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World’s Largest Solar-Powered Battery Is Now 75% Complete

Haemm0r 5y ago
After reading the headlines I question myself: What is the eqivalent in bathtubs filled with iPhones? But still an interesting project..
wiredfool 5y ago
Woah. An article with MW and MWh in the subheading. They're running a 2:1 capacity vs power ratio, so this is likely a demand smoothing installation rather than a demand shifting one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- labawi 5y ago
  > demand smoothing installation Depending on definition of smoothing vs. shifting - yes, most of them are. Demand shifting with current batteries is not really workable at scale - neither economically nor practically.
lovemenot 5y ago
I may have missed it in the article. What chemistry does it use?
Kydlaw 5y ago
The largest solar battery capacity in the world is filled by less than one hour of production from the smallest of the 52 French nuclear power plants. Guys, that's going to be a lot of batteries. And by a lot I mean a SHIT-TON of batteries.
- jusssi 5y ago
  Nuclear is not what they're looking to replace with batteries, so comparing to that doesn't make sense. How many hours of smallest French coal power plant?
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    By far the best metric would be "how many minutes or seconds of French (or possibly regional) electricity consumption can this battery cover". This gives you a rough idea of the total bridging capacity for the case of "no sun, no wind" situations. That said, I must admit I am a bit afraid of the huge batteries, at least if they are going to be located close to human dwellings. The videos of fires of vehicle batteries that I have seen so far were pretty bad, and here we are talking about orders of magnitude bigger energy store.
    - datameta 5y ago
      I think a highly useful metric would be how many homes this battery installation could power alone for a one day period.
      - jonfw 5y ago
        Homes are just one thing that consumes energy, and they're no more important than street lights, factories, night clubs, gas stations, electric charging stations, and hotels. there are no bonus points for renewable suburbs
        datameta 5y ago
        In an excessive heat wave, blizzard/ice storm, other severe inclement weather events being able to power homes directly is frankly all of the points. Out of all the users of energy that you listed perhaps the industrial sector is worth mentioning, otherwise street lights are essentially in the same magnitude of lights-per-capita so that can be a constant tacked onto the # of homes metric. Not to mention the fact that quite a substantial portion of them now use LEDs. The others are a magnitude less significant in comparison to homes, whether those homes are rural through urban.
  - datameta 5y ago
    Precisely. New renewable energy installations should replace the worst offenders not the other clean energy generation infrastructure. There was an article on HN a few days ago about how the 5% most polluting power plants pollute as much as 75% of the total.
- ckdarby 5y ago
  Thankfully there are places with a "SHIT-TON" of space throughout the USA and Canada.
  - Kydlaw 5y ago
    This add to the land competition for farming, solar panels and wind turbines. Also, remember the World is not USA + Canada, and there are plenty of ppl living in the World. The battery solution might likely not be the magic wand to will solve the energy problem as some might think.
    - ckdarby 5y ago
      I haven't forgotten the world is not just USA + Canada. The rest of the world will set up their own primary energy storage providers as well. Imagine each continent had a primary battery hub. Secondary storage can be in the countries that have the space or can afford the additional infrastructure. Also, remember this is how a lot of the world works now with existing energy infrastructure. Don't try to make the simple complex. Solar "tunnels" where existing roads are. Vertical building for batteries in space restricted areas.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  I don't understand why people see this as a problem. Energy generation being a local thing feels like a good thing -- sure you'll need a lot of batteries, but every city/state/municipality already has power plants, sewage plants, water treatment plants, etc. If we get to the point where energy is just this easy thing where you buy off-the-shelf batteries and have some solar panels or wind turbines that need replacement every now and then, that sounds way better than investing billions over decades to build a centralized fleet of nuclear reactors.