Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town 301
separsons writes "The largest sodium sulfur battery in America, nicknamed 'BOB,' can provide enough electricity to power all of Presidio, Texas. Until now, the small town relied on a single 60-year-old transmission line to connect it to the grid, so the community frequently experienced power outages. BOB, which stands for 'Big-Old Battery,' began charging earlier this week. The house-sized battery can deliver four megawatts of power for up to eight hours. Utilities are looking into similar batteries to store power from solar and wind so that renewables can come online before the country implements a smart grid system."
from the article (Score:5, Informative)
the battery would cost 25M, while a second transmission line would cost 60M. o_O
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the battery would cost 25M, while a second transmission line would cost 60M. o_O
But they are building both!. The second transmission line will be done by 2012.
Re:from the article (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder what a diesel generator would cost them? Reportedly many communities in Alaska are serviced by power generated by massive diesel generators. 4mw is what a data center consumes, right?
Re:from the article (Score:5, Informative)
Reportedly many communities in Alaska are serviced by power generated by massive diesel generators.
Well of course they are. Diesel is the default conservative power source for remote communities in Australia but photovoltaics are moving in. Solar power may not work as well in Alaska but wind power may do the job instead. Combine that with a BoB and you have a good reliable power supply.
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Re:from the article (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if oil runs out, the worst option for eletricity generation will be a diesel generator.
Why not? Really, give a reason for one not being able to do that. EROEI is ok, minerals are ok once you adopt a (more expensive) process of refining that uses eletricity instead of oil, mining is ok, transportation is ok. You'll need some bio oils for lubrification, plastics and rubber, but everything quite on the realm of the possible.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A gas generator would make more sense as the infrastructure is already available to fuel them.
4 - G3516 LE [cat.com] should do the trick, plus there isn't a single point of failure. Get 5 generators and run them all at partial load.
What happens when BOB gets wet?
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Of more concern to me is how exactly do you take 4 MW of DC power and turn that into sinusoidal 220 Vac RMS. Large motors with spark gaps or something similar will get you a square wave.
A giant AC-DC inverter would work, but where are you going to find such a thing that can handle 4 MW?
Rain should be the least of their concerns.
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A giant AC-DC inverter would work, but where are you going to find such a thing that can handle 4 MW?
Static Inverter Plant [wikipedia.org]
They're used for high voltage DC transmission systems. Actually, they're probably overkill for a 4 MW supply as many plants have been built to handle hundreds of MW each.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm confident the technology exists to keep something dry, in 2010.
I, for one, am quite happy with my "roof", as it's called.
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I'm confident the technology exists to keep something dry, in 2010.
I, for one, am quite happy with my "roof", as it's called.
Actually I've just been granted a patent on the 'roof' and so...
Oh. Wrong kind of Texas story. Sorry.
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I wonder what a diesel generator would cost them?
Diesel generators of that size (you would want to buy 2 of them) would probably run between 1-2 million dollars. But keep in mind that they would consume about 300 gallons of #2 diesel (non-taxed) per hour. What would that cost you?
Game of telephone (Score:5, Informative)
It's amazing the game of telephone that happens when blogs steal news stories from blogs that steal news stories from blogs.
Inhabitat: "Electric Transmission Texas ponied up $25 million to build the battery, and will add $60 million to build a second transmission line by 2012."
PopSci: "Electric Transmission Texas helped put the battery project together for around $25 million. But the utility has also agreed to build a second 60-mile transmission line to Presidio for about $44 million by 2012."
NPR: "The other solution for this town would be to build a second line, and that line would cost somewhere in the range of $40 to $50 million. And so a battery project in the $25 million range looks pretty attractive."
They all agree the battery costs $25mill, 2/3 agree that the 2nd transmission line will be built in 2012, and none of them agree on the price of the 2nd line.
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Re:Game of telephone (Score:5, Informative)
Not to detract at all from your point, however there's something worth pointing out I learned while listening to NPR.
This particular city has a contract with a Mexican power company, to provide backup power during the all-too frequent times the lone cable to the US power is broken. However 'some time' is required to switch the city from US to the Mexican power grid. The purpose of this battery is to make the switch from US to Mexican power seamless to the end-user. Therefore, 8hrs is plenty of time for the battery power to last.
