6 ms·

It's true, but when does it make sense to include plants that do not deliver reliable power? Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still using fos

It's true, but when does it make sense to include plants that do not deliver reliable power? Wind power makes a lot of sense as long as you are still using fossil fuels. Every watt generated by wind power means that you can reduce fossil fuel, and thus lower your CO2 emissions. But once you got rid of fossil fuels and you have a reliable source of power without CO2 emissions, you can get rid of the unreliable ones.

adrianN 5y ago
Wind and solar are pretty cheap and storage keeps getting cheaper, that's why they make sense.
- tjansen 5y ago
  We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....
  - ben_w 5y ago
    > There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201 [1] https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ [2] https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent
    - tjansen 5y ago
      I guess a manufacturing limit is bad enough. The global battery production is expected to reach 2063 GWh/year by 2028 [0]. That wouldn't be enough to store China's electricity consumption for a single hour. The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Are there enough raw materials for this? How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries? What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often. In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a scenario (<4% in Germany), nor will bio mass (<10%). [0] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute (German)
      - ben_w 5y ago
        > The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Yes, but that doesn’t itself seem like an implausible economic shift given how large the existing fossil fuel sector is. Challenging, sure — perhaps it is politically impossible, I wouldn’t know as I’m not at all politically astute — but physically it seems fine. > Are there enough raw materials for this? That part at least is fine. Earth is big, and while lithium is in the category “rare Earths”, it isn’t all that rare compared to what we need, and even if it was lithium isn’t even the only option for storage. One of the things suggested in your [2] was long-distance HVDC to different weather zones, and Scandinavian (hydro? I’m unclear) storage. In principle we could also do antipodal HVDC (different time zone for day/night, different hemisphere for summer/winter), though on a previous thread I was encouraged to do the maths and realised the EU collectively would use a 1m^2 cross section conductor for current HVDC designs (if you wanted 100% substitution rather than it being merely part of the solution), and this will take quite a long time to mine at current rates. > How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries? No idea, but the current alternatives are “set lots of it on fire” (fossil fuels) and “bury a tiny quantity of extraordinarily dangerous stuff in scary artwork for geological timescales” (nuclear), and all it has to do is beat those. IIRC the end-of-life batteries can be processed back into their raw material more easily than can the rocks we start with for fresh batteries.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    We're also pretty far away from the kinds of renewable penetration where you actually need a lot of storage, so we have plenty of time left to build more batteries and electrolyzers.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Electrolysis is extremely inefficient. It's unlikely to be a practical means of grid scale energy storage any time soon.
      - jhgb 5y ago
        It's not just a means of energy storage; it's a method for producing a vital chemical feedstock. If your main alternative is processing natural gas, building more electrolysers is a no-brainer. You'll have to do it no matter what the efficiency, since we just don't have a better way.
      - adrianN 5y ago
        Yeah round trip efficiencies are very bad, but at scale it's cheaper than batteries as far as I know.
        pfdietz 5y ago
        The two storage modes are complementary. Batteries would be good for diurnal storage, hydrogen for longer term and rare event backup.
      - ephbit 5y ago
        80 per cent is what you call extremely inefficient ... what percentage would be "efficient" then in your opinion? > Accounting for the accepted use of the higher heat value (because inefficiency via heat can be redirected back into the system to create the steam required by the catalyst), average working efficiencies for PEM electrolysis are around 80% ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industrial_output https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...]
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    By recent performance, if we build nuclear we are decades away.
    - tjansen 5y ago
      Even if that's true, at least we would be betting on proven technology. What makes you think that unproven technology for storage can be built faster?
      - dv_dt 5y ago
        By the number of abandoned nuclear projects in the west, it’s not proven.
        korantu 5y ago
        In this case 'proven' means was ever deployed at scale and worked successfully. Nuclear has track record of decarbonizing entire industrial economy in just 10 years. We dont have storage solution with such track record.
        dv_dt 5y ago
        Nuclear is in an awkward place. All of the proven last gen designs are considered too risky to build new now. But it also seems that the next gen designs are not proven at all in terms of construction timelines or buildability. For example, many next gen US nuclear projects were canceled after continuous schedule and budget overshoots. The completed next gen French reactor in China, for example is showing unexpected behavior and has been temporarily taken offline for review, and other next gen French design builds are, like the US designs and projects, behind schedule and over budget. That's just the direct industry. The support industry for nuclear plant construction materials has also lost maturity and scale between first gen and new gen, as evidenced by the failure of upgrade materials in the So Cal Edison San Onofre plant. This is after decades of investment. Because its so much less complicated to scale, my bet is on storage before any next round of new nuclear plants are built at scale. But we don't even need that much storage in the next decade, we mostly need far more renewable energy acceleration in very proven and fast, reliable rollouts.
  - autoliteInline 5y ago
    >There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem. Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it wasn't nuclear'.
  - ephbit 5y ago
    Something makes me think that storing weeks worth of electricity isn't going to happen in the near future (< 30 years). Storing hydrogen isn't that easy/cheap either. So I'd guess we're going to see storage of energy in the form of liquid/liquefiable hydrocarbons (synthesized from hydrogen) like methanol or propane.
- jules 5y ago
  Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before that. If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy. Until then, nuclear is the only proven solution. Betting on batteries now amounts to gambling with the planet.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Batteries are not supposed to solve the large scale storage problem. They're best at solving the small scale storage problem. Recently they solved the problem of small scale storage on wheels. > If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy. Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.
    - craftinator 5y ago
      First thought I had here was hydroelectric storage.
      - jhgb 5y ago
        Especially after that prospective sites research by the Australian National University (https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-worldwide https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...), that seems like a reasonable choice.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    As far as I know, few people suggest (Lithium-)batteries for long term storage. Electrolysis, optionally followed by turning the Hydrogen into Methane, seems like a much more scalable solution. That works at scale today, it's just too expensive to make sense at this point. Then there are other types of batteries that might become much cheaper in the future, perhaps redox-flow batteries or something like that.