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    > I don't understand why people see this as a problem. Energy generation being a local thing feels like a good thing -- sure you'll need a lot of batteries, but every city/state/municipality already has power plants, sewage plants, water treatment plants, etc. If we get to the point where energy is just this easy thing where you buy off-the-shelf batteries and have some solar panels or wind turbines that need replacement every now and then, that sounds way better than investing billions over decades to build a centralized fleet of nuclear reactors Not every locality will have the place, budget, geography to enable that. Furthermore, "a lot of batteries". Isn't there a shortage of battery production capacity currently? Isn't there a massive shift to battery electric vehicles which will need multiple times the battery production capacity available today? Wasting enormous amounts of space, money and production capacity to be able to offset a couple of hours of no wind/sun seems wasteful and risky.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      The shift to EVs drives down the cost of batteries and scales up manufacturing capacity. Nuclear is never getting built, takes too long and isn’t cost effective against storage and renewables. There is more than enough unused space worldwide for solar, wind, and batteries without impacting more productive land uses.
      - thehappypm 5y ago
        The only thing holding back renewables is cost -- particularly that there aren't really off-the-shelf battery storage solutions yet, the reason why this article is a headline is in itself indicative that it's still immature as of yet. However, it's obvious that this is going to be solved soon, the actual battery tech is there. and if cost is the main thing holding back renewables, nuclear will never win, because it's an order of magnitude more costly. It takes a LONG time for something that costs a billion dollars to break even versus renewables that cost $100M.
foxyv 5y ago
Hmm, so this 900 megawatt hour lithium installation will roughly use about 73 metric tons of lithium at 0.3 grams per amp hour. World lithium production is about 82 thousand metric tons with plenty of room for future expansion. Using a single year's supply of lithium we would be able to produce 1 terawatt hour worth of battery as an upper limit. Currently the world uses about 64 terawatt hours daily on average. Assuming we would only need storage for 1/3 of that amount, we would need roughly 20 terawatt hours of storage. What this means is we would need to dedicate 20 years worth of current lithium mining to produce the needed batteries or expand lithium mining by a factor of 5-10 to meet climate targets. Back of the napkin, this seems practical in the long run, but difficult in the short run. With recycling we can build up a reserve of lithium over the years, however I think it's going to take half a century just to get the lithium we need to replace fossil fuels. In the meantime we'll take a small chunk out of fossil fuel demand. However demand is still increasing. We may want to consider subsidizing nuclear at this point to get us over the finish line on renewables. Unless we come up with another carbon neutral energy source that provides consistent power 24/7.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > Assuming we would only need storage for 1/3 of that amount, we would need roughly 20 terawatt hours of storage Out of curiosity, why 1/3?
  - foxyv 5y ago
    I think current estimates are something along those lines. For a residential off-grid installation they suggest 100% kwh/day of battery storage. Grid power has backups and mitigation strategies that could reduce that significantly. I was mostly trying to be generous to grid battery installations. For the most part 1/3 is a bare minimum still requiring natural gas emergency peak plants.
- nickik 5y ago
  There are other battery types such as sodium, liquid air, liquid metal, air-metal and so on. Doing everything with lithium is not a great idea as we need that for cars mostly. But I also always preferred nuclear.

