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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?

by jusssi 5y ago

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.
Kydlaw 5y ago
My previous thought provoking argument was to say that if you plan to produce electricity in a developed country using mostly wind turbines and solar panels, you'll need an unreasonable amount of batteries. In that sense, it makes totally sense. If you are Greenpeace (for instance) and argue that all nuclear plants have to be close (for reason X) you need to translate that production with something else. And that amount can't be reasonably replaced by solar + wind + batteries.
sofixa 5y ago
> Nuclear is not what they're looking to replace with batteries, so comparing to that doesn't make sense Some people, including many "greens", do want to replace nuclear with renewables + storage (at best, the other day Greenpeace Belgium said that "natural gas is a necessary evil for transitioning away from nuclear and to renewables" (as in, we should retire nuclear ASAP to move to natural gas until renewables are ready), so it does make sense.

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?

by 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.

Kydlaw 5y ago

My previous thought provoking argument was to say that if you plan to produce electricity in a developed country using mostly wind turbines and solar panels, you'll need an unreasonable amount of batteries. In that sense, it makes totally sense. If you are Greenpeace (for instance) and argue that all nuclear plants have to be close (for reason X) you need to translate that production with something else. And that amount can't be reasonably replaced by solar + wind + batteries.

sofixa 5y ago

> Nuclear is not what they're looking to replace with batteries, so comparing to that doesn't make sense Some people, including many "greens", do want to replace nuclear with renewables + storage (at best, the other day Greenpeace Belgium said that "natural gas is a necessary evil for transitioning away from nuclear and to renewables" (as in, we should retire nuclear ASAP to move to natural gas until renewables are ready), so it does make sense.