Perhaps the battery buys the town time in more ways than one. Now the town is less reliant on someone building out that spare US transmission line for awhile longer. And I'm sure that price varies on which year the 2ns US power line is built.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> And I'm sure that price varies on which year the 2ns US power line is built.
You are right, I have read another blog post saying the new line would have cost 35,000$ in 1905. At least, that blog post specified the year. What were the others thinking when not specifying the year ? ;-))
Re:Game of telephone (Score:5, Funny)
They all agree the battery costs $25mill, 2/3 agree that the 2nd transmission line will be built in 2012, and none of them agree on the price of the 2nd line.
You don't work in IT do you? If you did you'd realise that sounds like any typical project plan.
Re:Game of telephone (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, they just used the Vista file copy dialog to calculate the price.
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You don't work in IT do you? If you did you'd realise that sounds like any typical project plan.
No it doesn't. They all agreed on the delivery date.
Re:from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
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Do you have a reference to the fact that the battery needs to run at 350C? It seems a bit impractical to heat a house-sized building that much, especially when you have lost power.
The main advantage of a battery over a generator is that you can switch power over to it in a matter of seconds. I'm guessing a 4MW generator would take a couple of minutes, maybe 10s of minutes, to spin up to capacity.
Re:from the article (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have a reference to the fact that the battery needs to run at 350C?
You could start with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-sulfur_battery [wikipedia.org]
It seems a bit impractical to heat a house-sized building that much, especially when you have lost power.
Good insulation, and you don't heat the building, you heat the guts of the battery. Also, the lost energy is likely heating the battery.
I'm guessing a 4MW generator would take a couple of minutes, maybe 10s of minutes, to spin up to capacity.
Not the ones I've seen. (Hospital and nuke reactor backup.)
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Not the ones I've seen. (Hospital and nuke reactor backup.)
Ever see them try to spin up a 1 MW class diesel locomotive engine in winter? Its not pretty in the best of conditions, even worse if everyone's stressed out. There's a reason they don't shut off diesel loco engines in the winter. And even in TX it does get cold on occasion.
I was told in a tour that the nuke backup engines go full power in much less than 10s, but, they keep the coolant and engine block heated to operating temp 24x7 with electrical heaters, they have bizarre oil systems that are kept pump
Re:from the article (Score:4, Informative)
Re:from the article (Score:5, Informative)
Ever see them try to spin up a 1 MW class diesel locomotive engine in winter? ... I was told in a tour that the nuke backup engines go full power in much less than 10s, but, they keep the coolant and engine block heated to operating temp 24x7 with electrical heaters, they have bizarre oil systems that are kept pumping 24x7 yet somehow don't hydrolock the pistons, they have onsite 24x7 maintenance crews, and still they occasionally break so they need multiple ones for true redundancy.
I've worked with diesel generators from 1MW up to the size this town would need, that were primarily emergency generators for a nuclear plant, and they were only run for testing, drills and the occasional power loss. They needed a small (like tens of kW tops) set of heaters to keep them warm even in the coldest weather, and there were maybe two 24-7 guys whose responsibility was to go check readings once an hour on multiple generators (and in the non-nuclear world you could easily replace those two guys with some sensors, a computer, a phone line, and an on-call mechanic). I don't remember there being bizarre oil systems, and the oil didn't run 24/7, because it was very quiet when they weren't running.
They really just weren't a big hassle in the big scheme of things. You have to do maintenance on them at regular intervals, but you have to do that to any complex machine, like, say, a town-load-sized battery + inverter installation. Disclaimer: I've never worked with a 4MW UPS, but I don't think it's going to be maintenance-free.
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Ever see them try to spin up a 1 MW class diesel locomotive engine in winter?
Yes. I have 9 1.25 MW Generators and I can tell you that they spin up and close to the buss in 15 seconds.....even in winter. They're totally capable of meeting this need. That's not to say necessarily that this battery application was a bad choice for this town (I don't have enough details to make that determination), but it wouldn't be fair to say that the battery was chosen over a generator due to some start up delay associated with diesel generators.
