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> energy storage The thing no one talks about. A battery that can store energy over 24 hours costs more than an equivalent nuclear power plant, loses half it'

> energy storage The thing no one talks about. A battery that can store energy over 24 hours costs more than an equivalent nuclear power plant, loses half it's capacity within a decade and has never been build. The closest one in South Australia could match a nuclear plant for all of 10 minutes and still needed the solar panel and wind generation to work. We're out of time. We don't have another 40 years to wait for renewables to mature.

hackerlight 4y ago
Can't you sell the excess capacity to another country? Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing?
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  If we're talking Europe sized countries. But Europe is pretty small relati ely speaking...it's hard to move a lot of electricity thousands of miles without losing too much.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    From Google: "HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km" Seems like small losses for large distances.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    And even in Europe the weather patterns tend to be quite larger. So you would need very long transmission lines. And then compete for the supply from the areas that have momentary production, with other areas that don't. Theoretically long distance sounds like fancy idea, but I don't think geopolitics are exactly ready for that yet. At least not on intercontinental scale.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  High voltage inter connects are also more expensive than nuclear power to build. Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines. The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country. The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand. >Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing? We don't have 40 years to wait for that technology to mature. We need to be cutting emissions now. Green energy has resulted in increasing use of fossil fuels. The only reason why total CO2 production has dropped is because we've been building gas power plants instead of coal.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    > High voltage inter connects are also more expensive Aren't these paid for by the excess electricity that you've sold? > Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines. The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country. The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand. Isn't this simply describing what the current situation is?
  - frankfrankfrank 4y ago
    >The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country. That is because America technically is not or should not be and what definitely not founded as "a single country". The USA was supposed to be and by law, i.e., the constitution should far more be governed like a ~2005 EU. The Federal government is in many ways extremely illegitimate in how it acts in illegal ways in direct violation and contradiction with the Constitution, i.e., the supreme law of the land, i.e., the highest law above which even Federal legislators cannot act without violating the law. It is one of those fundamental things that the vast majority of people even in the USA simply do not comprehend on an even basic level, not even to mention anyone outside of the US. It's one of those obvious and blatant lies that humans somehow have the capacity to simply live with as if it is not a lie. It is an odd phenomenon when one is able to recognize the mass delusion for what it is. Imagine being somewhere in a group and all the sudden everyone in that group but you insists that grass is in fact not green at all, but rather purple. You would be astonished and confused at first and incredulous as to what is going on, before you went through some phases to rest on a kind of bargained acceptance of "ok, well I guess we are doing that now", regardless of how insane and stupid it is.
martyvis 4y ago
Snowy Hydro 2.0 will be able to generate from water storage dams, 2GW of continuous energy for 175 hours. As long as gravity keeps working it should be good for a while. https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/ https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Brilliant. We just need 10 of those and we'd have covered the base load of NSW as long as there isn't a drought in the worlds driest continent. Now all we need to do is build a few mountains to put the dams in and we're golden.
  - martyvis 4y ago
    Then heat sand, turn sea water into hydrogen, compress air. There are plenty of options that can be explored that don't require continuing to dig up what we can't replace.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      We have a proven power source on the one hand that's been ready for 40 years. On the other we have 20 years of missed deadlines and broken promises. Watching Germany head to a winter where people will freeze to death if Putin cuts the gas is hilarious. Here's hoping that it finally cures them of their delusions.
pydry 4y ago
>has never been build Unless you count pumped storage, in which case it has.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  The trouble with pumped storage is that in most cases, our ancestors were smart enough to identify all the locations that lent themselves to building a dam and built them. Often more than 100 years ago. We aren't the first generation to be faced with the energy storage problem. In Central Europe, where I live, there aren't that many opportunities left to build new ones on a large enough scale. Also, if a drought comes, you suddenly have a double whammy on your hands: not enough water and not enough electricity.
  - pydry 4y ago
    Although dams can and are being used as a kind of pumped storage, pumped storage != dams and dont need rivers. The nuclear/carbon lobbies opine pretty loudly that there isnt enough suitable geography for it around the world. They are not correct though: 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...
    - makomk 4y ago
