3 ms·

> Look at the the lowest point of energy demand. That's base load. How big is it relative to the peak of energy demand? Depends on the season, but it's usually

> Look at the the lowest point of energy demand. That's base load. How big is it relative to the peak of energy demand? Depends on the season, but it's usually 70-80% of peak demand. So, the vast majority of energy demand is in fact base load. I'm really confused about why renewable proponents talk about base load all the time - it's really not relevant to decarbonization of the grid. I think this is just a confusion of terminology. What "renewable proponents" are talking about is baseload power plants. To quote the Wikipedia article that you linked to: "Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants." If you've been missing that key piece of terminology, I can see the source of the confusion. People just call this "base load" to be short, for various reasons. You can criticize this if you want to, but that is what is happening. > The majority of Germany's electricity comes from fossil fuels [1]. It's not a mostly renewable grid, occasionally supplemented by peaker plants. It's a majority fossil fuel grid supplemented by renewables. By comparison, here's France's electricity production [2]. One of these is a mostly decarbonized grid. The other is a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables here and there. This has nothing to do with my previous comment. I have no idea what point you're trying to get at. > This is an idea that no sane grid operator would ever accept. First of all, most of these vehicles actually lose energy in cold weather [3]. You're really confused about a lot of things in this part of the discussion. EVs have less range in winter because more of the energy is being used to heat the cabin, and that was done with resisitive heating until recently (more vehicles are starting to use heat pumps). The grid operator would not be insane, except from the point of view of a very traditionalist grid operator. The future is dynamic. > The market demonstrates otherwise. It really doesn't? The market demonstrates that demand has risen sharply, and it will take time for production to catch up. Every demand spike results in a "shortage".

mbesto 4y ago
> EVs have less range in winter because more of the energy is being used to heat the cabin, and that was done with resisitive heating until recently (more vehicles are starting to use heat pumps). I thought it was this PLUS the fact that lithium batteries degrade quicker in freezing temps? https://www.livescience.com/61334-batteries-die-cold-weather.html https://www.livescience.com/61334-batteries-die-cold-weather...
- coder543 4y ago
  I agree cold has some effects on batteries, but the main impact on EV range is related to heating, so linking an article on EVs is not very useful when talking about stationary storage. Batteries generate heat when charging and discharging, so grid batteries should naturally keep themselves warm, but maybe in extreme climates it would be worth adding some heat pumps to keep them in the optimal temperature range for longevity. It all depends on how the cost calculations work out, but it is not some major obstacle.
  - mbesto 4y ago
    > Batteries generate heat when charging and discharging /scratches head. Huh? How do you explain why my iPhone drains so much quicker in the cold then, if it's able to heat itself from the discharge? > but it is not some major obstacle. Ignoring efficiency of battery consumption is a hilarious oversight. If it costs you energy ("lets just pump heat pumps on them") to keep an energy source from depleting faster, then you're still depleting energy faster because of said energy required to heat the thing. That's not trivial.
    - coder543 4y ago
      A tiny battery generates a very tiny amount of heat. Batteries have internal resistance, so charging and discharging is not perfectly efficient. Larger batteries generate much more heat by moving larger amounts of energy. Secondly, consider the relationship between volume and surface area. Volume grows to the power of 3, and area grows to the power of 2. A small battery naturally has a much lower ratio of volume to surface area than a big battery. With a higher ratio, it takes a lot longer for the heat to be lost to the cold because of how heat transfer works, and that's in addition to the larger batteries generating much more total heat energy. Thirdly, consider that the goal of an iPhone is to use as little power as possible so that your battery lasts as long as possible, which also means generating as little heat as possible. A grid battery does not have that same goal. It is not a "hilarious oversight". Heat pumps are incredibly efficient these days even in very cold weather and there are ways to mitigate the heat loss, such as insulation. Grid scale battery deployments up to this point are typically already done in small structures, so the batteries aren't just sitting out directly in the elements. Obviously it's better if you don't have to do anything at all, but it is a very legitimate option. Every system will have some losses, no matter what. A very efficient heat pump could result in less losses than relying on the batteries to resistively heat themselves in extreme cold. Just because it wouldn't work for a phone has nothing to do with how it would work for a grid battery, since scaling things up has a dramatic impact on efficiency for what we're discussing. For how condescending your comment seemed to be, you seem to be missing a lot of basic points. Please give people the benefit of the doubt. I didn't come here to be a jerk to anyone, I was trying to help people understand things they seemed to be missing, but HN got super toxic over this topic. Some of this stuff is very nuanced and difficult to explain, which means that some people have no patience for it. If I'm wrong about things, or make a mistake in my explanation, I'm always happy to learn, but your comment was not attempting to teach anything.
Manuel_D 4y ago
"base load power plant" is a meaningless term. Base load is a feature of energy demand. Power plants produce energy, the same power plant might serve peak load, base load, or both. EVs are not a solution to energy storage. Even ignoring the challenge of getting people to hook their cars up to the grid, the battery production figures aren't remotely close to what we need. People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially. We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates. Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-rise-for-first-time-to-an-average-of-151-kwh/#:~:text=After%20more%20than%20a%20decade,last%20year%20in%20real%20terms https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-....
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  > People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially. I think the incredible success of the transistor industry has created some very unrealistic expectations about the pace of technological advance more generally. I know this is a fallacy I used to fall for. If a pocket sized computer today can beat out a supercomputer the size of a small building from when I was a kid, anything seems possible. But in reality, the rapid miniaturization of transistors is an extraordinary outlier.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates. That's a weird way of spelling enough batteries were produced in 2022 alone (about 760GWh) to replace the entire world's nuclear fleet with a renewable mix with minimal overprovision, more flexibility to meet peak demand and a lower forced outage rate. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z > Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices- https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-.... And this has nothing to do with reserves and everything to do with extraction. The price spike of lithium was a combination of unpredicted demand and the supply dip from covid (because brine ponds take about 3 years to process). Lithium will be irrelevant to grid storage anyway. There are already two GW scale sodium ion factories running and the supply chain CATL is building will completely dwarf them as it is much larger and compatable with the TWh/yr of existing lithium cell production and packaging facilities.

