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Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
- fennecfoxen 11y agoThe other reason energy storage could get big in the next several years is an elevated risk of blackouts due to aggressive retirement of coal-fired power plants -- blackouts like the one in Washington last week that shut down several government agencies (e.g. the Department of Energy) and which was probably related to the shutdown of the Potomac River Generating Station.
- tertius 11y agoEither that or more Gen3+ Nuclear. Why not both I would say.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoNuclear plants take years to build and have shitty failure scenarios. Best to stopgap coal until renewables take over with combined cycle natural gas plants, fueled by cheap natgas from fracking. It's not perfect, but those natural gas plants will still be kept around as peaking plants and they're an order of magnitude cleaner than coal plants (as well as producing much less CO2 per unit of power generated).
- jimktrains2 11y ago> Nuclear plants take years to build and have shitty failure scenarios That's only because we won't build any newer designs that don't have shitty failure modes and insist that we keep old reactors with very shitty failure modes online, though.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI don't disagree that we can build better designs. I disagree that we can build them quickly and cheap. According to the OECD: "As nuclear power plants are complex construction projects, their construction periods are longer than other large power plants. It is typically expected to take 5 to 7 years to build a large nuclear unit (not including the time required for planning and licensing)." "Between 2002 and 2008, for example, cost estimates for new nuclear plant construction rose from between $2 billion and $4 billion per unit to $9 billion per unit, according to a 2009 UCS report, while experience with new construction in Europe has seen costs continue to soar."
- 6d0debc071 11y agoHow does that compare with other sources? 5 Years and a few billion doesn't seem that bad to me. Even plans for building a few thousand new homes can be over the next ten to fifteen years.
- fennecfoxen 11y agoAll the modern design proposals are to mass-produce smaller units -- sometimes, completely sealed units -- which would then be installed several to a site, and maybe sent back to the manufacturer to be refurbished at periodic intervals. This is the "save money by mass production" economies-of-scale approach, as opposed to "save money by being more efficient with large custom-built plants" economies-of-scale approach which has failed the industry and led to many of those ballooning costs. (Whether we have the regulatory wherewithal to go with that plan is another matter, but the very idea of reusing the same design over and over does help keep compliance costs down, and you can focus on site-selection costs.)
- jimktrains2 11y agohttp://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/ http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/ puts the costs of a coal and natural gas plant right in that price range, though.
- 7952 11y agoSurely the main cause of failure is human rather than the actual design. Nuclear stations may be safe, but that comes at an increasing cost in money and complexity. How do we deal with the institutional failings that allowed us to build "old reactors with very shitty failure modes". Stop blaming it on the tech. I want reactors that are simple enough to be cheap and easy.
- MichaelApproved 11y agoHumans will always make mistakes, even within the design process. Nuclear is a dangerous technology to make a mistake with. Diablo Canyon Power Plant was partially built backwards, by mistake. It's absurd. The company updated its plans and added structural supports designed to reinforce stability in case of earthquake. In September 1981, PG&E discovered that a single set of blueprints was used for these structural supports; workers were supposed to have reversed the plans when switching to the second reactor, but did not. According to Charles Perrow, the result of the error was that "many parts were needlessly reinforced, while others, which should have been strengthened, were left untouched." Nonetheless, on March 19, 1982 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided not to review its 1978 decision approving the plant's safety, despite these and other design errors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
- wstrange 11y agoAll technologies are dangerous, but nuclear is one of the safest forms of power (deaths per Kwh generated). For the sake of the environment we need to get over our irrational fear of nuclear power.
- MichaelApproved 11y agoI just quoted an article where the builders of the power plant built part of the plant backwards. The fear is justified and rational.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> Stop blaming it on the tech. I want reactors that are simple enough to be cheap and easy. Find a way to put people in charge who aren't irresponsibly incompetent then. Until then, nuclear isn't a feasible option.
- snowwrestler 11y agoThat plant stopped generating in 2012, so I'm not seeing the connection to last week's power outage.
- fennecfoxen 11y agoThe plant had peak-load units which would have been spun up, if they still existed. (Alternatively, if the grid had lots of energy-storage devices around, it would have used those instead.)
- api 11y agoIf we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just build transmission lines, more solar/wind, and more storage even if it were marginally more expensive just to avoid the headaches of nuclear energy.
- Shivetya 11y agoWell one stumbling block is that we need to get thousands more people trained to service these energy storage facilities, let alone the windmills and solar panels. There is already a shortage there as the skill set is not one side, part electrician, part mechanical engineer, and so on.