After reading the headlines I question myself: What is the eqivalent in bathtubs filled with iPhones? But still an interesting project..

wiredfool 5y ago

Woah. An article with MW and MWh in the subheading. They're running a 2:1 capacity vs power ratio, so this is likely a demand smoothing installation rather than a demand shifting one.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
labawi 5y ago
> demand smoothing installation Depending on definition of smoothing vs. shifting - yes, most of them are. Demand shifting with current batteries is not really workable at scale - neither economically nor practically.

lovemenot 5y ago

I may have missed it in the article. What chemistry does it use?

Kydlaw 5y ago

The largest solar battery capacity in the world is filled by less than one hour of production from the smallest of the 52 French nuclear power plants. Guys, that's going to be a lot of batteries. And by a lot I mean a SHIT-TON of batteries.

jusssi 5y ago
Nuclear is not what they're looking to replace with batteries, so comparing to that doesn't make sense. How many hours of smallest French coal power plant?
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  By far the best metric would be "how many minutes or seconds of French (or possibly regional) electricity consumption can this battery cover". This gives you a rough idea of the total bridging capacity for the case of "no sun, no wind" situations. That said, I must admit I am a bit afraid of the huge batteries, at least if they are going to be located close to human dwellings. The videos of fires of vehicle batteries that I have seen so far were pretty bad, and here we are talking about orders of magnitude bigger energy store.
  - datameta 5y ago
    I think a highly useful metric would be how many homes this battery installation could power alone for a one day period.
    - jonfw 5y ago
      Homes are just one thing that consumes energy, and they're no more important than street lights, factories, night clubs, gas stations, electric charging stations, and hotels. there are no bonus points for renewable suburbs
      - datameta 5y ago
        In an excessive heat wave, blizzard/ice storm, other severe inclement weather events being able to power homes directly is frankly all of the points. Out of all the users of energy that you listed perhaps the industrial sector is worth mentioning, otherwise street lights are essentially in the same magnitude of lights-per-capita so that can be a constant tacked onto the # of homes metric. Not to mention the fact that quite a substantial portion of them now use LEDs. The others are a magnitude less significant in comparison to homes, whether those homes are rural through urban.
- datameta 5y ago
  Precisely. New renewable energy installations should replace the worst offenders not the other clean energy generation infrastructure. There was an article on HN a few days ago about how the 5% most polluting power plants pollute as much as 75% of the total.
ckdarby 5y ago
Thankfully there are places with a "SHIT-TON" of space throughout the USA and Canada.
- Kydlaw 5y ago
  This add to the land competition for farming, solar panels and wind turbines. Also, remember the World is not USA + Canada, and there are plenty of ppl living in the World. The battery solution might likely not be the magic wand to will solve the energy problem as some might think.
  - ckdarby 5y ago
    I haven't forgotten the world is not just USA + Canada. The rest of the world will set up their own primary energy storage providers as well. Imagine each continent had a primary battery hub. Secondary storage can be in the countries that have the space or can afford the additional infrastructure. Also, remember this is how a lot of the world works now with existing energy infrastructure. Don't try to make the simple complex. Solar "tunnels" where existing roads are. Vertical building for batteries in space restricted areas.
thehappypm 5y ago
I don't understand why people see this as a problem. Energy generation being a local thing feels like a good thing -- sure you'll need a lot of batteries, but every city/state/municipality already has power plants, sewage plants, water treatment plants, etc. If we get to the point where energy is just this easy thing where you buy off-the-shelf batteries and have some solar panels or wind turbines that need replacement every now and then, that sounds way better than investing billions over decades to build a centralized fleet of nuclear reactors.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > I don't understand why people see this as a problem. Energy generation being a local thing feels like a good thing -- sure you'll need a lot of batteries, but every city/state/municipality already has power plants, sewage plants, water treatment plants, etc. If we get to the point where energy is just this easy thing where you buy off-the-shelf batteries and have some solar panels or wind turbines that need replacement every now and then, that sounds way better than investing billions over decades to build a centralized fleet of nuclear reactors Not every locality will have the place, budget, geography to enable that. Furthermore, "a lot of batteries". Isn't there a shortage of battery production capacity currently? Isn't there a massive shift to battery electric vehicles which will need multiple times the battery production capacity available today? Wasting enormous amounts of space, money and production capacity to be able to offset a couple of hours of no wind/sun seems wasteful and risky.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    The shift to EVs drives down the cost of batteries and scales up manufacturing capacity. Nuclear is never getting built, takes too long and isn’t cost effective against storage and renewables. There is more than enough unused space worldwide for solar, wind, and batteries without impacting more productive land uses.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      The only thing holding back renewables is cost -- particularly that there aren't really off-the-shelf battery storage solutions yet, the reason why this article is a headline is in itself indicative that it's still immature as of yet. However, it's obvious that this is going to be solved soon, the actual battery tech is there. and if cost is the main thing holding back renewables, nuclear will never win, because it's an order of magnitude more costly. It takes a LONG time for something that costs a billion dollars to break even versus renewables that cost $100M.

foxyv 5y ago

Hmm, so this 900 megawatt hour lithium installation will roughly use about 73 metric tons of lithium at 0.3 grams per amp hour. World lithium production is about 82 thousand metric tons with plenty of room for future expansion. Using a single year's supply of lithium we would be able to produce 1 terawatt hour worth of battery as an upper limit. Currently the world uses about 64 terawatt hours daily on average. Assuming we would only need storage for 1/3 of that amount, we would need roughly 20 terawatt hours of storage. What this means is we would need to dedicate 20 years worth of current lithium mining to produce the needed batteries or expand lithium mining by a factor of 5-10 to meet climate targets. Back of the napkin, this seems practical in the long run, but difficult in the short run. With recycling we can build up a reserve of lithium over the years, however I think it's going to take half a century just to get the lithium we need to replace fossil fuels. In the meantime we'll take a small chunk out of fossil fuel demand. However demand is still increasing. We may want to consider subsidizing nuclear at this point to get us over the finish line on renewables. Unless we come up with another carbon neutral energy source that provides consistent power 24/7.

sofixa 5y ago
> Assuming we would only need storage for 1/3 of that amount, we would need roughly 20 terawatt hours of storage Out of curiosity, why 1/3?
- foxyv 5y ago
  I think current estimates are something along those lines. For a residential off-grid installation they suggest 100% kwh/day of battery storage. Grid power has backups and mitigation strategies that could reduce that significantly. I was mostly trying to be generous to grid battery installations. For the most part 1/3 is a bare minimum still requiring natural gas emergency peak plants.
nickik 5y ago
There are other battery types such as sodium, liquid air, liquid metal, air-metal and so on. Doing everything with lithium is not a great idea as we need that for cars mostly. But I also always preferred nuclear.