The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[bilby]

Improved batteries will likely make that kvetching totally out of date

No, they likely won't. There's a physical limit to battery storage, and we are pretty much there with Lithium batteries.

Energy density, maybe, but not in availability of raw materials. Lithium is a rare element, and that has provoked interest into alternatives like sodium-ion and flow batteries.

Energy density is important for things like automobiles. Not necessarily for power storage of PV systems.
What is needed there is cheap, long lifespan, and low maintenance.

So, hydroelectricity then.

Batteries fail on all three counts.

 

[bilby]

Can't be pure nuke because nukes can't be made blackstart capable.

Hydro plants are the best blackstart option, and a nuke+hydro grid, with pumped-storage for load levelling, is just about the best ultra low carbon emissions system possible. Add large scale production of synthetic gasoline and other liquid fuels for vehicles and legacy oil burning applications, and you can solve the entire fossil fuel problem, without any need to discourage or curtail energy use.

Adding wind or solar to such a grid is pointless and expensive. They still have a place (perhaps with battery storage) in small, off-grid, applications.

 

[lpetrich]

Energy density is important for things like automobiles. Not necessarily for power storage of PV systems.
What is needed there is cheap, long lifespan, and low maintenance.

So, hydroelectricity then.

Which has plenty of problems of its own, like not being very suitable for dry climates. An Australian ought to be familiar with that problem.

Batteries fail on all three counts.

Evidence?

 

[bilby]

Energy density is important for things like automobiles. Not necessarily for power storage of PV systems.
What is needed there is cheap, long lifespan, and low maintenance.

So, hydroelectricity then.

Which has plenty of problems of its own, like not being very suitable for dry climates. An Australian ought to be familiar with that problem.

Batteries fail on all three counts.

Evidence?

Cost: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf

Battery costs are in the order of hundreds of dollars per kWh. Compare wholesale electricity prices, which are around a thousandth of that cost. If a thousand times the cost is what you call "cheap", then batteries are cheap. Seriously, this isn't even close; That you are asking for evidence shows an embarrassing lack of interest on your part.

Lifespan: https://www.plicoenergy.com.au/blog/how-long-do-solar-batteries-last

Batteries last around 15 years. Pumped storage hydro dams have a lifespan of about a century, with the electromechanical gear lasting around 40 years.

Maintainence: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-warns-consumers-about-potentially-deadly-solar-batteries

Personally, I prefer my electrical infrastructure not to catch fire, but if it must, I would rather it didn't prove almost impossible for firefighters to extinguish. I sure as hell don't plan to strap one to my house - I quite like my house.

It took me nearly a minute to google those links; The information isn't hard to find (though it is usually hiding behind claims of how great batteries are - note that the first link above is effusive about prices falling to perhaps only $100/kWh, which is cheap for batteries, but mind-bogglingly expensive for electricity.

If you stop being starry eyed and innocent, and look at the facts rather than the spin, misdirection, and distraction, batteries are eyewateringly expensive today, but hold out the promise of maybe one day becoming merely very expensive indeed (assuming new technologies are developed, which is far from certain).

If they can divide the cost by about 5,000, multiply the lifespan by about three or four, and solve the currently hideous safety problems, then batteries might stop being a bad idea. I shalln't be holding my breath*.








*Unless next door's battery is burning, and giving off toxic smoke and fumes

 

[lpetrich]

Battery costs are in the order of hundreds of dollars per kWh. Compare wholesale electricity prices, which are around a thousandth of that cost.

Amazon.com: Power Sonic Rechargeable Sealed Lead Acid Battery PS-12180 12V 18.0 AH @ 20-hr. 12V 17.1 AH @ 10-hr., Gray : Automotive
It costs about $200/kWh, the cost of five of these batteries.

For a year with one charge/discharge cycle per day, that's 54 cents per day per kWh. For five years, that's 11 c/d/kWh.

Maintainence: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-warns-consumers-about-potentially-deadly-solar-batteries

Personally, I prefer my electrical infrastructure not to catch fire, but if it must, I would rather it didn't prove almost impossible for firefighters to extinguish. I sure as hell don't plan to strap one to my house - I quite like my house.

That's a problem with lithium-ion batteries, yes, but it does not seem to be a problem with most other kinds of batteries.