- nine_k 11y agoWith automation cutting more jobs in other industries, this could actually be beneficial. I don't think that training someone to be a serviceman on a solar plant takes as much pain as e.g. training a good programmer or a mechanical engineer.
- digikata 11y agoThere's no reason you couldn't bring up a infrastructure for technician level training to get those spots filled. I think you could just tap into the bureaucracy for existing job re-training efforts and it would work out fairly well.
- marze 11y agoFortunately, solar photovoltaic doesn't need servicing. Energy is big business, revenue will be there for servicing once market share is there.
- intrasight 11y agoSolar photovoltaic probably needs more servicing per kWh than any other method. If those panels aren't clean, you don't get the expected return.
- mrfusion 11y agoIf utilities install these batteries near the last mile, would that also cut down on power outages during storms?
- eigenvector 11y agoProbably not since most radial power systems are not designed to support islanded operation for a segment of the system. Grid batteries will likely be designed to automatically disconnect during grid outages just like distributed generation.
- aharonovich 11y agobut grid-edge storage does help a bit to resiliency of grid.
- mrfusion 11y agoRandom idea, if batteries are cheap enough could we charge them up and ship them on trains back forth instead of building high voltage transmission lines?
- jeffasinger 11y agoI had the same thought reading the article, but after some thought, I doubt it. Grid transmission can be as low as 0.5% per 100 miles already. Batteries lose about 10% of the energy by storing it, that leaves you with needing to go at least 2000 miles in order to make up the battery loss difference, plus needing the energy to move the batteries physically.
- ch4s3 11y agoFloat them down a river. \s
- intrasight 11y agoTrue. They float plenty of coal on the rivers here in Pittsburgh
- jbert 11y agoPerhaps stretch out a flow battery with a pair of pipelines? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery We could repurpose those oil pipelines we no longer need. :-)
- crpatino 11y agoBatteries are cheap to charge in-place. Once you load those into a train you have to add the cost (both economic and in energy conversion rates) of moving the whole mass around in a diesel powered vehicle. We already do that with alkaline batteries, and we pay premium price per BTU because of the convenience of begin able to carry small quantities of electricity around. But if you want to move city-powering amounts of it (think millions of Megawatt-hour), I am guessing a grid is more efficient.
- IanDrake 11y ago>This leads to what seems to be a paradoxical situation. A battery that is more expensive than the average price of grid electricity can nonetheless arbitrage the grid and save one money. That’s math. Missing in the math is logic. If enough people do this, the price will even out and the arbitrage opportunity will vanish. It's like an arbitrage trading a model that makes money when paper trading but loses money when live because the effects of live trades on the market wasn't considered.
- Guvante 11y agoThe fact that an arbitrage opportunity will not always be available does not mean that arbitrage opportunity does not exist. Also electricity companies would be very slow to adjust to reduced demand by lowering prices, making this work for longer than a naive analysis would predict.
- hueving 11y ago>The fact that an arbitrage opportunity will not always be available does not mean that arbitrage opportunity does not exist. Spotting a leftover cookie on the table means you will probably be able to get a free cookie. It doesn't mean that you have found a way to solve world hunger.
- Guvante 11y agoEverything you have said can be said about literally every possible opportunity to make money outside of those that leverage sweat equity. If you want to say something about his idea that is specific you could add value. For instance attempting this arbitrage is a risk transference since you are betting that the technology of batteries won't catch up before you have made back your capital investment.
- 7952 11y agoAlso, it will usually be more profitable to build more generating capacity, reduce demand or improve the grid. You can build massive arrays of expensive batteries but you probably don't want to.
- kumarski 11y agoThere's still more ROI for humanity in changing our consumption behavior. There's resource limitations on lithium ion, lest we run into the same scenario.
- crpatino 11y agoWould you care to elaborate? I am not sure I understand your point.
- bjelkeman-again 11y agoCompressed air systems don't need lithium though.
- mathgeek 11y agoOne thing that kept coming to mind while reading all of this article's details on different methods for storing and selling and buying power at the peaks and valley of pricing was this: Electricity in our homes is so widespread and popular because it just works. We don't need to think short-term about how or when we use it (although we should and can if you want to). You flip a switch, the light comes on, and you flip the switch again when you're done. In my mind, there are only two factors that need to be there for widespread adoption: the price needs to come down, and the battery or other storage medium needs to just disappear into the background of in-home electricity usage. Most people will just want to see a lower bill without any costs to their ease of use regarding electricity.
