5 ms·

Sounds great until you remember you're not get even half of that nameplate capacity. Capacity factors of solar/wind is between 10% and 30%. Offshore wind can be

by evilos 4y ago

Sounds great until you remember you're not get even half of that nameplate capacity. Capacity factors of solar/wind is between 10% and 30%. Offshore wind can be as high as 45% but your link says it's only 5% of wind capacity (in 2020). Intermittents like solar/wind aren't suitable for grids without a backing firm energy source. Today that is fossil fuels. We don't have a proven viable replacement right now. Most people think that we'll use batteries instead but that's a pipe dream with today's battery tech. We literally don't have enough minerals. See this report: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf Lots of people are trying to address this storage problem but there's nothing that is proven and manufacturable at scale today.

fulafel 4y ago
Lithium batteries (as focused by the paper) are attractive for mobile applications, for grid storage the energy density is not very important and li-ion batteries have disadvantages like going up in flames frequently. There are lots of overlapping options for running the grid with renewables from other battery chemistries to hydrogen, pumped hydro storage, long distance hvdc, hourly pricing to cut demand peaks, etc.
- evilos 4y ago
  Yes there are many competing battery technologies in the works right now and I sincerely hope that one of them turns out to be manufacturable/scalable. Or any kind of energy storage becomes cheap at Terra-watt hour capacities. But right now, it's just a bunch of 'maybes'. The fact that we don't have a solid plan RIGHT NOW for something so important is alarming. Everyone is just hoping it will work out. Maybe we'll find a good cheap battery. Maybe we can unify our grid and build thousands of miles of HVDC interconnects. Maybe we can find more pumped hydro sites. In the absence of a buildable storage solution for renewables today, we should be building the only other scalable clean energy technology we have: Nuclear energy. No energy storage. No brand new grid. No massive expansion in mining. Thankfully, more people are coming around to this. No it won't cover 100% of our energy. But it is an incredibly underutilized tool. We should at a minimum, replace all coal power plants with nuclear.
  - fulafel 4y ago
    Even if we keep looking at only batteries for grid storage instead of all the estabilished and proven ways: the predicted lithium shortage would happen gradually over O(100 years), leading to rising cost of lithium batteries which should give lots of lead time for investment in alternatives, of which we have many, both in old ones (pre-lithium) and many prospective ones under development. IMO the more alarming problems currently in climate change are the missing plan for global fossils rampdwn and solving the international-relations collective action problem of enacting the required energy saving policies in a coordinated and fair way.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
You're trying to use this to push nuclear, but 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decadeor two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years. Lithium has larger reserves, is mined in larger quantities at lower impact than uranium, and won't even be relevant to grid storage because in contradiction to Michaux's claims that he's the only one to ever consider the idea of a different chemistry, nobody is assuming there will be a week of NMC batteries for every watt of renewables. There were multiple news items about sodium ion, zinc bromide, iron batteries, pumped hydro, thermal storage, and a-caes being released the entire time he was fishing through ancient LCAs and IEA reports to try and claim there isn't enough Tellereum to make solar panels that don't contain any or not enough Niobium to make dual wound generators with no permanent magnets.
- evilos 4y ago
  He considers LFP in his more recent work and you still run into mineral constraints. Even if you take his 4 week buffer to 48 hours. > 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decade or two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation? It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying. > There were multiple news items about... Oh please, the news is saying we've solved nuclear fusion. The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume. Come back to me when we're pumping out gigawatt hours of storage. Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it. No we can't just dig the reservoirs anywhere because then the energy payback goes negative.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > Even if you take his 4 week buffer to 48 hours. Stil 4x as long as any serious proposal and still assumes all low grade heat and all energy that will eventually drive an electrolyser will be stored in a battery for no reason. Any report that suggests an electrolyser needs guaranteed 100% uptime backed by chemical storage has the same amount of credibility as a report that suggests all PV will be polysilicon or thin film. > That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation? Because you are trying to say that storage is a constraint to using renewable generation. And the form to compare doesn't matter. It's the elemental material you need to extract used in technology that is currently commercially viable. > It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying. Fertile material isn't fissile material. Even in a closed fuel cycle (which is not a thing that exists in reality) you still need startup fuel material, and none of the proposed over unity breeder scenarios have a fast enough doubling time to be useful. That's a very nice double standard where the technology that actually exists and has a tens of GWh/yr supply chain already 90% built has to have already solved the problem to be feasible, but vague hand waving at reactor designs and fuel cycles that don't even exist as a prototype get a pass. > Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it There are thousands of TWh of sites with suitable geography. Only a fraction of a percent need to pass environmental feasibility to cover the plurality of storage. > The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume. Then why did he repeatedly say thing like sodium ion has yet to show industrial scale feasibility mere weeks after CATL announced that they were building out an industrial scale pipeline having already finished proving feasibility? Why not include Zinc Bromide that was developed in the university whose logo he put on the report?
bryanlarsen 4y ago
Lithium (element #3) is a very abundant resource and widely distributed across the Earth. Saying we don't have enough is laughable. At certain price levels some of it is uneconomical to extract, but the price today is very different than the price when that report was written.
- evilos 4y ago
  The report doesn't even mention price. That is a whole other level of analysis. The fact is, the known global reserves of several minerals (not just lithium) needed for a primarily wind/solar grid are insufficient for today's battery tech. We need a new plan. Underground hydrogen storage looks more promising than batteries, but again we don't have anything scalable ready to go today in terms of cheap energy storage.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    That's why the report is completely useless. "proven reserves" is a function of price. It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe. And all the elements in a LiFePO4 battery are exceedingly common.
    - evilos 4y ago
      > It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe. This is a non sequitur. There is a limited amount of anything on Earth. The pertinent question is: can we get enough of these minerals economically to use them as storage by 2050. If it is not economical, it won't happen. If you think extracting more than 4x the known global reserves of lithium is going to be economical, I don't know what to tell you.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        The 10x price increase that Lithium has experienced is going to expand reserves by a heck of a lot more than 4X.