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Footnote: People giving tours frequently want you to be impressed with what they do and how hard their job is, so make sure to factor that into your estimation of how much trouble generators this size are. ;)
Re:from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
The pilot studies in South Africa show that pebble bed reactors acn abe built for $800 to $1000 per kilowatt. A 4mW reactor could be built for around $4 million and they could completely disconnect themselves from the grid.
Re:from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the cost of legislation for a nuke plant in the US per mW though? Diesel generators produce the same energy for half the price as nuclear in the kW range, and regulation is slim to none.
Re:from the article (Score:5, Funny)
Call me old-fashioned, but I'd go 100% eco with a gerbil in a wheel or a hand crank if the demand doesn't exceed 4mW.
Re:from the article (Score:5, Funny)
Re:from the article (Score:4, Funny)
You mean a BOL - Big Old Lemon.
Re:from the article (Score:4, Informative)
Re:from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me old-fashioned, but I'd go 100% eco with a gerbil in a wheel or a hand crank if the demand doesn't exceed 4mW.
Not to be pedantic (well, ok, in fact to be ultra-pedantic... so pedantic I find it necessary to point out how pedantic I'm being, and you can't get much more pedantic than that) there's nothing especially 'eco' about gerbils or hand cranks. 'Natural' maybe, but nature is full of incredibly wasteful processes (evolution itself, for example).
I'd like to see us break this bizarre association people have between the industrial use of the most wasteful processes on the planet (natural ones) and ecologically friendly technology.
So at 4 mW (yeah, I got the joke, I just decided to use it to make my incredibly pedantic point) you'd be better off from an ecological perspective going with a radioisotope generator. Salvage some 241Am out of a bunch of smoke detectors and you'd be good to go, and eco-friendly as can be.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Somehow I suspect that the costs of Pebble Bed nuclear reactors don't scale up linearly per-kilowatt.
If that was the case, then one could get a "personal" 1kW pebble bed reactor for $1000.
So there must be a "minimum" power value above which the price per kilowatt is close enough to the on
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You seem to have switched watt and gigawatt.
if 4 megawatts costs $4 million dollars
that's a dollar a watt not a billion dollars a watt.
though I'd be interested in a link about that 4 million dollar reactor producing 4 megawatts.
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Whoosh!
What he responded to mentioned "4mW". Which is 4 milliwatts, not 4 megawatts. Hence the comment about less power requirements than an LED....
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Never mind that you would have to store an explosive material.
Not that liquid sodium is that much better, mind you
Four megawatts of power for up to eight hours? (Score:2)
The house-sized battery can hold four megawatts of power for up to eight hours.
I wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. Does the battery discharge in 8 hours if you don't use the energy?
The original NPR article http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125561502 [npr.org] leads me to think they are saying that the consumption of the town is 4MW and the battery can feed it for 8 hours, so it holds 32MW (or less, since the 4MW is the peak load).
On an unrelated note, why does the inhabitat article have four links, which all go to the same popsci article? Does the author get paid by
Re:Four megawatts of power for up to eight hours? (Score:4, Informative)
A watt is a unit of power not energy, that'd be 115 gigajoules (or 32 MWh if you're lazy)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
No good, A Hogshead is already defined as 54 imperial gallons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogshead
Energy not Power (Score:5, Informative)
so it holds 32MW
No - it can hold 32MWh (=115.2GJ). Batteries hold energy not power. Since power is energy per unit time you have to multiply it by a time to get energy.
Re:Energy not Power and Batter Life (Score:2)
so it holds 32MW
No - it can hold 32MWh (=115.2GJ). Batteries hold energy not power. Since power is energy per unit time you have to multiply it by a time to get energy.
Thank you, 007, for clearing up this little misunderstanding.
I wonder how long this battery will last and what the cost of a refurbishment is. Also, how does the lifetime change with more dischare/charge cycles? I think these numbers are as important as the initial cost, but usually do not get mentioned.