 

[steve_bank]

Nuclear power does require different standards than coal or gas fired plants. Materials and radiation.

A low probability of a osteopathic event id mot a zero probability of an event.

Part of the cost issue is that there is no standard design. You can put together a gas powered plant from commercial components.

Three Mile Island put the kibosh on nuclear power.

Water contamination here at Hanford. The Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

Radioactive contamination from the Rocky Flats Plant - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I have a relate who worked at Brookhaven Lab and reatives in the area. A long term leak conminated water and got into wildlife.

Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor | Environmental Restoration Projects | BNL

www.bnl.gov

There is a fear of nuclear power. If you think nuclear power should be less regulated, would you live next door to a nuke plant by choice?

 

[bilby]

would you live next door to a nuke plant by choice?

Fuck yes.

Certainly it's a safer place to live than next to any other industrial facility.

The worst possible nuclear power plant accident would be one in which the containment completely failed, and a significant volume of the radioactive inventory was spread over a wide area, as fine particles; While authorities did nothing for days, and then put in a half-arsed response.

We saw that at Chernobyl. The death toll was that of a medium sized industrial accident; Nuclear accidents have been demonstrated by the USSR to be not significantly more deadly, or more threatening to public safety and health, than other industrial accidents.

The difference in accidents at nuclear plants vs those at other kinds of power plant or factory, is NOT between catastrophic but rare accidents vs serious but frequent ones. It is between serious but rare accidents vs serious but frequent ones.

Nuclear power has had only one fatal accident in its entire history, and that accident was as bad as it could possibly be - but still killed fewer people than the contemporary Bophal disaster.

Do you remember Bophal? Is it constantly brought up whenever any new chemical plant is proposed? Are there TV miniseries and special documentaries made about it?

Bophal happened the same year as Chernobyl. It was worse than Chernobyl, by pretty much any measure you care to choose. So why are people worried about nuclear accidents, but unconcerned about chemical plant accidents?

Could it be that there is a vast effort being made to unreasonably denigrate nuclear power, whether intentionally, or as a consequence of ignorance? There doesn't seem to be any other reason why you would post your terror and unreason (and that of others) as though it were an argument against the industry.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Can't be pure nuke because nukes can't be made blackstart capable.

Hydro plants are the best blackstart option, and a nuke+hydro grid, with pumped-storage for load levelling, is just about the best ultra low carbon emissions system possible. Add large scale production of synthetic gasoline and other liquid fuels for vehicles and legacy oil burning applications, and you can solve the entire fossil fuel problem, without any need to discourage or curtail energy use.

I don't think you can blackstart any meaningful power plant, period. Blackstart capability is generally separate stuff located at some power plants. Say, pulling a starter cable on a small diesel generator, or taking a hand pump to charge up compressed air to kick over a bigger engine. That is used as the feed power to start up bigger things.

Adding wind or solar to such a grid is pointless and expensive. They still have a place (perhaps with battery storage) in small, off-grid, applications.

I think they have a place if your grid has power sinks that can be used for load leveling. Consider the example I've given before--cracking water. If you're using synthetic fuels for vehicles you're going to need to crack a lot of water. Pumped hydro is simply too small to handle the sort of swings you're going to see so you pretty much have to have some sink.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Energy density is important for things like automobiles. Not necessarily for power storage of PV systems.
What is needed there is cheap, long lifespan, and low maintenance.

So, hydroelectricity then.

Which has plenty of problems of its own, like not being very suitable for dry climates. An Australian ought to be familiar with that problem.

Batteries fail on all three counts.

Evidence?

How do you even question this??

Cost? A while back I was looking at life cycle costs on batteries. At the time if you had some magical source of free charging there was still no battery technology that was remotely competitive with the current power grid.

Lifespan? Most batteries are somewhere in the ballpark of 1000 cycles. Daily use that's three years.

 

[bilby]

I don't think you can blackstart any meaningful power plant, period. Blackstart capability is generally separate stuff located at some power plants. Say, pulling a starter cable on a small diesel generator, or taking a hand pump to charge up compressed air to kick over a bigger engine. That is used as the feed power to start up bigger things.

Sure. But the power required to start a hydro plant tends to be very small; And the output very large.

A tiny diesel generator connected to the sluice gate motors is sufficient, and providing such a unit is an utterly trivial fraction of the cost of the plant as a whole, so it's the obvious way to go.