adrianN 5y ago

Wind and solar are pretty cheap and storage keeps getting cheaper, that's why they make sense.

tjansen 5y ago
We are decades away from having enough storage to make wind and power a reliable power source. There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. China just has announced ambitious plans to install storage for 100 GWh by 2030. China's electric power generation capacity is 2200 GW (in 2020). That's not even enough to provide electricity for 5 minutes....
- ben_w 5y ago
  > There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. Don’t mistake a manufacturing limit for a tech scaling limit. While it may take decades to get there, batteries could do that; in the mean time, intercontinental HVDC connections could substitute for some of that storage (not all the storage all at once unless mining increases, but certainly plausible over the scale of a decade or so and we would need that timescale to build the renewables themselves anyway)[0], and the batteries are in addition to existing pumped hydro, and even in the current “low wind” scenario the UK is still getting 3.8 GW (~11%) from wind[1][2] rather than getting nothing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201 [1] https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ [2] https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent
  - tjansen 5y ago
    I guess a manufacturing limit is bad enough. The global battery production is expected to reach 2063 GWh/year by 2028 [0]. That wouldn't be enough to store China's electricity consumption for a single hour. The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Are there enough raw materials for this? How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries? What about a no-wind scenario? I don't know what wind in the UK is like, but in Germany this happens quite often. In November 2015 wind output dropped to 0.2 GW (0.5% of its 40GW power rating) [1]. Hydro doesn't help in such a scenario (<4% in Germany), nor will bio mass (<10%). [0] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute (German)
    - ben_w 5y ago
      > The production would need an increase by several orders of magnitude. Yes, but that doesn’t itself seem like an implausible economic shift given how large the existing fossil fuel sector is. Challenging, sure — perhaps it is politically impossible, I wouldn’t know as I’m not at all politically astute — but physically it seems fine. > Are there enough raw materials for this? That part at least is fine. Earth is big, and while lithium is in the category “rare Earths”, it isn’t all that rare compared to what we need, and even if it was lithium isn’t even the only option for storage. One of the things suggested in your [2] was long-distance HVDC to different weather zones, and Scandinavian (hydro? I’m unclear) storage. In principle we could also do antipodal HVDC (different time zone for day/night, different hemisphere for summer/winter), though on a previous thread I was encouraged to do the maths and realised the EU collectively would use a 1m^2 cross section conductor for current HVDC designs (if you wanted 100% substitution rather than it being merely part of the solution), and this will take quite a long time to mine at current rates. > How much waste would there be, given the limited lifespan of those batteries? No idea, but the current alternatives are “set lots of it on fire” (fossil fuels) and “bury a tiny quantity of extraordinarily dangerous stuff in scary artwork for geological timescales” (nuclear), and all it has to do is beat those. IIRC the end-of-life batteries can be processed back into their raw material more easily than can the rocks we start with for fresh batteries.
- adrianN 5y ago
  We're also pretty far away from the kinds of renewable penetration where you actually need a lot of storage, so we have plenty of time left to build more batteries and electrolyzers.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Electrolysis is extremely inefficient. It's unlikely to be a practical means of grid scale energy storage any time soon.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      It's not just a means of energy storage; it's a method for producing a vital chemical feedstock. If your main alternative is processing natural gas, building more electrolysers is a no-brainer. You'll have to do it no matter what the efficiency, since we just don't have a better way.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Yeah round trip efficiencies are very bad, but at scale it's cheaper than batteries as far as I know.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        The two storage modes are complementary. Batteries would be good for diurnal storage, hydrogen for longer term and rare event backup.
    - ephbit 5y ago
