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Grid Storage Systems for Renewable Energy - Technology and Projects (No Politics)

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Colonel7

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Mark Jacobson is roundly laughed at by those in the energy business and only gets attention for his 100% renewables claim and advocates for it. His models and assumptions are terrible to put it politely. He’s like a modern day Paul Ehrlich who gets attention for his claims and not substance.
 

Timcognito

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Paul Ehrlich who gets attention for his claims and not substance.
Paul Ehrlich was right on the affects of over-population however he formulated it.
 

Colonel7

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Wow, this paper says so many EV batteries will become available for grid storage it will cover the entire grid’s requirements. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35393-0
By 2030?! I’ll take that bet for 2050. The technology needed is not there yet and we need to get much better at monitoring the cells and predictions for failure etc to make it a viable business (I’m involved in this). I’ll ignore the realities of actually doing it and implementing it that quickly.
 

Timcognito

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You mean like the UK not existing by 2000?:rolleyes:
No but over -population as a global environmental and resource problem. Just as environmentalists and climate change deniers predict our future specifics forward for half century that are hard to nail down. People in Ethiopia are starving because they can't get fertilizer from Ukraine, who would have predicted that, but that their land can not sustain their numbers was known for a long time.
 

monkeyboy

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"use excess power to pull carbon from the atmosphere"...CO2 is about 400 ppm, you need to move a tremendous volumes of air to be able to extract any appreciable CO2, those types of schemes have never been practical....that's why sequestration schemes crack methane and remove the C upstream of the combustion step, before it's diluted during combustion...
 
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MediumRare

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Mark Jacobson is roundly laughed at by those in the energy business and only gets attention for his 100% renewables claim and advocates for it. His models and assumptions are terrible to put it politely. He’s like a modern day Paul Ehrlich who gets attention for his claims and not substance.
What's the basis for your critique? Many people in industry are narrow-minded or protecting their own interests.
 

Keened

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"use excess power to pull carbon from the atmosphere"...CO2 is about 400 ppm, you need to move a tremendous volumes of air to be able to extract any appreciable CO2, those types of schemes have never been practical....that's why sequestration schemes crack methane and remove the C upstream of the combustion step, before it's diluted during combustion...

Yes, using traditional methods that would be true. But even then I'm suggesting more burning hydrocarbons and collecting the resultant combustion products to re-crack into usable fuel. It's more that you're making up for the losses in the process and adding to it as you can. You're not trying to gather all of the carbon you're going to use in the process out of the air, at least not yet.

There are other, larger attempts at doing this. The basic idea is that maintaining a baseload of power generation during the night is always going to have a cost, but that if you have sufficient excess power generation during the day you can average out the negative cost.

Hydrocarbons are a great source of fuel that is fairly responsive to demand changes, 'easy' to transport, store, etc. If you can run diesel generators without the massive negatives you're coming out ahead of most other options.
 
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MediumRare

MediumRare

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Yes, using traditional methods that would be true. But even then I'm suggesting more burning hydrocarbons and collecting the resultant combustion products to re-crack into usable fuel. It's more that you're making up for the losses in the process and adding to it as you can. You're not trying to gather all of the carbon you're going to use in the process out of the air, at least not yet.

There are other, larger attempts at doing this. The basic idea is that maintaining a baseload of power generation during the night is always going to have a cost, but that if you have sufficient excess power generation during the day you can average out the negative cost.

Hydrocarbons are a great source of fuel that is fairly responsive to demand changes, 'easy' to transport, store, etc. If you can run diesel generators without the massive negatives you're coming out ahead of most other options.
"An installed carbon capture machine will use as much as 30 percent of the energy that a power plant generates to remove 90 percent of the carbon dioxide." Come on, this is not a viable option, plus the equipment costs $750 million per site. A entire 750 MW solar PV or wind site or storage site can be built for that, completely carbon free.
 

Suffolkhifinut

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Just read an article in ‘Car & Driver’ on Tesla crashed cars. It said they are being written off with relatively minor damage, they said the repair costs are around $50k. No reason to doubt what they published, maybe that’s one of the reason why their insurance costs in the UK are so high.
 
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somebodyelse

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"An installed carbon capture machine will use as much as 30 percent of the energy that a power plant generates to remove 90 percent of the carbon dioxide." Come on, this is not a viable option, plus the equipment costs $750 million per site. A entire 750 MW solar PV or wind site or storage site can be built for that, completely carbon free.
It probably looks very different depending on which hat you're wearing. If you're heavily invested in fossil fuels or plant that uses them then it might look quite viable - you get to burn even more and still claim to be 'green.' Remember that Exxon had very good models of the effect of their business - they just didn't care.
 

Keened

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An entire 750 MW solar PV or wind site or storage site can be built for that, completely carbon free.
No amount of solar will work at night though (unless you're talking vacuum insulated molten salt, which is interesting but has issues), and while wind generation isn't tied as strongly to day/night cycles, they also are subject to seasonal and hourly variation which makes them un-reliable for overnight baseload generation.

The storage site is the issue at hand, you can't use hydro storage everywhere (and it's often culturally/ecologically devastating), and batteries have their own problems and require robust distribution networks that often don't currently exist. Also the installment cost will drop dramatically as the technology matures. Since it's not particularly difficult to make/doesn't use rare resources it should be a steep drop in price.