 

[bilby]

I think they have a place if your grid has power sinks that can be used for load leveling. Consider the example I've given before--cracking water. If you're using synthetic fuels for vehicles you're going to need to crack a lot of water. Pumped hydro is simply too small to handle the sort of swings you're going to see so you pretty much have to have some sink.

Nonsense. Industrial processes (of all kinds) are best run pretty much continuously. The only reason you would choose NOT to do this would be if you had a power supply that was highly variable.

The model of constant base load (mostly from industry) plus variable peak demand above the base (mostly domestic) can be easily handled by nuclear plus hydro.

The problems with levelling come when you have large variations not only in demand, but also in supply - particularly when both are weather dependent. Coping with the increased demand for heating when insolation is low is not a big deal, unless you have lots of solar generation that vanishes at the same time that the demand arrives. Similarly, the weekday peak of domestic demand, as people arrive home from work, coincides with the setting sun.

The massive increase in gas peaker capacity in recent years is a direct consequence of the upswing in intermittent generation, and is a clear indicator that such generation is far from being the low carbon panacea it is painted as.

Adding intermittent power to supply intermittent sinks is doubly dumb - it's better all round to have constant sinks, and no uncontolled intermittent supply at all.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Energy density is important for things like automobiles. Not necessarily for power storage of PV systems.
What is needed there is cheap, long lifespan, and low maintenance.

So, hydroelectricity then.

Which has plenty of problems of its own, like not being very suitable for dry climates. An Australian ought to be familiar with that problem.

Batteries fail on all three counts.

Evidence?

How are batteries remotely viable? They are an intermittent power "source" that does nothing but store power. I recognize that battery storage in California is relatively high, but unless the batteries are absorbing surplus green energy (we aren't close to that in the US), they are merely sequestering energy for night time... at a loss. So more pollution during the day to power the night?

In order for batteries to work, we need, what 50%, 75% of the night time power source to be stored, meaning, we'd need to store all of that... times what large number for redundancy? Ignoring everything else about batteries, the mere volume of storage should scare people away from them immediately.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Battery costs are in the order of hundreds of dollars per kWh. Compare wholesale electricity prices, which are around a thousandth of that cost.

Amazon.com: Power Sonic Rechargeable Sealed Lead Acid Battery PS-12180 12V 18.0 AH @ 20-hr. 12V 17.1 AH @ 10-hr., Gray : Automotive
It costs about $200/kWh, the cost of five of these batteries.

For a year with one charge/discharge cycle per day, that's 54 cents per day per kWh. For five years, that's 11 c/d/kWh.

That's an automotive battery, not a deep cycle battery. You're not going to get anything like 5 years out of it using it like that. One year is probably more like it.

Maintainence: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-warns-consumers-about-potentially-deadly-solar-batteries

Personally, I prefer my electrical infrastructure not to catch fire, but if it must, I would rather it didn't prove almost impossible for firefighters to extinguish. I sure as hell don't plan to strap one to my house - I quite like my house.

That's a problem with lithium-ion batteries, yes, but it does not seem to be a problem with most other kinds of batteries.

It's an issue with power density. Li-Ion is capable of running wild because it liberates enough energy to increase the damage that originally triggered it. It's pretty hard for any battery of that density not to have the capability of running wild.

On the other hand, I don't think that's too great a handicap. I wouldn't want a pack like that in my house--but neither do I want the 20# propane tank in my house. The propane tank lives in a chest outside, the batteries should likewise be stored in a location that if they go up they only take themselves out.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nuclear power does require different standards than coal or gas fired plants. Materials and radiation.

True, but what they should be doing is regulating safety based on risks vs results, not on the economics of any particular risk mitigation.

In non-political situations we generally do a fairly good job in figuring risk in terms of dollars spent per life saved. In political situations there is often a fear-driven completely disproportionate regulation of something. And major vested interests are generally able to keep themselves from being regulated out of existence even when that's the best safety improvement. Do we spend that $ on improving the safety of the nuke plant? Or do we spend it tearing down a coal plant? The latter will produce about 1000x the safety improvement over the former.

A low probability of a osteopathic event id mot a zero probability of an event.