      "Disclaimer: None of the sites discussed in this study have been the subject of geological, hydrological, environmental, heritage and other studies, and it is not known whether any particular site would be suitable. The commercial feasibility of developing these sites is unknown. As with all major engineering projects, diligent attention to quality assurance would be required for safety and efficacy. There has been no investigation of land tenure apart from exclusion of some environmental areas and urban areas, and no discussions with land owners and managers. Nothing in this list of potential site locations implies any rights for development of these locations." That's a whole lot of important things that they didn't even bother to check before pushing out a nice impressive press release for the media to latch on to. Also, from what I can tell even finding that many potential candidates required changing the very definition of a suitable site away from the type actually used by existing real-world pumped hydro projects.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This is one of the specific things they are now saying they have good science on, allowing previous models that forecast it as a problem to be updated: > Fifth, many scenarios suffer from incomplete power-to-X routes, a lack of comprehensive sector coupling, and excessively high costs assumed for key flexibility-providing technologies: batteries and electrolyzers. These are the two most important VRE supporting technologies that strongly increase the VRE supply share in scenarios by overcoming the day-night limitation of solar PV, supporting strong electrification of practically all on-road transportation, squeezing out biofuels for road vehicles, and enabling highly cost-attractive power-to-hydrogen-to-X routes for almost all remaining energy segments that cannot be directly electrified, including long-distance transportation, high temperature industrial energy demand that may remain despite comprehensive direct electrification, and hydrogen-based chemicals demand in industry. Thus, low-cost batteries, low-cost electrolyzers, and established power-to-X routes strongly increase the VRE share in covering the total primary energy demand. Solar PV benefits more from low-cost electrolyzers than wind power, since low-cost electricity is most efficiently matched with relatively inflexible energy demand categories through the intermediaries of hydrogen storage and electrolyzer-based power-to-X routes Since you mention Australia, they seemed to be one of the first movers on green hydrogen, though everyone else seems to have caught up recently. The amount of hydrogen used just for fertilizer globally dwarfs the amount of pumped hydro storage by multiple orders of magnitude.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Great, where is the link to cheap batteries that can store energy overnight? There aren't any because they don't exist. Renewables without grid scale storage are a pipe dream. We don't have grid scale energy storage and we won't have it for decades yet.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    > Western Australia putting 1,000 PV-plus-battery standalone power systems into remote and rural areas https://www.energy-storage.news/western-australia-putting-1000-pv-plus-battery-standalone-power-systems-into-remote-and-rural-areas/ https://www.energy-storage.news/western-australia-putting-10...
defrost 4y ago
Utility scale MW Compressed Air Energy STorage is much much cheaper . . . [1] https://energystorage.org/why-energy-storage/technologies/compressed-air-energy-storage-caes/ https://energystorage.org/why-energy-storage/technologies/co... [2] https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/sepm/article/view/1574/1314 https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/sepm/article/view/1574/131... and, of course, there are other approaches.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  That's great. How much does a 25 TWh storage plant cost?
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The cost of storing hydrogen underground can be as low as $1/kWh, so that would be $25B (electrolyzers and turbines/generators are additional, but that's not per-energy capacity cost.)
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      For the low low price of 6 over budget 1TW nuclear power plants we could have a single hydrogen _storage_ plant. What a bargain. Oh sorry, we could have the storage facilities of a single hydrogen storage plant with none of the equipment needed to turn the stored hydrogen to electricity.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Nuclear power plants are more like 1 GW, not 1 TW. You mean six reactors that produce about the storage capacity of the hydrogen storage facility over a year, I'm guessing. The problem is the nuclear power plants just dribble out their power at a constant rate, while hydrogen storage can deliver its output just when it's needed (and is most valuable). In other words, the hydrogen output is dispatchable, nuclear is not. The output part of the hydrogen storage would be either simple cycle turbines or combined cycle, which are 20x (10x for CC) cheaper than NPPs per unit power output.
markvdb 4y ago
> A battery that can store energy over 24 hours costs more than an equivalent nuclear power plant, loses half it's capacity within a decade and has never been build. Multiple have been built, for cheaper than a nuclear reactor, losing zero capacity within a decade. I present you Nant de Drance [0]: - 20 GWh of storage capacity - 900 MW of power - 2.1 * 10^9 USD cost This kind of project cannot be replicated just anywhere. Other fairly cheap large scale scalable electricity storage solutions do exist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance_Hydropower_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance_Hydropower_Plan...
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Show me where you will build it in Poland or even Germany?
  - markvdb 4y ago
    Goldisthal [0], Markersbach [1] and Żarnowiec [2] exist and are quite significant. Also, the Młoty pumped hydro storage project is being worked on again after 33 years. The best sites for this have been taken already, but there is still some potential in new sites and optimisation of existing ones. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldisthal_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldisthal_Pumped_Storage_Stat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markersbach_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markersbach_Pumped_Storage_Pow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBarnowiec_Pumped_Storage_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBarnowiec_Pumped_Storage_... [3] https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/01/18/poland-set-to-resume-work-on-largest-hydroelectric-plant-after-33-years/ https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/01/18/poland-set-to-resume-...
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      So you can build only few and only in specific geography. Thus pumped storage is mostly worthless for anything else than smoothing out dips in energy supply.
pjc50 4y ago
I'm not sure we have another decade for each nuclear plant to get built, either.
powerhour 4y ago
> > energy storage > The thing no one talks about. Given how many people talk about energy storage every time renewables come up (including in this very thread), would you agree to stop pretending they don't? You're not smarter than the rest of us for "finding" the storage issue or better for "revealing" it to us. Just stop telling lies, that's all I ask here.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  What lies?
  - powerhour 4y ago
    I'm sure you can do better than this. It's embarrassing.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    "The thing no one talks about." He even quoted it for you.

