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What about the hours when the sun doesn’t shine? Is energy storage at such a scale feasible?
by unboxingelf 3y ago
What about the hours when the sun doesn’t shine? Is energy storage at such a scale feasible?
- konschubert 3y agoBatteries probably work for this, though prices will have to drop a little more for this. For seasonal storage, pumped storage and chemical (power to gas) are the more likely solutions. However, if might turn out that simply overbuilding solar is more cost effective than a lot of seasonal storage. And yes, you will always need backup generation capacity based on gas. But those plants can be inefficient and cheaply built, since they won’t run many hours in the year.
- djaychela 3y ago>And yes, you will always need backup generation capacity based on gas Always is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I would disagree on the longer term. Deep geothermal for one technology has the capacity to stop us needing gas for such use, and given enough storage, I think the whole system of operation will change.
- XorNot 3y agoIf you have deep geothermal you don't need the solar panels though. It's more cost-effective to build a geothermal plant that you run at full power all the time (because you sell energy by the kWh) rather then trying to cycle it up and down.
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- mschuster91 3y agoBuild enough geothermal to run base night load, use solar+wind+hydro+battery storage for day demand (and install a ton of electrolyzers to catch the unused electricity in overproduction times), keep a small reserve fleet of biogas/power-to-gas powered plants for emergencies, and get as many of the large consumers (as well as private loads such as ACs, EV chargers) as possible to agree on dynamic load shedding.
- elihu 3y agoThat does make sense; while you could run the geothermal 24/7, you might actually be better off only running it when you need to, since (as I understand it) geothermal can actually use up all the usable heat in an area, which can take a long time to "recharge" through conduction from surrounding rock.
- mschuster91 3y agoFun fact: if you do it right, you can reverse the geothermal heat pump to store energy in the form of heat in the ground in overproduction (i.e. zero or negative electricity rate) times. Heat pumps are pretty awesome.
- makeshitup 3y ago[flagged]
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- bottlepalm 3y agoBatteries are within an order of magnitude of significantly cutting fossile fuel usage in California at least: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-supply-trend https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio... Very scalable. It’s happening right now and accelerating.
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- poopbutt7 3y ago[dead]
- coding123 3y agoI don't see it this way. It's democratized. Each person is slowly going to get batteries as they try to avoid skyrocketing and unfair income based fees that are being introduced. The ultimate goal is to get off the grid, then get your friends off the grid, and so on and so forth. Cheap prismatic batteries from China baby. Price still have a bit to go, but it's very close.
- Lio 3y ago> Cheap prismatic batteries from China baby. Cheap, slave made batteries from China baby... but we'll just skip over that part, eh? They're cheap because some bugger ain't getting paid. Then there's the added bonus that that artificial cheapness drives everybody else out of the market. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/business/economy/forced-labor-china-supply-chain.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/business/economy/forced-l...
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- reducesuffering 3y agoWind helps supplement a lot most of the time. But there are times when there's no sun and no wind. For that, there's currently hydro, nuclear, and eventually batteries.
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- realusername 3y agoNo it's not realistic yet, it's already hard to get a day or two of consumption worth of batteries at a country level.
- elihu 3y ago"a day or two" would handle probably 90% of situations -- or 100% if there's enough solar overcapacity to power everything even on winter days (which probably involves good power grid connections to places like Arizona and Mexico). I think we need to close all the fossil fuel plants eventually, but keeping them online to be used maybe a few days or weeks a year is the most responsible way to use them.
- realusername 3y agoI wish it would be this way but unfortunately the worst solar months are really bad if you are on the northern hemisphere, in my place it's 3% of the yearly production in December and same in January. It's really badly uneven.
- elihu 3y agoIt might be like that in some places, but not everywhere. HVDC lines are pretty efficient. From this map it looks like Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and presumably Regular Mexico could be major producers for the rest of the US. https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolation-maps.html/#Map3 https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolat... In the Northwest we also have pretty good hydroelectric to handle the cold rainy months. Every region is in its own specific situation. Alaska would be a rough place for solar. I don't know if they do much hydroelectric or wind, but it seems like they'd be well situated for either. If nothing else works, there's always nuclear.
- jl6 3y agoThere are many ideas in the pipeline for grid scale storage to smooth day-to-day renewable intermittency, but we also need seasonal storage. We need the ability to draw energy from storage for extended periods (weeks or months), to cover low energy production during winter. The seasonal energy storage problem is one that humanity (and, really, life in general) has always faced. Many of our traditional food products are methods of preserving energy from the good times to tide us over in the bad times. We have traditionally adapted our activities for the season. I would imagine that part of the solution will be re-introducing seasonality to industry (e.g. making aluminium mostly in the summer).
- mgiampapa 3y agoAt the rate that solar costs are falling we really don't. We just over-build and energy during the day is nearly zero cost. There is no problem with curtailing excess solar production, or opportunistically use that daytime power curve to run non time critical industrial processes.
- genman 3y agoThen you would have a lot of excess energy during the summer and this energy would then look for an use. Metal and cement production are very likely candidates and seasonality would be then dictated by the market.
- Panzer04 3y agoDepends if the capital cost of the increased manufacturing capacity is worth it to make up for lost winter production. I'm not all that convinced. Also consider the workforce differences too, since presumably this would also need to be on leave for a portion of the year.