A $25M batter which lasts 50 years sounds like a pretty nice piece of technology if it can be discharged/charged daily. If it lasts 5 years and has a 100% refurbishment cost, it does not sound so gre
Re:Energy not Power and Batter Life (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Energy not Power and Batter Life (Score:5, Insightful)
They can last about 2,500 complete cycles or 4,800 80% discharge cycles. (From the wikipedia article linked elsewhere). Presuming a power outage once a week requiring 80% discharge, it would last about 90 years, if the number of cycles is the only thing determining its longevity.
That is 10-15 years when used as a night-time backup for solar collection.
This might be useful.
-Todd
Re: (Score:2)
32 Megawatt/hours (Score:2)
That is extremely unlikely- that's a LOT of heat.
A Watt is a power unit. A Watt-hour is a energy unit. They most likely meant it is a 32 Megawatt-hour battery.
On an unrelated note, nobody seems to have pictures of the finished thing, or how it was constructed, etc- just one picture of a concrete shell, clearly early in the process. Anyone find more pictures?
Haven't heard about these in years (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been a long time since I last heard about Sodium/Sulphur batteries. Twenty-plus years ago Ford Aerospace in Newport Beach, CA had a small research facility looking at this technology. The smell of sulphur was pretty strong around that building which was cleverly situated both downhill and downwind from the rest of the campus. The idea of being anywhere in the neighborhood of a bunch of hot,liquid sodium and a bunch of hot,liquid sulphur somehow never seemed like a good idea to me.
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That sure is a nasty battery [wikipedia.org].
Leaky battery (Score:5, Informative)
"The house-sized battery can hold four megawatts of power for up to eight hours."
"Power" is not "held." Power is delivered. Energy is held. The unit of energy is joule.
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That that to He-Man. He had the power.
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In which case, do they mean they can deliver 4 megawatts for eight hours on a fully charged battery, which would make the usable capacity roughly 115 gigajoules - or did they mess up the units completely somehow?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I can't recall ever seeing a battery rated in Joules. Small batteries are rated in both volts and mAh. The voltage times the amperage tells you how much power it can put out. The power times the duration tells you how much energy it can deliver.
Rather than stating that the battery can "hold 4 megawatts of power for up to 8 hours", the article should perhaps have stated that the battery can "deliver four megawatts of power for up to 8 hours", as is stated in the /. summary. From this you could derive that it
NPR Link (Score:5, Informative)
BOBs are probably safer underground (Score:2)
Should the device explode, given the amount of energy stored inside the battery and the kind of chemicals employed in the facility, it could level out the surroundings. Furthermore keeping it underground should make easier to cool the device while charging.
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It runs on molten sodium. Cool is the one thing you don't ever want the battery to get.
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This via that via the other site (Score:2)
The article linked to in the summary got the article from PopSci [popsci.com], who got it from NPR [npr.org].
That aside... They should probably just stick a little reactor nearby to power their community and other nearby communities. Maybe even sell some power to Mexico.
I'm sure they've got enough wasteland that you could build one on without causing too much damage to human settlements in the region (which is all the NIMBYists care about).
BUB (Score:4, Interesting)
BUB might be a better nickname. Big Unexploded Battery.
I'm sure it's safely enclosed and all the safety aspects have been taken into account, but it will be an impressive boom when it does go off, assuming the size of the boom goes up proportionally with the size of the battery (I had a tiny watch battery blow my little remote control car apart...)
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A buddy of mine who is in the electrical contractors union tells a tale of what went wrong once. You know those huge ( I think they're called) step-down transformers? Someone was briefly working amongst, walking across, (am unclear precisely on this) and this unfornate person dropped a wrench, which caused the current to arc, in a Big Way. This person became One with a Big Mass of Metal. You'd think this wouldn't happen, but apparently things go wrong sometimes.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me a bit of a story I heard once from one of my teachers.
There are some small power control stations around, and this was about one of those. This particular one was high up in a mountain, and a capacitor was in need of change. Size a bit smaller than a garage.
So a person put the new capacitor in his backpack (yep, one of the rather big ones..), got up there (took a few hours), cut the power, removed the old one and popped in the new one. Put on the power, everything looked ok and he went back down.