by evilos 4y ago

fulafel 4y ago

Lithium batteries (as focused by the paper) are attractive for mobile applications, for grid storage the energy density is not very important and li-ion batteries have disadvantages like going up in flames frequently. There are lots of overlapping options for running the grid with renewables from other battery chemistries to hydrogen, pumped hydro storage, long distance hvdc, hourly pricing to cut demand peaks, etc.

evilos 4y ago
Yes there are many competing battery technologies in the works right now and I sincerely hope that one of them turns out to be manufacturable/scalable. Or any kind of energy storage becomes cheap at Terra-watt hour capacities. But right now, it's just a bunch of 'maybes'. The fact that we don't have a solid plan RIGHT NOW for something so important is alarming. Everyone is just hoping it will work out. Maybe we'll find a good cheap battery. Maybe we can unify our grid and build thousands of miles of HVDC interconnects. Maybe we can find more pumped hydro sites. In the absence of a buildable storage solution for renewables today, we should be building the only other scalable clean energy technology we have: Nuclear energy. No energy storage. No brand new grid. No massive expansion in mining. Thankfully, more people are coming around to this. No it won't cover 100% of our energy. But it is an incredibly underutilized tool. We should at a minimum, replace all coal power plants with nuclear.
- fulafel 4y ago
  Even if we keep looking at only batteries for grid storage instead of all the estabilished and proven ways: the predicted lithium shortage would happen gradually over O(100 years), leading to rising cost of lithium batteries which should give lots of lead time for investment in alternatives, of which we have many, both in old ones (pre-lithium) and many prospective ones under development. IMO the more alarming problems currently in climate change are the missing plan for global fossils rampdwn and solving the international-relations collective action problem of enacting the required energy saving policies in a coordinated and fair way.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

