Giant Batteries and Cheap Solar Power Are Shoving Fossil Fuels Off the Grid (sciencemag.org) 203
sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: This month, officials in Los Angeles, California, are expected to approve a deal that would make solar power cheaper than ever while also addressing its chief flaw: It works only when the sun shines. The deal calls for a huge solar farm backed up by one of the world's largest batteries. It would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That's cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel. The new solar plus storage effort will be built in Kern County in California by 8minute Solar Energy. The project is expected to create a 400-megawatt solar array, generating roughly 876,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity annually, enough to power more than 65,000 homes during daylight hours. Its 800-MWh battery will store electricity for after the sun sets, reducing the need for natural gas-fired generators.
good start, but (Score:5, Insightful)
saying something that doesn't exist might in four years when done will provide 7% the power of a single city is hardly "shoving fossil off the grid". I'd call it "a bit of peak shaving if all goes well"
Re:good start, but (Score:5, Informative)
7% is huge, especially when it's a battery because it will be pushing everyone else out of the lucrative peaking market. Nothing else can compete with the speed at which batteries react to demand.
The energy market is fundamentally changing.
Re:good start, but (Score:4, Informative)
So, this new thing will replace a lot of natural gas fired power plants, while leaving a bunch of coal fired plants alone?
Yep, makes sense. We wouldn't want to shut down those coal plants, now would we?
Note that replacing reasonably clean power with cleaner power is not, in and of itself, bad. But we'd be better off worrying about the really dirty coal-based power before we start work on the cleaner-than-coal-by-a-lot natural gas based power....
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Worth noting that coal is high quality, and doesn't deserve burning nowadays
Huh? What do you mean "doesn't deserve burning"?
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Worth noting that coal is high quality, and doesn't deserve burning nowadays
Huh? What do you mean "doesn't deserve burning"?
Father Christmas has determined that this "high quality coal" does not deserve a fiery fate, but in fact should be given to low-performing children this solstice to encourage them to behave with commensurately high quality in the coming year.
The naughty coal is burned.
subsidies (Score:1, Insightful)
With or without subsidies? That is pretty important.
Re: subsidies (Score:1)
Do we count all the money spent on political pressure and wars as well as lost productivity from economic sanctions as indirect-but-expensive subsidies?
Because we should.
more BS (Score:2, Interesting)
huge solar farms are just not needed and a sign of not moving forward. It only keeps power generation in the hands of the rich and powerful. There is already more than enough floor space on roof tops of businesses, homes, and office building, edges of freeways, up and down sky scrapers.
Batteries should be staged outside of buildings so they don't burn them down if they fail catastrophically. Pair all of this up on a distributed grid paid for by taxes so that people can have power if part of their energy
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Care to elaborate? I could buy that setup tomorrow if I wanted, so you sound like a nutbag.
Re:more BS (Score:5, Informative)
Solar cells are now very cheap. They are a negligible part of the cost for a small-scale installation. The cost of deploying rooftop solar is dominated by the installation cost (putting up scaffolding and having competent people climbing safely around on the roof is not cheap). The second largest cost is the storage and the alternator system to drive AC mains. Both of these costs are amortised significantly in larger installations. Most large installations are at ground level, so require a fraction of the manpower to install each panel. They use much larger alternator installations, which also come with higher efficiency.
TL;DR: Solar power is not immune to economies of scale.
Re:more BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar power is not immune to economies of scale.
Neither is nuclear power.
I keep hearing on how nuclear power is too expensive and so we should never even try. Sure, if all you do is build one or two at a time then nuclear power is expensive. What happens if someone decides they need a dozen?
That can't happen? Is that what you think? There are now about 100 nuclear power reactors operating in the USA right now. Many of these built in a boom of construction from about 1970 to 1980. There's expected to be about 2 dozen nuclear reactors going off line in the next decade.
Consider how we can get 20+ nuclear reactors reaching the end of their operational life span so close together. That's probably because we built 20+ reactors roughly 50 years ago. Twelve reactors went online in 1974 alone in the USA. That means almost 50 years ago the USA was able to build a new nuclear reactor, each able to produce about one gigawatt of electrical power, at a rate of one per month.
Here's what I expect to happen. We will build one or two reactors per year until there is a base of experienced engineers and technicians capable of building and operating a nuclear power plant. Once people get comfortable with this idea of new nuclear power then we will again be building nuclear power plants at the rate of not one or two per year but one or two per month. Once that happens then economies of scale will really kick in. That means not 40 years to finish a nuclear power reactor, like what happened at Watts Bar, but be more like 4 years.
You think we can't do that? That we can't go from breaking ground to producing power in 4 years? Here, hold my beer and watch.
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Solar power is not immune to economies of scale.
Neither is nuclear power.
