3 ms·

Assuming you have an endless supply of food but can only take one bite per day and it means tomorrows bite will be a bit smaller. These storage systems are gen

Assuming you have an endless supply of food but can only take one bite per day and it means tomorrows bite will be a bit smaller. These storage systems are generally warrantied as 5000-10000 cycles with 85% capacity remaining in 20 years time. Guaranteed money today is better than saving a few cycles to maybe make money in 20 years time. Now also factor in discounting the risk etc. and the calculation is given. But the business case is of course calculated on having the entire construction cost be amortized with profit over a chosen period. With some days making more money than other. What batteries do are extending the time renewables flood the grid with cheap electricity and thus force nuclear reactors to throttle down, gas peakers to shut down etc. Or these thermal plants can bid negative ensuring they don’t have to turn off while hurrying on their own demise.

lucb1e 1y ago
Okay, I can follow that. I've noticed on electricitymaps.com that, for Germany, the coal component never disappears, no matter if you have optimal wind+solar conditions near the summer solstice and prices are far into the negatives. Apparently it's cheaper to let it run the power plant at negative prices for days, than to make it stop burning coal for those days. That renewables with storage would make that finally go away stands to reason But that fully relies on storage. The person you were responding to was asking whether small-scale solar panels make sense. As it is, during those hours where your solar panel is most effective, you can sign up to receive money for drawing electricity from the grid (if prices are negative enough that it outbids even the transportation costs and taxes). Having a solar panel at that time... you might as well turn it off and get a price that's better than free. Storage would be what we need much more urgently than an extra 800Wp solar per household, then we could already turn off those coal plants for probably weeks at a time during summer
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  Yes. Phasing out coal is a multi step process. The next step is coal plants forced to become peakers thermally cycling daily because they are loosing too much. As seen in for example Australia: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant-in-extraordinary-survival-experiment/104461504 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant... The next step is being a reserve plant only activated seasonally. Finally rounding off with purely being a reserve plant and then decommissioning when it costs too much to even keep it runnable. And instead they make you a bunch of money a bog standard autumn day because the French and Swedish nuclear power decided to crap out.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Another possibility is retrofitting the coal plant with a thermal battery. https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy > 3) (medium term) The world-conquering dream is for our PV-based steam to replace fossil-generated steam at conventional power plants. That will let us feed electricity back into the grid using otherwise stranded generating assets (e.g. a coal plant). You might see this as a way to combine an existing, uncompetitive coal plant with thermal energy storage and captive renewables to give it economics more similar to a natural gas power plant. See also: "Thermal Energy Storage in Dirt for Repowering Decommissioned Coal Plants" (although I believe this assumes the storage is using power from the grid): https://findingspress.org/article/141340-thermal-energy-storage-in-dirt-for-repowering-decommissioned-coal-plants https://findingspress.org/article/141340-thermal-energy-stor...
    - kragen 1y ago
      While I think what Standard Thermal is doing is very interesting, and in particular may be very helpful for already-built thermal plants, I don't think they've solved the fundamental problem that large heat engines are really expensive to build compared to solar.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        But that's not a problem they're trying to solve, or one they need to solve.
        kragen 1y ago
        As I understand it, their market is dependent on it. They can't store electrical energy, only thermal energy, and their system is designed to store it at fairly high temperatures (they don't say explicitly, but I'm guessing 800° and up from the problems they report having to solve) which you can avoid doing if you're just targeting the process heat market. So turning their stored heat back into electrical energy is necessary for their process to make sense, and that requires a heat engine, such as a steam turbine. But utility-scale steam circuits cost more per watt than solar panels, and much more than batteries, the electrochemical kind.
- kragen 1y ago
  Typically ramping a coal plant up or down only takes a day or so, so if the prices stay negative for entire days, probably there's some kind of perverse incentive where the coal plant operator is getting paid to run the plant by someone else who is also having to pay a consumer to consume the energy generated.

lucb1e 1y ago

Okay, I can follow that. I've noticed on electricitymaps.com that, for Germany, the coal component never disappears, no matter if you have optimal wind+solar conditions near the summer solstice and prices are far into the negatives. Apparently it's cheaper to let it run the power plant at negative prices for days, than to make it stop burning coal for those days. That renewables with storage would make that finally go away stands to reason But that fully relies on storage. The person you were responding to was asking whether small-scale solar panels make sense. As it is, during those hours where your solar panel is most effective, you can sign up to receive money for drawing electricity from the grid (if prices are negative enough that it outbids even the transportation costs and taxes). Having a solar panel at that time... you might as well turn it off and get a price that's better than free. Storage would be what we need much more urgently than an extra 800Wp solar per household, then we could already turn off those coal plants for probably weeks at a time during summer

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
Yes. Phasing out coal is a multi step process. The next step is coal plants forced to become peakers thermally cycling daily because they are loosing too much. As seen in for example Australia: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant-in-extraordinary-survival-experiment/104461504 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant... The next step is being a reserve plant only activated seasonally. Finally rounding off with purely being a reserve plant and then decommissioning when it costs too much to even keep it runnable. And instead they make you a bunch of money a bog standard autumn day because the French and Swedish nuclear power decided to crap out.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Another possibility is retrofitting the coal plant with a thermal battery. https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy > 3) (medium term) The world-conquering dream is for our PV-based steam to replace fossil-generated steam at conventional power plants. That will let us feed electricity back into the grid using otherwise stranded generating assets (e.g. a coal plant). You might see this as a way to combine an existing, uncompetitive coal plant with thermal energy storage and captive renewables to give it economics more similar to a natural gas power plant. See also: "Thermal Energy Storage in Dirt for Repowering Decommissioned Coal Plants" (although I believe this assumes the storage is using power from the grid): https://findingspress.org/article/141340-thermal-energy-storage-in-dirt-for-repowering-decommissioned-coal-plants https://findingspress.org/article/141340-thermal-energy-stor...
  - kragen 1y ago
    While I think what Standard Thermal is doing is very interesting, and in particular may be very helpful for already-built thermal plants, I don't think they've solved the fundamental problem that large heat engines are really expensive to build compared to solar.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      But that's not a problem they're trying to solve, or one they need to solve.
      - kragen 1y ago
        As I understand it, their market is dependent on it. They can't store electrical energy, only thermal energy, and their system is designed to store it at fairly high temperatures (they don't say explicitly, but I'm guessing 800° and up from the problems they report having to solve) which you can avoid doing if you're just targeting the process heat market. So turning their stored heat back into electrical energy is necessary for their process to make sense, and that requires a heat engine, such as a steam turbine. But utility-scale steam circuits cost more per watt than solar panels, and much more than batteries, the electrochemical kind.
kragen 1y ago
Typically ramping a coal plant up or down only takes a day or so, so if the prices stay negative for entire days, probably there's some kind of perverse incentive where the coal plant operator is getting paid to run the plant by someone else who is also having to pay a consumer to consume the energy generated.