      80 per cent is what you call extremely inefficient ... what percentage would be "efficient" then in your opinion? > Accounting for the accepted use of the higher heat value (because inefficiency via heat can be redirected back into the system to create the steam required by the catalyst), average working efficiencies for PEM electrolysis are around 80% ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industrial_output https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...]
- dv_dt 5y ago
  By recent performance, if we build nuclear we are decades away.
  - tjansen 5y ago
    Even if that's true, at least we would be betting on proven technology. What makes you think that unproven technology for storage can be built faster?
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      By the number of abandoned nuclear projects in the west, it’s not proven.
      - korantu 5y ago
        In this case 'proven' means was ever deployed at scale and worked successfully. Nuclear has track record of decarbonizing entire industrial economy in just 10 years. We dont have storage solution with such track record.
        dv_dt 5y ago
        Nuclear is in an awkward place. All of the proven last gen designs are considered too risky to build new now. But it also seems that the next gen designs are not proven at all in terms of construction timelines or buildability. For example, many next gen US nuclear projects were canceled after continuous schedule and budget overshoots. The completed next gen French reactor in China, for example is showing unexpected behavior and has been temporarily taken offline for review, and other next gen French design builds are, like the US designs and projects, behind schedule and over budget. That's just the direct industry. The support industry for nuclear plant construction materials has also lost maturity and scale between first gen and new gen, as evidenced by the failure of upgrade materials in the So Cal Edison San Onofre plant. This is after decades of investment. Because its so much less complicated to scale, my bet is on storage before any next round of new nuclear plants are built at scale. But we don't even need that much storage in the next decade, we mostly need far more renewable energy acceleration in very proven and fast, reliable rollouts.
- autoliteInline 5y ago
  >There is not even technology that would scale up enough to store a country's power for weeks or at least a few days. My bet is that the Japanese will build some huge newfangled storage facility. There'll be a big earthquake. The storage will meltdown/burn/whatever somehow. It'll cause a great big semi-permanent problem. Everyone will declare victory and shout 'at least it wasn't nuclear'.
- ephbit 5y ago
  Something makes me think that storing weeks worth of electricity isn't going to happen in the near future (< 30 years). Storing hydrogen isn't that easy/cheap either. So I'd guess we're going to see storage of energy in the form of liquid/liquefiable hydrocarbons (synthesized from hydrogen) like methanol or propane.
jules 5y ago
Batteries are so expensive that it is unclear whether they will ever solve the large scale storage problem: yes they're getting cheaper, but they have to continue to get cheaper for a long time before they're suitable, and it's unclear whether fundamental limits will be hit before that. If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy. Until then, nuclear is the only proven solution. Betting on batteries now amounts to gambling with the planet.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Batteries are not supposed to solve the large scale storage problem. They're best at solving the small scale storage problem. Recently they solved the problem of small scale storage on wheels. > If battery technology improves to the extent that it becomes viable for large scale storage, then wind and solar can become our main source of energy. Batteries are not the only way of storing electricity.
  - craftinator 5y ago
    First thought I had here was hydroelectric storage.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      Especially after that prospective sites research by the Australian National University (https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-worldwide https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...), that seems like a reasonable choice.
- adrianN 5y ago
  As far as I know, few people suggest (Lithium-)batteries for long term storage. Electrolysis, optionally followed by turning the Hydrogen into Methane, seems like a much more scalable solution. That works at scale today, it's just too expensive to make sense at this point. Then there are other types of batteries that might become much cheaper in the future, perhaps redox-flow batteries or something like that.