Re: (Score:2)
... it will be an impressive boom when it does go off, assuming the size of the boom goes up proportionally with the size of the battery ...
So how many exploding iPod/Laptop batteries is this critter, which uses molten sodium. Did your high school chemistry ever do the "this is sodium; this is water; this is sodium in water" trick?
Good thing that it doesn't rain much in Texas.
But I guess that the folks building the battery will know about the dangers, and take appropriate safety measures. Like, getting their asses out of town when the puppy goes online.
Does some poor soul have to do the "lick the connectors on the 9 volt battery" test, to
That's a great price! (Score:3, Interesting)
This thing cost 25 million to make and apparently stores 192000 KWHr of energy. That is $130/KWHr. On average my home uses 17 KWHr/day so I can store my average needs for only $2210.00.
Thats a small additional cost on the 6 KW of Peak Power worth of PV's I need to provide the 17 KWHr for my house.
Does this thing scale down?
Re:That's a great price! (Score:5, Informative)
*According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], they need to run even hotter, 300-350 degree celsius
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Here's what you do. Go down to the auto parts store and get yourself a bunch of car batteries. Put them in your basement. Get an alternator and a good switch. Find an electrician who can hook them up to your house. (I'm an electrical engineer so I can't help you. I make less money than an electrician and I also don't know anything about electricity, since an EE degree only covers calculus and some very basic RLC circuits.)
We all know that car batteries last 10-12 years of daily use, so this rig could
Question: how much energy did it take to make it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not based on the $25 million sticker price: that's just bullshit accounting. I'd like to know the Joules expended in the extraction, refining, shipping and construction of this thing, including the energy required by the workers, then let's compare that to the energy that it will actually store and deliver over its working life.
Eventually, we are going to have to start asking these questions about "renewable" generation and storage, because you can only hide a net energy loss in the books for so long, until the fossil fuels that subsidise these energy sinks start to run out.
Re:Question: how much energy did it take to make i (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're saying instead of smelting metal, making concrete, and paying construction workers to build the battery, it might be more cost effective to pay that same smelting facility, concrete making plant, and construction workers to provide a few hours of power for this town every week or so?
I doubt this project has anything to do with "renewable" but all to do with convenience of not having to lose power for a few hours every few weeks. Sure those few hours may be 10x as expensive as normal, but, eh, you don't have to adjust clocks on all those VCRs every week.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
I'm not saying anything, I'm asking a question. It's one which is rarely asked, and almost never answered. You'll note that I discounted (dollar) "cost" right up front - I'm only interested in energy. You'll further note that the article explicitly talks about using BOBs as storage for renewable generation.
If you don't know the answer, you could just say so.
Re:Question: how much energy did it take to make i (Score:4, Informative)
As you can see, the estimates vary widely, there's a lot of guesswork involved in making these estimates. Overall the renewables don't fare that badly, especially wind and hydroelectricity.
In case you were wondering, here's [world-nuclear.org] the CO2 emissions:
So yes, even with all the intensive energy requirements for renewables, they still are better than fossil fuels. The problems with widespread use of renewables are political (i.e. Republicans and conservatives don't like them), require intensive upfront capital costs, and infrastructural (the power grid is not designed to carry power where likely wind generation sites are).
Re: (Score:2)
Two things:
One:
Dollar cost is the easiest path to determine the energy cost of a project because it already takes in account all the inputs directly and indirectly (for example, the manpower costs include not only the transportation costs for that worker but also all the side-costs such as entertainment costs, housing costs and more of using that specific kind of worker - after all, if the pay was lower that the money the worker spends then he would - usually - not take that job).
Don't forget that indirect
Re: (Score:2)
That's not particularly relevant because this battery i
These are available for home use already... (Score:5, Funny)
Look in any computer shop and you'll see NaS storage systems!
Re: (Score:2)
NaS is Sodium Sulphur...
Tensile strength and inertia (Score:2)
Flywheel energy storage (FES) works by accelerating a rotor (flywheel) to a very high speed and maintaining the energy in the system as rotational energy. When energy is extracted from the system, the flywheel's rotational speed is reduced as a consequence of the principle of conservation of energy; adding energy to the system correspondingly results in an increase in the speed of the flywheel.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage [wikipedia.org]
Maraging steel, UHMWPE, and carbon fibres are some of the materials with the highest known tensile strength. The higher the tensile strength, the higher the energy density, which is good for mobile applications but perhaps not necessary for a small town.