hackerlight 4y ago

Can't you sell the excess capacity to another country? Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing?

ThunderSizzle 4y ago
If we're talking Europe sized countries. But Europe is pretty small relati ely speaking...it's hard to move a lot of electricity thousands of miles without losing too much.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  From Google: "HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km" Seems like small losses for large distances.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And even in Europe the weather patterns tend to be quite larger. So you would need very long transmission lines. And then compete for the supply from the areas that have momentary production, with other areas that don't. Theoretically long distance sounds like fancy idea, but I don't think geopolitics are exactly ready for that yet. At least not on intercontinental scale.
thrown_22 4y ago
High voltage inter connects are also more expensive than nuclear power to build. Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines. The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country. The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand. >Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing? We don't have 40 years to wait for that technology to mature. We need to be cutting emissions now. Green energy has resulted in increasing use of fossil fuels. The only reason why total CO2 production has dropped is because we've been building gas power plants instead of coal.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  > High voltage inter connects are also more expensive Aren't these paid for by the excess electricity that you've sold? > Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines. The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country. The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand. Isn't this simply describing what the current situation is?
- frankfrankfrank 4y ago
  >The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country. That is because America technically is not or should not be and what definitely not founded as "a single country". The USA was supposed to be and by law, i.e., the constitution should far more be governed like a ~2005 EU. The Federal government is in many ways extremely illegitimate in how it acts in illegal ways in direct violation and contradiction with the Constitution, i.e., the supreme law of the land, i.e., the highest law above which even Federal legislators cannot act without violating the law. It is one of those fundamental things that the vast majority of people even in the USA simply do not comprehend on an even basic level, not even to mention anyone outside of the US. It's one of those obvious and blatant lies that humans somehow have the capacity to simply live with as if it is not a lie. It is an odd phenomenon when one is able to recognize the mass delusion for what it is. Imagine being somewhere in a group and all the sudden everyone in that group but you insists that grass is in fact not green at all, but rather purple. You would be astonished and confused at first and incredulous as to what is going on, before you went through some phases to rest on a kind of bargained acceptance of "ok, well I guess we are doing that now", regardless of how insane and stupid it is.

