6 ms·

All this energy ! Can't be stored (don't tell me about lithium, please do the math…), and it's not there at night.

by edhelas 5y ago

sunstone 5y ago
Heat the swimming pool during the day and then use the heat pump at night.
- ed25519FUUU 5y ago
  How does that store energy for the grid?
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Reduces grid demand by localizing the energy, storing it on site thermally. Air conditioners that make ice at night and cool during the day do the same.
    - wrycoder 5y ago
      Freeman Dyson devised an a/c system at Princeton that involved using snow making machines to generate a large pile of ice in an insulated shed during the winter (with the doors open) and circulated coolant through the ice pile and the buildings in the summer (with the shed doors closed).
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Freeman Dyson wrote about it, but it was Ted Taylor who did it, I think.
      - aitchnyu 5y ago
        There is a passive ice pile technique, but for producing water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Stupa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Stupa
toomuchtodo 5y ago
If the solar is almost free, you can shift investment to storage, transmission, demand response, and other (more expensive) low carbon generation. One would expect a similar cost decline curve for batteries [1] once every automaker is required to buy batteries when they can only sell EVs. [1] https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323 https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323
- edhelas 5y ago
  Please do the math, check how much you'll need to cover the consumption of a small city for a night. Just an idea, you have ~500kg of lithium-battery in an average EV for a few hundred km of autonomy. 95% of stored electricity today is water pumped behind dam. You want to store electricity, build dam. There is only a few decades of lithium left to be extracted by the way.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    https://carbontracker.org/solar-and-wind-can-meet-world-energy-demand-100-times-over-renewables/ https://carbontracker.org/solar-and-wind-can-meet-world-ener... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928343 Storage is a component, but renewables will get so cheap we'll overbuild and throw away (curtail) the excess versus optimizing for storage. The world has sufficient lithium reserves for storage and EV demands.
    - edhelas 5y ago
      Sure :) 500B€ (yes, half a trillion !) invested in wind turbines in Germany over 20 years. Check the result https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE, Germany is ~300g of CO²/kwh, France is 50g. Why ? Because when there is no wind, no sun, you need power. And then you're burning gaz or coal. So you "erase" all those 0CO² days. Also solar panel efficiency fades over time, you loose 50% of efficiency after a few decades. Wind-turbines have 25y life expectancy.
      - 5y ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
It still means power for air conditioning is ~free during the day when it's most needed, and you could pre-cool or pre-heat a bulk block with high heat capacity, then slowly use the heat/cold during the day. You can charge the electric cars when there's an excess, so in particular all the extra load from electric car charging that some people were so worried about is no longer a concern. If it gets cheap enough, you can overbuild capacity so that you have just enough power if it's a bit overcast, and way too much when there's sun (since solar cells can be safely "turned off" as far as I know, unlike conventional plants). If we now get some process for capturing carbon from the air where electricity is the main cost (i.e. overbuilding capacity and using it only 20% of the time is affordable), we now have a place to put all the excess electricity during peak.
- edhelas 5y ago
  I think that you don't see how much land you actually need. Maybe in America there is plenty of space, but in Europe it's way more difficult. To replace one nuclear reactor, you need ~ half of Paris in solar panel. And still need energy "at night". Yes heating water, or cooling places are nice. But your trains ain't gonna work "only when there is sun". If you need backup at one moment, you need 0C0² backup and basically: Or you build dam, or you build nuclear plants. If you build nuclear plants, it's basically dumb to have plenty of renewable next to it…
  - stale2002 5y ago
    Fortunately space and land are cheap in the vast scheme of things. There are very large amounts of "free" space, on rooftops, for example.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      The last time I flew to Europe, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of residential rooftop solar there was.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    > you need ~ half of Paris in solar panel So put solar panels on roofs in Paris then. Europe has plenty of space if you actually look for it.
pridkett 5y ago
It’s not as far off as you might think - even for individual homeowners. I’ve got a far from ideal house with a 8.4KWh solar array on my roof and 3x Tesla Powerwalls in my basement. Yesterday I produced 43KWh of electricity and exported 27KWh to the grid. The only reason I’ve needed grid connectivity in the last nine days has been to export power. In essence, I’m largely off grid from March through October. Now, this wasn’t cheap (thankfully incentives made it more affordable and Eversource provides the most expensive electricity in the United States), after incentives it was about $22000. That’s a lot, but it’s not hard to imagine this becoming scalable in the near future for climates with better solar potential than Connecticut.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  $22,000 would pay my electric bills for about 12 years, not even factoring in opportunity cost. What are the ongoing maintenance costs/total cost of ownership over 12 years of such a system? As far as Powerwalls go, I'd definitely want something like that in an outbuilding and not in my house. Last thing I want to do is wake up at 3:00am with a raging battery fire in my basement.
  - vostok 5y ago
    If we're talking about nerds buying this stuff, $22k is comparable to what people spend on nice homelab setups. I would pay $22k just because it's cool and not because it saves money.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Yeah, but we're talking about 0.1% of the population. For mass adoption, prices have to be much, much lower.
  - pridkett 5y ago
    There's some places where you can't put the Powerwalls indoors. In CT where I live it's just fine. I did add in a fire suppression system in my basement when I had them installed. This was not a requirement and was included in my overall cost figure provided. It's a big red thingy in between the rafters that goes "boom" when there's a fire. That's a technical term.
epistasis 5y ago
How do you know how much lithium there is? Every year we discover more accessible lithium than the year before. Do the history!
- philipkglass 5y ago
  This is correct. Here is the USGS mineral commodity summary for lithium in 2010: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/lithium/mcs-2010-lithi.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium... Here is the same report for 2021: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pd... World lithium reserves went up from 9.9 million tons in 2010 to 21 million tons in 2021 even as extraction accelerated. Companies have been putting more effort into discovery which has increased known reserves much faster than increasing extraction is drawing them down.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    And most of our lithium doesn't come from proper "reserves" but from what is categorized as "resources," which is several times the quantity of "reserves." I don't know how much lithium is out there but we've barely even begun looking and there's never been demand for much in the past.
    - oblio 5y ago
      > At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth's crust,[45] lithium is the 25th most abundant element. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium I'm too lazy to do the math, but that's probably enough lithium to plate the entire planet with it if we want to :-)
ineedasername 5y ago
I think aluminum batteries are coming along nicely in that area of battery tech and they have a very large capacity. The problem with aluminum has always been high energy costs to produce. So you can store the energy in the aluminum itself by using it to produce Aluminum for use in batteries. Aluminum battery stations could replace gas stations.
adrianN 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_gas