Risks should be evaluated on a impact * probability basis. There's a big hole in the real world case with 100% probability situations, though. I'm sure you're aware of the warnings about consuming too much fish from the top of the food chain--that's a direct result of coal plants.

Three Mile Island put the kibosh on nuclear power.

Politics did. Three Mile Island harmed nobody. If you spent your time 24/7 at the fence line should you have evacuated? Let's start walking away towards safety.....oops, there's a road there. Walking across that road is more dangerous than staying put. (Admittedly, I'm using an average pedestrian on an average road, we don't have data to compare just how dangerous that road is vs the national average for crossing a street.)

Water contamination here at Hanford. The Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

Again, compare it to the alternatives. Coal plants emit radiation at a rate that would be totally unacceptable for a nuke plant. Or IIRC the Palo Verde (Arizona) nuke plant had to get a waiver from the EPA about the radioactivity of discharged cooling water as they were using reclaimed sewage for cooling water and the incoming water exceeded the threshold for what they were allowed in the outgoing water. Seems there were too many patients upstream getting radioiodide treatment.

There is a fear of nuclear power. If you think nuclear power should be less regulated, would you live next door to a nuke plant by choice?

I don't think people should be living next to any high energy industrial processes. If I had to live next to a powerplant I would certainly choose nuke over gas, oil, or coal.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nuclear power has had only one fatal accident in its entire history, and that accident was as bad as it could possibly be - but still killed fewer people than the contemporary Bophal disaster.

Are you considering SL-1 a suicide rather than an accident? Because it certainly was a nuclear power plant, admittedly tiny and military. He unquestionably pulled the rod too far and it promptly killed him, but AFAIK it has never been definitively established whether that was by intention or an accident from fighting something that was stuck.

 

[bilby]

Battery costs are in the order of hundreds of dollars per kWh. Compare wholesale electricity prices, which are around a thousandth of that cost.

Amazon.com: Power Sonic Rechargeable Sealed Lead Acid Battery PS-12180 12V 18.0 AH @ 20-hr. 12V 17.1 AH @ 10-hr., Gray : Automotive
It costs about $200/kWh, the cost of five of these batteries.

For a year with one charge/discharge cycle per day, that's 54 cents per day per kWh. For five years, that's 11 c/d/kWh.

That's an automotive battery, not a deep cycle battery. You're not going to get anything like 5 years out of it using it like that. One year is probably more like it.

Maintainence: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-warns-consumers-about-potentially-deadly-solar-batteries

Personally, I prefer my electrical infrastructure not to catch fire, but if it must, I would rather it didn't prove almost impossible for firefighters to extinguish. I sure as hell don't plan to strap one to my house - I quite like my house.

That's a problem with lithium-ion batteries, yes, but it does not seem to be a problem with most other kinds of batteries.

It's an issue with power density. Li-Ion is capable of running wild because it liberates enough energy to increase the damage that originally triggered it. It's pretty hard for any battery of that density not to have the capability of running wild.

On the other hand, I don't think that's too great a handicap. I wouldn't want a pack like that in my house--but neither do I want the 20# propane tank in my house. The propane tank lives in a chest outside, the batteries should likewise be stored in a location that if they go up they only take themselves out.

Indeed they should.

But (at least around here) the most common domestic batteries are mounted to the exterior walls of people's houses.

Large battery farms are better designed for fire, insofar as they tend to separate individual batteries to reduce the impact of a fire in one on its neighbours; But they are still prone to catching fire, and still produce a lot of toxic smoke when they do. They are also effectively un-extinguishable, and have to be allowed to burn themselves out.

But as Jimmy Higgins notes above, the real problem is the sheer number of (mostly idle, but very expensive) batteries that would be needed to achieve a reliable supply of electricity (and the sheer number of wind and solar generators required to recharge them once depleted). Quite apart from the eyewatering cost, it's notable that the number of fires is proportional to the number of units in service.

To cope with a week of still, overcast weather, you need vast storage capacity; And vast generating capacity to recharge that storage once the sun and wind return, and before they go away again. And almost all of that capacity will be completely useless and unnecessary most of the time. But it has to be there in a 100% renewables+storage grid, because modern society can't handle a few days of no electricity, even if it only happens once every decade or two.

Of course, no such grid will ever be built; The dirty little secret of the wind+solar lobby is that they are inextricably also the natural gas lobby - that is, a fossil fuel lobby.