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Hornsdale Power Reserve was nowhere even close to being the biggest energy storage facility, even when it was constructed. At that time, the biggest facility wa
by scq 4y ago
Hornsdale Power Reserve was nowhere even close to being the biggest energy storage facility, even when it was constructed. At that time, the biggest facility was the Bath County Pumped Storage Station at 24,000 MWh, which has since been surpassed again.
- Gwypaas 4y agoOr just take any hydro electric dam. The Swedish hydro power currently stores 17.7 TWh. It is not a battery in how it can fluctuate due to natural flow concerns, but some fluctuations are fine.
- Manuel_D 4y agoDams are geographically limited. You can't just build more of them. A fully decarbonized grid's ability to build renewables is largely determined by the availability of hydroelectricity for dispatchable power. Sweden gets ~40% of its electricity from hydro, another 40 from nuclear, and 20 from intermittent sources.
- moloch-hai 4y agoA fully decarbonized grid's ability to build renewables is, in fact, not at all determined by the availability of (watershed) hydroelectricity. In particular, hydro storage can be built in hundreds of times as many places as watershed hydro generation. And, there are numerous other practical storage methods. Ready combined-cycle gas generation capacity is more important, most places. Those will be incrementally converted to consume imported synthetic ammonia.
- Manuel_D 4y ago> Ready combined-cycle gas generation capacity is more important, most places. Those will be incrementally converted to consume imported synthetic ammonia. Synthetic ammonia that comes from where? Ammonia is currently produced by steam reformation, which emits CO2. You're talking about electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, and using renewable energy to carry out the Haber process. Nobody is using this strategy of energy storage, so it's priceless in a very literal sense: there is no way to estimate how much such a system would cost. I'd take an expensive solution over a priceless solution any day.
- moloch-hai 4y agoSynthetic ammonia will come from electric synthetic ammonia production plants. A few production-scale plants are already under construction, but of course hundreds more will be needed. Ammonia will not be, primarily, a storage medium, but a transportation medium and fuel, although it stores well under light pressure. Any tropical country can put up a solar farm and begin exporting ammonia to places less blessed with reliable sunshine -- for fertilizer, at first. Insisting technologies that people are already spending billions of dollars on building out were not first shown to be viable is a peculiar position to take.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoEfficiency of producing Ammonia is 15%? How is this ever going to be practical?
- moloch-hai 4y agoWhen marginal cost of energy is zero, other things than energy efficiency become more important. But where is this 15% figure coming from?
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoYou are assuming a very ideal scenario, which is dangerous. Even so, do you have another figure? This is a complex molecule, it is naturally inefficient to produce compared to hydrogen, which is below 50%.
- witrak 4y agohttps://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/we're-going-to-need-a-lot-of-solar-panels/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/we're-going-to...
- Gwypaas 4y agoYou can increase their peak power production to deal with the variability. For example this hydro plant, about the size of a nuclear reactor, maxes out at ~1 GW while the production is on average 250 MW. In other words, it facilitates renewables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harspr%C3%A5nget_hydroelectric_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harspr%C3%A5nget_hydroelectric...