I keep hearing on how nuclear power is too expensive and so we should never even try. Sure, if all you do is build one or two at a time then nuclear power is expensive. What happens if someone decides they need a dozen?
We never tried?
"The paper reviews the history and the economics of the French PWR program, which is arguably the most successful nuclear-scale up experience in an industrialized country. Key to this success was a unique institutional framework that allowed for centralized decision making, a high degree of standardization, and regulatory stability, epitomized by comparatively short reactor construction times. .... Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characteri
Re:more BS (Score:4, Interesting)
We never tried?
Not in the last 40 years we haven't. Not with third generation nuclear power reactors we haven't.
Of course, this paper might be wrong. But let's look at your very repetitive (and therefor a little boring) slashdot posts: They are always full of conviction about how nuclear is cheap and the only possible solution for climate change without ever giving even a little evidence or citations.
You want citations?
Here you go.
https://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
Nuclear is going to have to be part of our energy supply in the future or things will get real dark and cold.
Where's the evidence, the citations, that we could ever replace coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear with wind, water, and sun? And do so in any meaningful time frame?
In the USA we were able to add 100 GW of low CO2 nuclear powered generation capacity from 1960 to 1990, with some of those years seeing 10 GW added. Not only can the USA do that again, we must do it again.
To be fair we now have 82 GW or so of wind power generation capacity, and the vast majority of that constructed in the last 10 years. I like wind and I believe we need to keep building at the pace we have, at a minimum. One problem is that even though installed capacity of nuclear and wind are near parity we get 20% of our electricity from nuclear and only 5% from wind. It will take 3 or 4 GW of wind capacity, about 1500 typical windmills, to match the output of a single typical 1 GW nuclear power reactor. That's assuming that there are enough batteries, natural gas, hydro, and perhaps other sources to fill in when the wind doesn't blow.
Saying we shouldn't have more nuclear power is saying that nuclear power is a greater threat to us than global warming. If that is the case then I will say global warming is a hoax, right up there with a flat earth and claims we never sent men to the moon. We need an "all the above" energy strategy, and that includes nuclear power, or I'm calling global warming the biggest pile of bullshit ever concocted.
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huge solar farms are just not needed and a sign of not moving forward. It only keeps power generation in the hands of the rich and powerful.
So, you oppose solar power subsidies? I certainly do.
There is already more than enough floor space on roof tops of businesses, homes, and office building, edges of freeways, up and down sky scrapers.
Who owns these businesses, homes, and office buildings? My guess is it's the people that you would call "rich and powerful". Maybe there's quite a few in the middle class and working poor that own their homes. Maybe if there's a financial case for a short payback period on rooftop solar that people with less wealth could finance a solar power system on their homes. This will not be available to people that rent their home, that will be for the rich a
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Yes, let's not stray from the status quo! God forbid that the rich might benefit from something that would help everyone. So we better not help everyone. Only the rich.
Here's what a tax and subsidize plan does for the middle class. It takes money from them to start. The government takes a cut to pay for all the paper pushing they do. The middle class gets to fill out some paperwork so that they can get the rest of that money back that was taken from them in solar panels that they might not even want. But if they don't fill out the forms then they were simply taxed and saw no income from the solar power subsidies. Instead that money would go to their neighbors that fi
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Pointing out the obvious does not make anyone smart.
Cloudy math (Score:1)
800 MWh battery, 400 MW array. Sounds like 2 hours of storage. How is that enough for all night?
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800 MWh battery, 400 MW array. Sounds like 2 hours of storage. How is that enough for all night?
It depends on how many EVs are charging...
Re:Cloudy math (Score:5, Interesting)
Your math is correct, but you are making the unstated assumption that the battery will be feeding out power at the same rate as the solar generation capacity, 400 MW. But, it is night time, and usage will tend to be lower for a good part of that time. Also, if a 400 MW generator can fill an 800 MWh battery, then less than 400 MW is being used to supply on line demand on any average daytime hour. So, average daytime demand, if prorated to the night would last more than 2 hours at full daytime usage, but even so, much of the night should see low use, so 800 MWh could go rather far. And, none of this presupposes that the battery is the only means of generation or supply at those nighttime hours. It can be supplemented by the other supplies and offset their demand (coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, wind, whatever), and that is still a good start. And, "a start" is a crucial concept. If it proves itself to any reasonable degree, then as profitability, technical infrastructure, and industry and consumer acceptance ramp up, it gets ever easier to build out more capacity. One can foresee such technology fully entrenched and being a major or majority component of the power supply within 30-50 years.