martyvis 4y ago

Snowy Hydro 2.0 will be able to generate from water storage dams, 2GW of continuous energy for 175 hours. As long as gravity keeps working it should be good for a while. https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/ https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

thrown_22 4y ago
Brilliant. We just need 10 of those and we'd have covered the base load of NSW as long as there isn't a drought in the worlds driest continent. Now all we need to do is build a few mountains to put the dams in and we're golden.
- martyvis 4y ago
  Then heat sand, turn sea water into hydrogen, compress air. There are plenty of options that can be explored that don't require continuing to dig up what we can't replace.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    We have a proven power source on the one hand that's been ready for 40 years. On the other we have 20 years of missed deadlines and broken promises. Watching Germany head to a winter where people will freeze to death if Putin cuts the gas is hilarious. Here's hoping that it finally cures them of their delusions.

pydry 4y ago

>has never been build Unless you count pumped storage, in which case it has.

inglor_cz 4y ago
The trouble with pumped storage is that in most cases, our ancestors were smart enough to identify all the locations that lent themselves to building a dam and built them. Often more than 100 years ago. We aren't the first generation to be faced with the energy storage problem. In Central Europe, where I live, there aren't that many opportunities left to build new ones on a large enough scale. Also, if a drought comes, you suddenly have a double whammy on your hands: not enough water and not enough electricity.
- pydry 4y ago
  Although dams can and are being used as a kind of pumped storage, pumped storage != dams and dont need rivers. The nuclear/carbon lobbies opine pretty loudly that there isnt enough suitable geography for it around the world. They are not correct though: 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...
  - makomk 4y ago
    "Disclaimer: None of the sites discussed in this study have been the subject of geological, hydrological, environmental, heritage and other studies, and it is not known whether any particular site would be suitable. The commercial feasibility of developing these sites is unknown. As with all major engineering projects, diligent attention to quality assurance would be required for safety and efficacy. There has been no investigation of land tenure apart from exclusion of some environmental areas and urban areas, and no discussions with land owners and managers. Nothing in this list of potential site locations implies any rights for development of these locations." That's a whole lot of important things that they didn't even bother to check before pushing out a nice impressive press release for the media to latch on to. Also, from what I can tell even finding that many potential candidates required changing the very definition of a suitable site away from the type actually used by existing real-world pumped hydro projects.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

This is one of the specific things they are now saying they have good science on, allowing previous models that forecast it as a problem to be updated: > Fifth, many scenarios suffer from incomplete power-to-X routes, a lack of comprehensive sector coupling, and excessively high costs assumed for key flexibility-providing technologies: batteries and electrolyzers. These are the two most important VRE supporting technologies that strongly increase the VRE supply share in scenarios by overcoming the day-night limitation of solar PV, supporting strong electrification of practically all on-road transportation, squeezing out biofuels for road vehicles, and enabling highly cost-attractive power-to-hydrogen-to-X routes for almost all remaining energy segments that cannot be directly electrified, including long-distance transportation, high temperature industrial energy demand that may remain despite comprehensive direct electrification, and hydrogen-based chemicals demand in industry. Thus, low-cost batteries, low-cost electrolyzers, and established power-to-X routes strongly increase the VRE share in covering the total primary energy demand. Solar PV benefits more from low-cost electrolyzers than wind power, since low-cost electricity is most efficiently matched with relatively inflexible energy demand categories through the intermediaries of hydrogen storage and electrolyzer-based power-to-X routes Since you mention Australia, they seemed to be one of the first movers on green hydrogen, though everyone else seems to have caught up recently. The amount of hydrogen used just for fertilizer globally dwarfs the amount of pumped hydro storage by multiple orders of magnitude.

