different idea of “a large area”. The UK is about half the size of California.
- thu2111 6y agoBalancing power over ever larger areas does run into problems with long distance inter-connectors and spare capacity in general though, so it's not like this is an easily solved problem. The UK is well connected to mainland Europe with many large interconnectors and has an enormous abundance of off shore wind power because it's an island, yet it still nearly had brown/blackouts due to low wind coinciding with normal maintenance. That suggests the UK is hitting the limits of what can be done with wind power despite having a lot of it. Even if interconnectors were upgraded, that doesn't help if other countries are already using all their wind power locally.
- epistasis 6y agoEnergy storage is already cheap enough to provide this for a few hours in the evening, as long as it's guaranteed that the battery get to discharge (and get paid) daily. In the ERCOT market, one of the markets that's most open to new, independent entrants reusing to make money, the interconnection queue has more GW of storage than natural gas. The much trickier problem is storage that's only needed once a week, once a month, or once a year. That's where we don't have batteries, yet.
- Budabellly 6y agoGravity batteries! Basically a hunk of concrete that uses spare grid power to be hoisted, and then converts the gravitational energy when its dropped. Seems like there are only a few companies giving it a real go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
- ben_w 6y agoLow energy density though — a fully charged 1kg LiIon battery has enough energy to raise its own weight by a height of about 50 km. Wikipedia says energy density of 0.36-0.875 MJ/kg; assuming 0.5 MJ/kg and putting it into PE = mgh -> 0.5 MJ/kg * 1kg = 1kg * g * h -> h = (0.5 MJ/kg)/g = ~51 km http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%280.5%20MJ%2Fkg%29%2Fg&assumption=%22UnitClash%22%20-%3E%20%7B%22g%22%2C%20%7B%22StandardAccelerationOfGravity%22%7D%7D&assumptionsversion=2 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%280.5%20MJ%2Fkg%29%2Fg...
- epistasis 6y agoI think that ultimately this limits how cheap gravity batteries can get, there’s just too much material and those materials are already well-understood components with little chance for falling costs. We would likely need entirely new and innovative materials or designs A gravity battery that used completely new materials or design to come up with something cheap. Where as lithium ion batteries generally get cheaper the more energy dense we make them (in the same chemistries, at least) because fewer resources go into making that same kWh of storage.