I suspect a flywheel would also be more reliable and environmentally friendly than most batteries.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I found an online calculator and apparently the energy squares with either the diameter OR the speed. The only linear input is mass.
So let's try this: A 100-meter wide flywheel, weighing 10 metric tons, spinning at 1hz, gets you 68 kWh, or double that if you move the mass to the outside (which I presume you would for something that big). Now that's probably light for something so big, so at 100 metric tons you could get up to 1.36 MWh.
This battery has 32 MWh.
You would need to spin it 5 times faster (300r
What happened to Vanadium Redox? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious as to why they used Sodium Sulfur rather than Vanadium Redox.
I'm unaware of any advantages to S.S. except maybe size (which wouldn't particularly matter in a stationary installation. And the Vanadium Redox is already productized for exactly this service.
Maybe too much patent encumberment and the guys with the V.R. patent don't have enough production capacity or are charging too much?
Dump (Score:2)
Ob (Score:2)
Sorry, I don't speak metric. What's that in ampere-parsecs?
Sane units (Score:2)
For physicists and engineers:
8 hours = 28800 s
W=PT
=4e6 W * 28800 s
=115.2 GJ
For people who measure energy in electricity bills: 3200 kW h
For people who like impressive comparisons: About 2 M-29 Davy Crocketts [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
For "People Who Enjoy Pointless Comparisons", how man sequels of Happy Feet [slashdot.org] does that work out?
Re: (Score:2)
Never mind that! How many Libraries of Congress do we have to burn down to get 115 gigajoules?
Economically ridiculous solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's do the math here.
The article suggests the battery can put out 4 megawatts for 8 hours. So that's 32,000 kilowatt-hours. My electricity here costs about 7 cents a kWh, so that BOB can hold almost $225 worth of electricity. At a cost of many millions, that does not sound like very economical power per kWh!
For example, your basic Honda generator can run for two thousand hours, putting out 1,500 watts, before the little putt-putt engine needs an overhaul. So that's about 3,000 kilowatt-hours for $400. Let's assume the power fails ten times a year, so you'd wear out 10 Honda generators per failure (avg), at a cost of $4000 per, or $40,000 per year. By comparison BOB's cost of financing in itself is going to be at least $3 million a year, not to mention maintenance.
So these poor sods are paying about 75 times as much as they should.
( Not to mention that generators are much more economical in larger sizes )
Re: (Score:2)
Let's do the math here.
The article suggests the battery can put out 4 megawatts for 8 hours. So that's 32,000 kilowatt-hours. My electricity here costs about 7 cents a kWh, so that BOB can hold almost $225 worth of electricity. At a cost of many millions, that does not sound like very economical power per kWh!
For example, your basic Honda generator can run for two thousand hours, putting out 1,500 watts, before the little putt-putt engine needs an overhaul. So that's about 3,000 kilowatt-hours for $400. Let's assume the power fails ten times a year, so you'd wear out 10 Honda generators per failure (avg), at a cost of $4000 per, or $40,000 per year. By comparison BOB's cost of financing in itself is going to be at least $3 million a year, not to mention maintenance.
So these poor sods are paying about 75 times as much as they should.
( Not to mention that generators are much more economical in larger sizes )
A more realistic comparison would be to price some cheap megawatt class diesel generators: http://www.dieselserviceandsupply.com/Used-Generators/ [dieselserv...supply.com]. Slightly used units seem to run $175,000 for a 1 MW unit, if a 4 MW unit is available at the same price point (the required output) that is $700,000 (they do have a new 6 MW natural gas unit for $2 million). So a conventional peaking plant would seem to be a much cheaper alternative, but at a multiple of 10-25 (including siting costs), not 75.
The explanation for
Re:Economically ridiculous solution (Score:4, Insightful)
I spent a minute squinting at your maths in an effort to see things your way.