All this energy ! Can't be stored (don't tell me about lithium, please do the math…), and it's not there at night.

sunstone 5y ago

Heat the swimming pool during the day and then use the heat pump at night.

ed25519FUUU 5y ago
How does that store energy for the grid?
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Reduces grid demand by localizing the energy, storing it on site thermally. Air conditioners that make ice at night and cool during the day do the same.
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    Freeman Dyson devised an a/c system at Princeton that involved using snow making machines to generate a large pile of ice in an insulated shed during the winter (with the doors open) and circulated coolant through the ice pile and the buildings in the summer (with the shed doors closed).
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Freeman Dyson wrote about it, but it was Ted Taylor who did it, I think.
    - aitchnyu 5y ago
      There is a passive ice pile technique, but for producing water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Stupa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Stupa

toomuchtodo 5y ago

If the solar is almost free, you can shift investment to storage, transmission, demand response, and other (more expensive) low carbon generation. One would expect a similar cost decline curve for batteries [1] once every automaker is required to buy batteries when they can only sell EVs. [1] https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323 https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323

edhelas 5y ago
Please do the math, check how much you'll need to cover the consumption of a small city for a night. Just an idea, you have ~500kg of lithium-battery in an average EV for a few hundred km of autonomy. 95% of stored electricity today is water pumped behind dam. You want to store electricity, build dam. There is only a few decades of lithium left to be extracted by the way.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  https://carbontracker.org/solar-and-wind-can-meet-world-energy-demand-100-times-over-renewables/ https://carbontracker.org/solar-and-wind-can-meet-world-ener... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928343 Storage is a component, but renewables will get so cheap we'll overbuild and throw away (curtail) the excess versus optimizing for storage. The world has sufficient lithium reserves for storage and EV demands.
  - edhelas 5y ago
    Sure :) 500B€ (yes, half a trillion !) invested in wind turbines in Germany over 20 years. Check the result https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE, Germany is ~300g of CO²/kwh, France is 50g. Why ? Because when there is no wind, no sun, you need power. And then you're burning gaz or coal. So you "erase" all those 0CO² days. Also solar panel efficiency fades over time, you loose 50% of efficiency after a few decades. Wind-turbines have 25y life expectancy.
    - 5y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