- james-skemp 11y agoRenters. Every time I hear about advances in renewable energy I get a little sad. I've rented for the last decade plus, and unless I get married and decide to settle down, will probably continue to rent for the next decade plus. Homeownership would allow me to take advantage of these sorts of advances, but so would the ability to take advantage of this as a renter. Looks like only ~35% of US households rent, according to http://www.nmhc.org/Content.aspx?id=4708%20 http://www.nmhc.org/Content.aspx?id=4708%20 , so perhaps that's why.
- prostoalex 11y agoYour landlord, however, has an incentive to install solar (and claim the relevant tax credit) in order to increase the attractiveness of his rental by advertising lower utility bills.
- bjelkeman-again 11y agoWhere I live, in Sweden, you can. I purchased shares in a wind power coop. It feeds me all the electricity I need wherever I live in the country, at cost of production. And with interest rates at effective zero here the investment is significantly better than having the money in the bank.
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- nine_k 11y agoLet's calculate a bit. > Most flow battery companies have $100 / kwh capital cost as a target With typical power plants generating e.g. 500 MW 24 hours long, the storage is going to be 100000 $/MWh * 500 MW = 50M/hour. If we assume that a solar plant generates power for 12 hours, and the batteries feed the consumers for 12 more hours, it's going to be 600M for storage alone. The solar power plant with a peak power well above 500MW (to feed the day load + charge the batteries for the night) will cost you extra. I still think that a Thorium molten salt reactor is a strong contender in a price landscape like this. (It also has a nice ability to burn our current stockpiles of radioactive waste from Uranium reactors.)
- cwal37 11y agoIt stands out to me that pumped storage only gets a passing mention. We've had that as a proven energy storage technology for decades. People in the industry love to talk about it and file FERC applications for preliminary permits on the same sites over and over (I would know, I've had to read nearly all of them over the last year at work), but it's never deployed at the scale people expected. It'll be interesting to see if if PSH ever really takes off, or if it really does get left in the dust by batteries and other things.
- ridgeguy 11y agoPumped hydro works very well. Its main issue is that the enabling favorable combination of terrain (adjacent lakes or potential lakes at differing heights) and water supply aren't common, so cost-effective sites are restricted.
- dredmorbius 11y agoPumped hydro is virtually all deployed grid-scale storage -- 90%+ (and plus quite a bit as memory serves). It's cheap, effective, scalable, and highly efficient. It's also got limited sites and localized environmental impacts. Where you been hiding?
- cwal37 11y agoIt is most of deployed storage atm, but the bulk of that wasn't deployed recently. I'm staring at a very informative figure I just made last week that I can't share since it's a draft for a report, but if you glance at EIA 860 data you'll see the breakdown for storage by nameplate capacity is: Battery - 0.7% Compressed Air - 0.5% Concentrated Solar Power Storage - 1.3% (which doesn't always exactly count) Flywheels - 0.2% Pumped Storage - 97.4% You can also see that the average operational year for pumped storage is 1974, not anytime recent. You could weight the years by capacity, but most plants are pretty big, and it shouldn't change it too much. Also, pumped storage capacity only totals 21.6GW. As for where I've been, I've just been stupidly busy. I keep meaning to jump back in, but I never seem to have the time.
- jhallenworld 11y agoPush a train up a hill to store energy. Yes, someone is really doing this: http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/ http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/
- teamonkey 11y agoThat uses more-or-less the same principle as pumped-storage hydroelectricity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
- brownbat 11y agoExcept it takes a really big train to weigh as much as a lake. Pumped hydro is unbelievable. Tour a pumped hydro facility if you ever get the chance, and ask about the economics. They're buying a dollar of energy at night in Spring and selling it on hot summer days for something like five hundred. (Probably not quite that much, but it was a crazy ratio, to the point where efficiency barely matters - also, free energy from rain!)
- ridgeguy 11y agoIt actually can be that price multiple. Pumped hydro is one of those fast response storage technologies that can supply power for high price premium ancillary services (transient supply/load matching, peak shaving, etc.).
- ulrikrasmussen 11y agoThe ARES website claims that the cost of their train technology is only 60% of an equivalent pumped hydro facility [1]. This is pretty impressive, and I wonder how they do that. Maybe because a water pump is not just a turbine operating in reverse, and thus pumped hydro needs separate equipment for charging/discharging, whereas ARES can use the same? [1] http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/santa-barbara-energy-storage-environmental-integrity http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/santa-barbara-energy-storage...
- melling 11y agoGot any real numbers to back that up? I'm guessing that it just feels good to bang on your chest and make that call. The reality is probably a lot different. How are all the megacities going to get enough solar and wind power, for example? Tokyo, NYC, Mexico City, Shanghai, etc. all running from solar? How big will the grid need to be to power NYC? Anyway, I'd love to see a deeper analysis and less chest pounding.