I think you didn't figure into the generator plan the following expenses. . .
-Initial start-up costs. Large data centers, for instance, will have a couple of huge diesel generators in the basement and they tend to start in the hundreds of thousands of dollars before all the associated costs, (cooling, air circulation, electrical infrastructure, fuel storage) kick in. Diesel back-up power for a whole town would easily be a multi-million dollar endeavor.
-Fuel costs.
-Your projected maintenance costs are not in sync with the real hardware required for the job. Also, you'd need to hire a technician to oversee the operation. Employees are not cheap, and I'm sure this was figured into the town's budget for their battery but left out of yours.
It is entirely possible, given the way politics and city planners work, that poor decisions were made, but even so, towns tend to be on tight budgets and so I'm sure there were at least a few board meetings where the various alternatives were explored with the bottom line being one of the primary concerns.
As well, clean energy is important for many people. The town also installed a field of solar cells to charge the battery between use periods. Solar cells pay for themselves after a few years and then keep on giving, whereas fossil fuel costs are ever-present and unreliable. There are also many hidden costs involved with fossil fuel; for instance, you don't have to build billions of dollars in military hardware and kill thousands of people in order to maintain an oil supply. (Of course, some people prefer the idea of society running on bombs and blood, but there's something deeply screwed up with those people.)
Even if new types of cleaner energy cost a little bit more, (and often new technologies do cost more than tested older tech), then the populace will benefit from knowing that they're not a bunch of loud-mouth assholes. This kind of self-assurance is worth more than money. A happy population is a healthy one.
From my own personal experience, I've noted that loud-mouth assholes tend to live petty lives, have few real friends, and die early of heart-disease. I don't see the appeal myself.
-FL
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If that was the case you would see the whole state of Arizona covered in panels. The reality is that at current installed cost there is no ROI without govt subsidies.
Well, to be fair, I don't know what the reality is on the large scale, (I suspect few honestly do), but I do know that on the small scale it can work out very well. --It's not a direct conversion, to be certain. I know a fellow whose entire house is wired for 12 volts DC, and all of his lighting and other electronic technology has to fit this mode. It hasn't proven to be a particularly complex issue. He and another few people I know have taken different approaches to home-building using non-traditional
Large inverter to go with the battery? (Score:3, Insightful)
Its always amazes me that so few people understand fundamental concepts about the energy that they use. The reporter probably just assumed that the battery is directly connected to the town grid.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
One word: IGBT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulated-gate_bipolar_transistor
It's a lump of silicon about as big as a car battery, easily handles 5MW, and has revolutionised the connection of solar/wind/wave energy to grid.
Equipment costing hundreds OR thousands dollars now replaces what used to cost hundreds OF thousands, so connecting the battery to the grid is probably one of the easiest and cheapest problems to solve.
And you thought D Cells were big (Score:2)
"Big-Old Battery"? No. (Score:3, Funny)
It's the BIG OL' BAT'RY. You bunch of citified nerds. Have some respect for the Good-Old Boys.
Re: (Score:2)
Talk about shooting the rope that's tied to a balloon that hits the hamster cage, that turns the treadmill, that throws the basketball onto the lightswitch to turn on the light!!!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Talk about shooting the rope that's tied to a balloon that hits the hamster cage, that turns the treadmill, that throws the basketball onto the lightswitch to turn on the light!!!
In Dwarf Fortress, you turn the switch, that opens the door, that lets the goblin in, who steps in the pressure plate, that connects the windmill, that pumps the magma, that runs under the water, that evaporates, passes through the grates, incinerates the goblin, who releases the pressure plate, closes the door and resets the trap.
Or that's what the engineer described before flooding half the fortress and turning the other half into a convoluted basalt sculpture.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, so you've BEEN to Presidio!
AFAIK it's just a jumping off point for Big Bend Ranch State Park. Or a gateway into Mexico for the Chihuahua-Pacifico railroad. If you want a scenic, lonely drive go from Ft. Davis -> Marfa -> Presidio -> Lajitas/Terlingua/Study Butte ->Alpine ->Ft Davis. Don't forget to visit McDonald Observatory!