- mgiampapa 3y agoNo one knows exactly where economy of scale will land us, but much like Moore's law the trend in the data is there. Of course any major change in these industries are going to have knock on effects. We have been automating the steel production process in 1st world countries for years simply due to the cost of human labor. I expect that trend will continue and those plant operators will effectively end up being paid to work on other things on non operation days.
- Gibbon1 3y agoCalifornia installed about 5GW of batteries in the last three years. Today natural gas peaked at 16GW. Batteries at the same time were delivering 3.8GW. During the day renewables which is mostly but not all solar peaked at 18.5GW. So currently shifting my guess about 2 percent of the daily power generation. So not huge. But that didn't even exist three tears ago.
- tuna74 3y agoYes, it is a pretty amazing development. The "base load" concept is fast becoming irrelevant.
- alphanumeric0 3y agoMaybe gravity towers: https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-will-show-its-potential-in-2021 https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-will-show-i...
- realusername 3y agoThat's basically a very inefficient and expensive dam, concrete doesn't cost nearly the same price as water and unlike water will break.
- Ekaros 3y agoGravity towers are pretty poor. For simple math you need to lift/drop 1 tonne a 367 km to store 1 MWh of energy.
- defrost 3y agoThis is what an actual 25 MW Gravity Energy Storage facility looks like under construction in China: https://www.energyvault.com/project-cn-rudong https://www.energyvault.com/project-cn-rudong Apparently you can use multiple weights in parallel ... https://vimeo.com/647372871 https://vimeo.com/647372871
- elihu 3y agoLet's see: it takes 9.8 joules to lift 1 kg by 1m. Let's say the tower is 100m high. The video says the blocks are 30 tons. 1 joule is 0.000278 watt hours. 9.8 * 30000 * 100 * 0.000278 * 0.0001 = 0.81732 kilowatt hours per 30 ton brick. They claim they can store 100 mwh of energy. So, that's 100000 / 0.81732 = about 122,351 bricks. From the top of the building it looks like it stores about 22x24 cubes per level, assuming the parts that aren't following the grid pattern are the lifts. So, 528 cubes per level. That would mean they need 231 levels of upper cube storage at an average height of 100 meters above the lower cube storage area, and it looks like they've only got about 29 total so far. The math seems suspicious, but maybe my assumptions are wrong, or I made a calculation error. The structure might continue underground quite some distance, or the 30 ton cubes in the video aren't what they're using on the actual structure, or what looks like a single cube in the images are actually 8 or 27 cubes stacked into a bigger cube. I'd be curious how this compares to the cost of LFP batteries, which are somewhere around $100 per kwh or so (in China). My guess is it's probably a lot more expensive than batteries or pumped hydroelectric storage.
- maccard 3y agoAt least here in the UK, our electricity usage drops by 50% overnight and picks back up again cyclically. That helps hugely
- beefield 3y agoThe most low hanging fruit for seasonal storage is most likely thermal storage connected to district heating. At least technologically, not 100% sure on economics, but given the scalability laws (heat loss scales to square and heat capacity to cube of the size of the storage), I am optimistic there as well.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoSure, battery production volumes are increasing rapidly. Going from hundreds to thousands of gwh annually. Basically twh territory. 32 GW at a capacity factor of about 0.25 (about right for solar, I think) pumps out about 70twh annually. Sounds like a lot but the US consumes about 4000twh per year. So this only represents about 1.7% of its overall energy production. The US is still catching up with other countries that source a larger percentage from solar already (e.g. China, Germany). I think globally it's around 5% currently. But undeniably the IRA is delivering big time in terms of economic stimulation and the bootstrapping of what are no doubt going to be very profitable businesses. And as a side effect, a lot of renewable energy capacity is coming online very rapidly. Those car batteries could be cycled daily of course. There's will be an order of magnitude more battery on the roads (just in cars) than you can charge with this amount of solar. Of course those cars don't discharge all that much. Mostly they don't drive anywhere near their maximum range on a daily basis and are near fully charged most of the time. So, that's going to be tens of twh that is ready to be used, in principle. We'll probably never utilize most of that available capacity for grid usage. Not because we can't but because there are more economical forms of storage than car batteries that are also becoming available. In other words, we'll have lots of redundant storage options. Domestic battery, grid battery, truck batteries, buses, ships, cars, etc. Tens, hundreds of twh of capacity.
- AdamN 3y agoAside from energy storage, which the other comments touch, there is also the use of variable pricing to drive demand during peak solar production hours. Factories and other big users would have their most intensive work aligned to when energy is cheapest during the day. That way any needed storage is minimized.
- ThatPlayer 3y agoProblem is peak electricity usage is 4-9pm when people come home from work, turn on the A/C, TVs, stoves, lights, etc. Residential users, not factories. Moving that peak is not feasible unless you're somehow changing the standard 9 to 5 workday. So raising peak hours prices too much will just hurt a majority of people California has already mandated migrating plans to variable pricing, because there's so much solar. They call it time-of-use plans, and that's where I'm pulling 4-9pm from. Weekend peak hours are also priced lower because more people are home during the day and the peaks are lower. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/balancing_authority/CISO https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Last weekend's lowered peaks are a bit less noticable because of the holiday Monday though.
- bushbaba 3y agoPumped hydro storage would likely work
- shapefrog 3y agoBurning gas or coal 24 hours a day because "the sun only shines for 8 hours" is the kind of gigabrain solution that the "what about when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesnt blow" crowd like the most. The real answer; burn something, and enjoy the 8 hours when the sun is shining to get electricity that is cheaper.