thrown_22 4y ago
Great, where is the link to cheap batteries that can store energy overnight? There aren't any because they don't exist. Renewables without grid scale storage are a pipe dream. We don't have grid scale energy storage and we won't have it for decades yet.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  > Western Australia putting 1,000 PV-plus-battery standalone power systems into remote and rural areas https://www.energy-storage.news/western-australia-putting-1000-pv-plus-battery-standalone-power-systems-into-remote-and-rural-areas/ https://www.energy-storage.news/western-australia-putting-10...

defrost 4y ago

Utility scale MW Compressed Air Energy STorage is much much cheaper . . . [1] https://energystorage.org/why-energy-storage/technologies/compressed-air-energy-storage-caes/ https://energystorage.org/why-energy-storage/technologies/co... [2] https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/sepm/article/view/1574/1314 https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/sepm/article/view/1574/131... and, of course, there are other approaches.

thrown_22 4y ago
That's great. How much does a 25 TWh storage plant cost?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  The cost of storing hydrogen underground can be as low as $1/kWh, so that would be $25B (electrolyzers and turbines/generators are additional, but that's not per-energy capacity cost.)
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    For the low low price of 6 over budget 1TW nuclear power plants we could have a single hydrogen _storage_ plant. What a bargain. Oh sorry, we could have the storage facilities of a single hydrogen storage plant with none of the equipment needed to turn the stored hydrogen to electricity.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Nuclear power plants are more like 1 GW, not 1 TW. You mean six reactors that produce about the storage capacity of the hydrogen storage facility over a year, I'm guessing. The problem is the nuclear power plants just dribble out their power at a constant rate, while hydrogen storage can deliver its output just when it's needed (and is most valuable). In other words, the hydrogen output is dispatchable, nuclear is not. The output part of the hydrogen storage would be either simple cycle turbines or combined cycle, which are 20x (10x for CC) cheaper than NPPs per unit power output.

markvdb 4y ago

> A battery that can store energy over 24 hours costs more than an equivalent nuclear power plant, loses half it's capacity within a decade and has never been build. Multiple have been built, for cheaper than a nuclear reactor, losing zero capacity within a decade. I present you Nant de Drance [0]: - 20 GWh of storage capacity - 900 MW of power - 2.1 * 10^9 USD cost This kind of project cannot be replicated just anywhere. Other fairly cheap large scale scalable electricity storage solutions do exist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance_Hydropower_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nant_de_Drance_Hydropower_Plan...

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Show me where you will build it in Poland or even Germany?
- markvdb 4y ago
  Goldisthal [0], Markersbach [1] and Żarnowiec [2] exist and are quite significant. Also, the Młoty pumped hydro storage project is being worked on again after 33 years. The best sites for this have been taken already, but there is still some potential in new sites and optimisation of existing ones. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldisthal_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldisthal_Pumped_Storage_Stat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markersbach_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markersbach_Pumped_Storage_Pow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBarnowiec_Pumped_Storage_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBarnowiec_Pumped_Storage_... [3] https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/01/18/poland-set-to-resume-work-on-largest-hydroelectric-plant-after-33-years/ https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/01/18/poland-set-to-resume-...
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    So you can build only few and only in specific geography. Thus pumped storage is mostly worthless for anything else than smoothing out dips in energy supply.

pjc50 4y ago

I'm not sure we have another decade for each nuclear plant to get built, either.

powerhour 4y ago

> > energy storage > The thing no one talks about. Given how many people talk about energy storage every time renewables come up (including in this very thread), would you agree to stop pretending they don't? You're not smarter than the rest of us for "finding" the storage issue or better for "revealing" it to us. Just stop telling lies, that's all I ask here.

thrown_22 4y ago
What lies?
- powerhour 4y ago
  I'm sure you can do better than this. It's embarrassing.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  "The thing no one talks about." He even quoted it for you.