- diminoten 11y agoHN isn't where you go to learn, HN is where you go to expand the realm of possible information for you to consume. When you read a comment like the above, your response shouldn't be to demand for sources, your response should be to go research the topic on your own. This site would be much better if folks understood that HN itself isn't a place for someone to "get wonky". On my debate team, we had a rule of "no wonking". HN would be a better place if it too had the same rule.
- patcon 11y agoHm. Good point. I like that rule.
- melling 11y agoIt certainly could and should be a place to learn. How do chest pounding statements add value, especially when they fall apart after the first question? There are definitely a lot of knowledgable people who read this site. Why wouldn't you want them to contribute and take deeper dives? Superficial conversations are essentially noise.
- diminoten 11y agoIf you don't see a qualitative potential difference between a quick reply (HN's comments section), and a well thought out article (HN submissions), then I can't help you. HN comments sections cannot be more than superficial. Anything more than superficial deserves to be put in a more accessible and readable place, as a topic in its own right.
- greggyb 11y agoIf there's a legitimate arbitrage opportunity for individual homeowners to buy a battery and charge it overnight to cover peak costs, there should be an even stronger case for energy companies to buy larger batteries, install them in low-land-cost areas, and do the thing themselves. If these peak plants are so expensive, then a major utility can save money using batteries rather than peak plants. The cost should be lower for a utility to do this than for individual homeowners to do so for equal capacities. So I ask are we seeing this behavior? On a slightly different note, it doesn't seem that the article is addressing vehicles. Battery powered cars are not yet practical enough for the mainstream, and aircraft are still entirely dependent on the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels. I could see batteries becoming feasible for cars "soon" with the current rate of advance, but charging stations don't make sense to me. You want easily accessed battery packs in cars and battery-swap stations. This is a huge infrastructure change, but for out-of-city travel (i.e. a trip where you would need to charge before you get to your destination), you want the equivalent of a gas station, which is 1-10 minutes for a stop, not 45+. As for aircraft, I don't see them using batteries soon.
- mark-r 11y agoI think you missed the part about studies that make the case that utilities could be doing this today. Utilities are conservative though, I don't expect them to jump in with both feet right away.
- greggyb 11y ago> This is, of course, speculative. We don’t know if the study findings scale to the whole of the United States. It’s back of the envelope math. Atop that, the study itself is an analysis, which is not the same value as experience. Hence my question. Do we actually see any utilities making steps in this direction?
- beat 11y agoThey're openly talking about it. Let's look again in ten years, given the lead time, conservatism, and regulatory concerns at this scale. "Fail fast" isn't really an option for the grid the way it is for software startups.
- URSpider94 11y agoOne problem that will surface is that the cost of our transmission infrastructure will have to be covered, one way or the other. Currently, with net metering, customers are able to arbitrage power at the retail price, while effectively making use of the grid for both pushing and pulling load. This would be like flying a round-trip from San Jose to Tokyo and back to SFO, and claiming that you only owe the airline for the Caltrain fare up the peninsula. The other issue is that our current infrastructure isn't designed for peer-to-peer transmission, with neighborhoods pumping large amounts of power into the transmission lines during peak solar hours. Some areas of Hawaii have had to put a moratorium on installing rooftop solar to prevent potential damage to the branch circuits. Long story short, it's not simply a matter of storage costs undercutting retail power costs, there are also maintenance costs for the grid that are invariant on demand, which will have to get paid one way or the other.
- driverdan 11y agoI think you misunderstood something in this article. The only stored power that would be on the grid would be from the power companies themselves, not the end users. End users wouldn't resell the power, they'd use it themselves.
- ridgeguy 11y agoThe growth of distributed solar + storage (i.e., zillions of residences having 10kW arrays and 25kWhr storage) is accelerating. Projections I've seen suggest that this distributed storage (which doesn't belong to the power companies) will be far larger than utility-scale storage such as discussed in the article. This presents real challenges in how to control that distributed storage and pay its owners for storage-related grid services.
- bjelkeman-again 11y agoWhy can't it just be a feed-in tariff? And if the consumer can consume using the network they can produce, in the other direction. The cable runs both ways, no?
- beat 11y agoOne of the best things about the solar/wind + storage combination is that it's decentralized and cheap at small scale. This makes serious electrification of remote and impoverished places viable. It reminds me of the wildfire spread of cell service in places that didn't have phones before, only on a larger and more important scale. Give a village cheap electricity, and awesome things will happen. This gets to another point that bugs me in these discussions... the pushback against wind/solar dominance by the pro-nuclear crowd. Insisting that nuclear power is the right way to go is western-centric. It's fine for the US, Europe, Japan, and other advanced nations that have the infrastructure to support it. But is it a solution for Peru? For Somalia? Of course not. Wind/solar/storage, on the other hand, is totally viable as a solution for even the poorest nations. This alone is an argument for solar over nuclear.