It still means power for air conditioning is ~free during the day when it's most needed, and you could pre-cool or pre-heat a bulk block with high heat capacity, then slowly use the heat/cold during the day. You can charge the electric cars when there's an excess, so in particular all the extra load from electric car charging that some people were so worried about is no longer a concern. If it gets cheap enough, you can overbuild capacity so that you have just enough power if it's a bit overcast, and way too much when there's sun (since solar cells can be safely "turned off" as far as I know, unlike conventional plants). If we now get some process for capturing carbon from the air where electricity is the main cost (i.e. overbuilding capacity and using it only 20% of the time is affordable), we now have a place to put all the excess electricity during peak.

edhelas 5y ago
I think that you don't see how much land you actually need. Maybe in America there is plenty of space, but in Europe it's way more difficult. To replace one nuclear reactor, you need ~ half of Paris in solar panel. And still need energy "at night". Yes heating water, or cooling places are nice. But your trains ain't gonna work "only when there is sun". If you need backup at one moment, you need 0C0² backup and basically: Or you build dam, or you build nuclear plants. If you build nuclear plants, it's basically dumb to have plenty of renewable next to it…
- stale2002 5y ago
  Fortunately space and land are cheap in the vast scheme of things. There are very large amounts of "free" space, on rooftops, for example.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    The last time I flew to Europe, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of residential rooftop solar there was.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  > you need ~ half of Paris in solar panel So put solar panels on roofs in Paris then. Europe has plenty of space if you actually look for it.

pridkett 5y ago

It’s not as far off as you might think - even for individual homeowners. I’ve got a far from ideal house with a 8.4KWh solar array on my roof and 3x Tesla Powerwalls in my basement. Yesterday I produced 43KWh of electricity and exported 27KWh to the grid. The only reason I’ve needed grid connectivity in the last nine days has been to export power. In essence, I’m largely off grid from March through October. Now, this wasn’t cheap (thankfully incentives made it more affordable and Eversource provides the most expensive electricity in the United States), after incentives it was about $22000. That’s a lot, but it’s not hard to imagine this becoming scalable in the near future for climates with better solar potential than Connecticut.

throwawayboise 5y ago
$22,000 would pay my electric bills for about 12 years, not even factoring in opportunity cost. What are the ongoing maintenance costs/total cost of ownership over 12 years of such a system? As far as Powerwalls go, I'd definitely want something like that in an outbuilding and not in my house. Last thing I want to do is wake up at 3:00am with a raging battery fire in my basement.
- vostok 5y ago
  If we're talking about nerds buying this stuff, $22k is comparable to what people spend on nice homelab setups. I would pay $22k just because it's cool and not because it saves money.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Yeah, but we're talking about 0.1% of the population. For mass adoption, prices have to be much, much lower.
- pridkett 5y ago
  There's some places where you can't put the Powerwalls indoors. In CT where I live it's just fine. I did add in a fire suppression system in my basement when I had them installed. This was not a requirement and was included in my overall cost figure provided. It's a big red thingy in between the rafters that goes "boom" when there's a fire. That's a technical term.

epistasis 5y ago

How do you know how much lithium there is? Every year we discover more accessible lithium than the year before. Do the history!

philipkglass 5y ago
This is correct. Here is the USGS mineral commodity summary for lithium in 2010: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/lithium/mcs-2010-lithi.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium... Here is the same report for 2021: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pd... World lithium reserves went up from 9.9 million tons in 2010 to 21 million tons in 2021 even as extraction accelerated. Companies have been putting more effort into discovery which has increased known reserves much faster than increasing extraction is drawing them down.
- epistasis 5y ago
  And most of our lithium doesn't come from proper "reserves" but from what is categorized as "resources," which is several times the quantity of "reserves." I don't know how much lithium is out there but we've barely even begun looking and there's never been demand for much in the past.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth's crust,[45] lithium is the 25th most abundant element. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium I'm too lazy to do the math, but that's probably enough lithium to plate the entire planet with it if we want to :-)

ineedasername 5y ago

I think aluminum batteries are coming along nicely in that area of battery tech and they have a very large capacity. The problem with aluminum has always been high energy costs to produce. So you can store the energy in the aluminum itself by using it to produce Aluminum for use in batteries. Aluminum battery stations could replace gas stations.

adrianN 5y ago

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