Also building solar/wind/hyrdo is not carbon free, like at all. The concrete alone in Hydro is an enormous carbon positive part of the equation. Lithium batteries require extensive mining and manufacturing, etc.

At the end of the day, is the goal to minimize net carbon emissions with respect to equal or greater power generation, or is it to minimize carbon emissions at all costs including societal stability and political viability?
 

Blumlein 88

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At the end of the day, is the goal to minimize net carbon emissions with respect to equal or greater power generation, or is it to minimize carbon emissions at all costs including societal stability and political viability?
To whatever extent solar or wind is usable, carbon emissions will be irrelevant if those are cheaper. Any ecological benefits will be icing on the cake and the cherry on top.

 

somebodyelse

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Is there a reason not to install battery stations of one sort or other at closing, or recently closed, fossil powered generating stations? They're usually relatively secluded brown field industrial sites with good connections to the power grid.
 

Timcognito

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Also building solar/wind/hyrdo is not carbon free, like at all. The concrete alone in Hydro is an enormous carbon positive part of the equation. Lithium batteries require extensive mining and manufacturing, etc.
The math says different yes the upfront costs and emissions must be amortized over decades and will produce very low cost and nearly carbon free power. The enemy is combustion with the exception of hydrogen.
 

Keened

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The math says different yes the upfront costs and emissions must be amortized over decades and will produce very low cost and nearly carbon free power. The enemy is combustion with the exception of hydrogen.
Again, this is not about primary production during the day, but energy storage for renewables. Hydrogen is a nightmare to store and move. Add some carbon atoms onto it and suddenly you have a useful high-density energy storage solution. The problem with traditional combustion is the constant extraction of new raw material and disregard for externalities in it's combustion. If you are mostly reusing the same material and capturing the by-product so the externalities are managed, it's no where near as bad.

I don't think you fully understand the math involved here, concrete comes with a high cost.

Consider the following:
Hover Dam
6.6 million tons of concrete
~900kg CO2 per ton of concrete (maybe, I'm not digging into the tonne vs ton vs historical tonnage units)
~5.94e9 tons of C02 produced to build
~248 square miles flooded
2,074 MW peak production

Track 4A Power Plant
???? tons of C02 produced to build, guestimate 2-3 magnitudes less
~4 square mile facility
1440 MW

Even with a 30% penalty to run the petro-generators clean, you could build several of them and come out ahead. You can also build them almost anywhere, they are not reliant on water as we slide into the water wars, etc

To whatever extent solar or wind is usable, carbon emissions will be irrelevant if those are cheaper. Any ecological benefits will be icing on the cake and the cherry on top.

Sure, but I'm talking about short term/longer term energy storage for solar and wind. Nothing is going to beat tapping the fusion generator in space (0 maintenance :) ) or the planetary currents (air currents, river/ocean currents, geothermal, etc).

Is there a reason not to install battery stations of one sort or other at closing, or recently closed, fossil powered generating stations? They're usually relatively secluded brown field industrial sites with good connections to the power grid.
There aren't good ones, at least if you're talking about future plans. Sometimes the sites need to be cleaned first, so it's easier to just find another location, but most of the time it's that the cost of building batteries large enough to sustain a grid is still very high and politically it's hard enough to get new power generation going, let alone unsexy things like power storage or redundancies. It's also a balancing act, the time it takes to decommision an already running plant and re-purpose it leaves you with even less leeway for demand off-hours. If we had a strong nuclear core it would be a lot easier...
 

Doodski

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Hydrogen is a nightmare to store and move.
The mobile storage and use of hydrogen has been researched in depth by Ballard and then with Mercedes since the early 1990's in Vancouver/Burnaby British Columbia. They are now selling technology.
 

Keened

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The mobile storage and use of hydrogen has been researched in depth by Ballard and then with Mercedes since the early 1990's in Vancouver/Burnaby British Columbia. They are now selling technology.
I'd be thrilled to see it pulled off, but the compression and cooling required to achieve the required density and the tendency for hydrogen to leak through everything (and degrade most containers over time) makes me very wary going down that path.
 
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MediumRare

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No amount of solar will work at night though (unless you're talking vacuum insulated molten salt, which is interesting but has issues), and while wind generation isn't tied as strongly to day/night cycles, they also are subject to seasonal and hourly variation which makes them un-reliable for overnight baseload generation.

...

At the end of the day, is the goal to minimize net carbon emissions with respect to equal or greater power generation, or is it to minimize carbon emissions at all costs including societal stability and political viability?
I don't have a goal.

Power companies' goal is to make money, balanced with reliability. At this point, the lowest cost generation is wind and solar, even below hydro. Wind blows best at night, Solar shines best during the day. ;) Grid storage (there are many viable kinds) buffer the difference and make them viable for base load. The only question is how much capacity is needed to get to 80%, 90%, 100% of the base load.

This thread is about hard data and facts about the potential, technology options, and projects implementing grid storage. Which is, in fact, happening all over the world, including in the US, at a massive pace - because the economics are very favorable.
 
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