- steve19 11y agoWesterners arguing that Nuclear is better for them in no way means solar is not better for an African village in the middle of nowhere.... Or are you arguing that Westerns should adopt solar so that African villagers get slightly cheaper solar? That seems like an inefficient form of aid. On a side note: solar is not cheap on a small scale, it might be convenient, green, safe, etc. but not cheap (cheap infers low cost versus conventional power generation)
- beat 11y agoNo, I'm not arguing that Westerners should adopt solar as a form of aid for Africa. I don't see how you could have concluded that from what I said. And narrowly measuring "cheap" in cost per kwh does not address my point - that the up-front cost to get power at all is far cheaper for solar/wind + storage. A village is not a city. It doesn't need a gigantic power plant, and can't afford one. Look at it this way - I could buy myself a can of soda for a buck, or I could buy a bottling plant for a million bucks. In terms of cost-per-liter, the bottling plant is a huge bargain. But I don't need a bottling plant! It's actually useless to me. A can of soda? That's useful, and scaled correctly for my budget and needs. I don't think this is hard to understand.
- iamcurious 11y ago
- fokinsean 11y agoI don't know about that. /r/april30th2015
- notlisted 11y agoSilly question perhaps… If alternative energy sources in combination with batteries increase independence from those who supply it, and reduced demand during peak times allows rates to fall, isn't there a point where investments in infrastructure (or maintenance thereof) will stop being profitable, etc etc.
- ridgeguy 11y agoYes. This is the grid owners' nightmare at the moment. Their old business model is rapidly dissolving as the price of solar + storage falls ever further and more electricity users essentially disconnect from buying grid power. That revenue loss hits grid maintenance expenditures directly.
- rjurney 11y agoIf you haven't read Ramez's books, you're missing out. Check out Nexus, and then the sequels. Without a doubt, the best sci-fi I've read in a long time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_%28Ramez_Naam_novel%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_%28Ramez_Naam_novel%29
- D_Alex 11y agoOne thing to add: Electric cars. They come with energy storage in-built. By rough calculation, if 10% of cars in my city (Perth, Australia) were electric, their batteries could supply the entire city's demand for duration of about 2 hours (or 10% of demand for 20 hours etc). This could work really well for demand balancing and peak shaving - overcapacity (which in Perth is massive, since the policy is to maintain supply even on extremely hot days, when demand shoots up and generation capacity goes down) and spinning reserve could be tremendously reduced. I suspect some good software and a little hardware will be needed to account for the owners' needs optimally.
- bjelkeman-again 11y agoThere is going to be an interesting startup market around this is my prediction.
- aharonovich 11y agoHow lucky for me, I've just finished doing the same back of the envelope calculation for using a home storage system that would take advantage of Time-Of-Use rates, my conclusion was opposite - when he is concentrating on the gap between ~34c peak rate to ~15c minimum rate I've chosen to focus on the gap between the minimum rate to the ~19c standard tiered rate. the 3-4 cent difference means that you can only save, at the maximum, 3-4 cents per kwh consumed your storage. And storage is very far from this range. Nonetheless, I'm still very optimistic about other uses of storage and I am confident that I would find the right company to short, maybe a company that builds peaker plants.
- lancewiggs 11y agoShocked at the amount of support for nuclear here. Use the data - how much solar, wind and nuclear capacity had been installed in the last 5 years? Nuclear is not getting cheaper, not significantly, so what does this imply for the next five years? The answers are obvious, and non nuclear. New Zealand, where I live, declared itself nuclear free in 1984. We are currently generating 70-80% of our electricity using renewable/low/zero emission methods.
- maccard 11y agoApologies for the mobile link, but [0] says that in 2014 over 50% of your energy was from oil and coal. Have you a source on your claims? I know that many of the non-nuclear countries in Europe end up importing a lot of their power from neighbouring countries like France, who's main supply is nuclear. The big advantage of nuclear is it's relatively safe and readily available. How many people have been killed in nuclear related incidents in the past 30 years vs people killed in coal mines, for instance? [0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_New_Zealand http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_New_Zealand
- mauricemir 11y agoInteresting though the Compressed Air storage could have some "interesting" failure modes. Back when I was an Engineering Technician my thermo fluids lecturer commented that if the main reservoir for the labs compressed air system burst it would flatten the entire lab block.