You're trying to use this to push nuclear, but 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decadeor two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years. Lithium has larger reserves, is mined in larger quantities at lower impact than uranium, and won't even be relevant to grid storage because in contradiction to Michaux's claims that he's the only one to ever consider the idea of a different chemistry, nobody is assuming there will be a week of NMC batteries for every watt of renewables. There were multiple news items about sodium ion, zinc bromide, iron batteries, pumped hydro, thermal storage, and a-caes being released the entire time he was fishing through ancient LCAs and IEA reports to try and claim there isn't enough Tellereum to make solar panels that don't contain any or not enough Niobium to make dual wound generators with no permanent magnets.

evilos 4y ago
He considers LFP in his more recent work and you still run into mineral constraints. Even if you take his 4 week buffer to 48 hours. > 1kg of lithium gets you 1kW of diurnal storage for a decade or two, whereas 1kg of Uranium gets you 1kW of power production for at most 8 years That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation? It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying. > There were multiple news items about... Oh please, the news is saying we've solved nuclear fusion. The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume. Come back to me when we're pumping out gigawatt hours of storage. Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it. No we can't just dig the reservoirs anywhere because then the energy payback goes negative.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Even if you take his 4 week buffer to 48 hours. Stil 4x as long as any serious proposal and still assumes all low grade heat and all energy that will eventually drive an electrolyser will be stored in a battery for no reason. Any report that suggests an electrolyser needs guaranteed 100% uptime backed by chemical storage has the same amount of credibility as a report that suggests all PV will be polysilicon or thin film. > That is an absolutely cursed comparison. What forms of these elements are you talking about? Why are you comparing energy storage to energy generation? Because you are trying to say that storage is a constraint to using renewable generation. And the form to compare doesn't matter. It's the elemental material you need to extract used in technology that is currently commercially viable. > It doesn't matter. We have enough U and Th to power humanity for millennia. We only use 0.7% of the U we mine for fucks sake. We're not even trying. Fertile material isn't fissile material. Even in a closed fuel cycle (which is not a thing that exists in reality) you still need startup fuel material, and none of the proposed over unity breeder scenarios have a fast enough doubling time to be useful. That's a very nice double standard where the technology that actually exists and has a tens of GWh/yr supply chain already 90% built has to have already solved the problem to be feasible, but vague hand waving at reactor designs and fuel cycles that don't even exist as a prototype get a pass. > Pumped hydro is great, there's not enough suited geography for it There are thousands of TWh of sites with suitable geography. Only a fraction of a percent need to pass environmental feasibility to cover the plurality of storage. > The report was constrained to tech that was commercially available in volume. Then why did he repeatedly say thing like sodium ion has yet to show industrial scale feasibility mere weeks after CATL announced that they were building out an industrial scale pipeline having already finished proving feasibility? Why not include Zinc Bromide that was developed in the university whose logo he put on the report?

bryanlarsen 4y ago

Lithium (element #3) is a very abundant resource and widely distributed across the Earth. Saying we don't have enough is laughable. At certain price levels some of it is uneconomical to extract, but the price today is very different than the price when that report was written.

evilos 4y ago
The report doesn't even mention price. That is a whole other level of analysis. The fact is, the known global reserves of several minerals (not just lithium) needed for a primarily wind/solar grid are insufficient for today's battery tech. We need a new plan. Underground hydrogen storage looks more promising than batteries, but again we don't have anything scalable ready to go today in terms of cheap energy storage.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  That's why the report is completely useless. "proven reserves" is a function of price. It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe. And all the elements in a LiFePO4 battery are exceedingly common.
  - evilos 4y ago
    > It's not like fossil fuels where it is plausible that there are limited amounts. Elements are created by the same processes that formed the universe. This is a non sequitur. There is a limited amount of anything on Earth. The pertinent question is: can we get enough of these minerals economically to use them as storage by 2050. If it is not economical, it won't happen. If you think extracting more than 4x the known global reserves of lithium is going to be economical, I don't know what to tell you.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      The 10x price increase that Lithium has experienced is going to expand reserves by a heck of a lot more than 4X.