mbesto 4y ago

> EVs have less range in winter because more of the energy is being used to heat the cabin, and that was done with resisitive heating until recently (more vehicles are starting to use heat pumps). I thought it was this PLUS the fact that lithium batteries degrade quicker in freezing temps? https://www.livescience.com/61334-batteries-die-cold-weather.html https://www.livescience.com/61334-batteries-die-cold-weather...

coder543 4y ago
I agree cold has some effects on batteries, but the main impact on EV range is related to heating, so linking an article on EVs is not very useful when talking about stationary storage. Batteries generate heat when charging and discharging, so grid batteries should naturally keep themselves warm, but maybe in extreme climates it would be worth adding some heat pumps to keep them in the optimal temperature range for longevity. It all depends on how the cost calculations work out, but it is not some major obstacle.
- mbesto 4y ago
  > Batteries generate heat when charging and discharging /scratches head. Huh? How do you explain why my iPhone drains so much quicker in the cold then, if it's able to heat itself from the discharge? > but it is not some major obstacle. Ignoring efficiency of battery consumption is a hilarious oversight. If it costs you energy ("lets just pump heat pumps on them") to keep an energy source from depleting faster, then you're still depleting energy faster because of said energy required to heat the thing. That's not trivial.
  - coder543 4y ago
    A tiny battery generates a very tiny amount of heat. Batteries have internal resistance, so charging and discharging is not perfectly efficient. Larger batteries generate much more heat by moving larger amounts of energy. Secondly, consider the relationship between volume and surface area. Volume grows to the power of 3, and area grows to the power of 2. A small battery naturally has a much lower ratio of volume to surface area than a big battery. With a higher ratio, it takes a lot longer for the heat to be lost to the cold because of how heat transfer works, and that's in addition to the larger batteries generating much more total heat energy. Thirdly, consider that the goal of an iPhone is to use as little power as possible so that your battery lasts as long as possible, which also means generating as little heat as possible. A grid battery does not have that same goal. It is not a "hilarious oversight". Heat pumps are incredibly efficient these days even in very cold weather and there are ways to mitigate the heat loss, such as insulation. Grid scale battery deployments up to this point are typically already done in small structures, so the batteries aren't just sitting out directly in the elements. Obviously it's better if you don't have to do anything at all, but it is a very legitimate option. Every system will have some losses, no matter what. A very efficient heat pump could result in less losses than relying on the batteries to resistively heat themselves in extreme cold. Just because it wouldn't work for a phone has nothing to do with how it would work for a grid battery, since scaling things up has a dramatic impact on efficiency for what we're discussing. For how condescending your comment seemed to be, you seem to be missing a lot of basic points. Please give people the benefit of the doubt. I didn't come here to be a jerk to anyone, I was trying to help people understand things they seemed to be missing, but HN got super toxic over this topic. Some of this stuff is very nuanced and difficult to explain, which means that some people have no patience for it. If I'm wrong about things, or make a mistake in my explanation, I'm always happy to learn, but your comment was not attempting to teach anything.

Manuel_D 4y ago

"base load power plant" is a meaningless term. Base load is a feature of energy demand. Power plants produce energy, the same power plant might serve peak load, base load, or both. EVs are not a solution to energy storage. Even ignoring the challenge of getting people to hook their cars up to the grid, the battery production figures aren't remotely close to what we need. People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially. We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates. Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-rise-for-first-time-to-an-average-of-151-kwh/#:~:text=After%20more%20than%20a%20decade,last%20year%20in%20real%20terms https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-....

LarryMullins 4y ago
> People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially. I think the incredible success of the transistor industry has created some very unrealistic expectations about the pace of technological advance more generally. I know this is a fallacy I used to fall for. If a pocket sized computer today can beat out a supercomputer the size of a small building from when I was a kid, anything seems possible. But in reality, the rapid miniaturization of transistors is an extraordinary outlier.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates. That's a weird way of spelling enough batteries were produced in 2022 alone (about 760GWh) to replace the entire world's nuclear fleet with a renewable mix with minimal overprovision, more flexibility to meet peak demand and a lower forced outage rate. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z > Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices- https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-.... And this has nothing to do with reserves and everything to do with extraction. The price spike of lithium was a combination of unpredicted demand and the supply dip from covid (because brine ponds take about 3 years to process). Lithium will be irrelevant to grid storage anyway. There are already two GW scale sodium ion factories running and the supply chain CATL is building will completely dwarf them as it is much larger and compatable with the TWh/yr of existing lithium cell production and packaging facilities.