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Well, this has to be understood in the context of the actual grid we have in California. In this grid, we don't have much storage. Not near enough to run the grid for a day or even an hour, truth be told. So the idea that we charge fast and discharge slow and somehow end up 100% renewal, well, that doesn't work. So the original unstated assumption is likely to be optimistic. In reality, it would be very desirable for this battery to be capable of very fast discharge. And it would also be very desireable if
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Re:Cloudy math (Score:5, Informative)
It would be best to be honest about how much this will cost and how it will effect electricity rates in California. But unfortunately, nobody is interested in that.
There are people that will be honest about this, but they aren't selling solar panels.
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
The storage of solar power to last through the night, and the occasional cloudy day, is not a trivial problem.
Quite possibly the easiest and simplest means to store energy today is molten salt thermal.
http://large.stanford.edu/cour... [stanford.edu]
Molten salt thermal energy storage is ideal for concentrated solar thermal power, because once the solar energy is concentrated to a molten salt heat transfer medium the storage of this heat is just a matter of having enough salt and a big enough tank to keep it in. The rest is just a fairly typical steam cycle or an air-Brayton cycle turbine driving a generator.
People will claim that this also works for solar PV and wind but leave out the fact that this is throwing away 40%, 60%, or more of your energy in the process. Heating the salt from an electric source, and doing it with near 100% efficiency, is trivial. The problem is getting that energy back out, and that means using a heat engine with (depending on the implementation) efficiencies that might be 60% (which requires VERY high temperatures), or more likely 40% to 30%.
Getting to the 600 C temperatures for molten salt thermal storage is within the range of many coal and solar thermal power systems. Current nuclear power often runs at lower temperatures for reasons of safety, not because they can't do it. A nuclear power plant that can reach these temperatures today is very feasible as the lower temperatures are used to keep the water from boiling too quickly in a loss of coolant event. If the reactor is cooled with molten salt this hazard of flash boiling the water (and everything bursting at the seams) is gone.
If the people behind solar power were honest about the needs for energy storage then they'd be arguing themselves out of the solar power business.
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I am surprised you didn't get modded troll as often seems to happen to me if I say anything negative about certain topics (such as solar or Tesla). Anyway, good comment.
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The solar plant is most likely not really charging the battery. That makes no sense. The battery is likely charged by the grid.
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The solar plant is most likely not really charging the battery. That makes no sense. The battery is likely charged by the grid.
You are quite likely very correct, which makes the solar power half of this project quite pointless.
Combined cycle natural gas is quite inexpensive in the USA, in part because natural gas is plentiful and in part because of the 60% efficiency that can be obtained with these combined cycle plants. A single cycle natural gas power plant is expensive, because they get 30% efficiency, doubling their fuel costs for the same energy.
Solar power without the batteries means displacing combined cycle (boilers with g
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It does make sense - whilst you pay a flat rate for power, the power companies pay differently according to tiem of day, on sunny, windy days the cost of power gets cheaper and cheaper to the point where solar generation companies are practically giving it away from free.
So a money-making scheme for them would be to store it when everyone else is generating, and sell it to the grid when that electricity becomes more expensive - ie in the early evening after the sun has gone down.
So until such time as we hav
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There is a dirty little secret about solar in California. They have more than they can use during the day. Peak generation is when the sun is highest in the sky. Peak demand is in the hours approaching and after sunset. During peak generation there are solar farms that dump power. The inverters stop sending power to the grid because it can't take any more, so it is wasted.
It is completely feasible to imagine this installation charging batteries during peak generation and selling it back during peak dra
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Or maybe it won't be putting 100% of its daily energy production into either one?
400MW worth of solar can be expected to provide at *least* 3,000MWh of energy per day. Even if the battery is cycled 100% every day, that's 800MWh going to the batteries and 2,200MWh remaining for general use.
And since there's no need or desire to shunt 100% of the solar output to batteries, that 800MWh is spread out over the day meaning there is always a split between batteries and grid.
=Smidge=
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Existing power systems (including those based purely on fossil fuel) already reduce production at night, because demand is lower.
I suspect the power authority installing this array is very well aware of the power demand curve at night, and has selected a suitable battery capacity to meet their needs. Chances are they also have other generation capacity in other plants, and/or import power from elsewhere.
Yaz
Yeah, a project in CA will make budget. Sure. (Score:2)
100% electric renewal is undeniably the future. That is still in the far far far distant future. Willfully & politically pushing much cheaper sources of energy away is stupid and expensive. Forcing developing countries to not use cheap energy because of a non-existent "global warming crises" is cruel in the worst possible way.
Anyway, I'm willing to bet $1000 that the project in CA doesn't make budget nor does it work as well as projected.
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Anyway, I'm willing to bet $1000 that the project in CA doesn't make budget nor does it work as well as projected.
I wouldn't make that bet.
There's a lot of money that can be made in buying electricity low and selling high. Because of the backwards government subsidies on wind the spot price of electricity can go negative. Wind power projects get government subsidies based on the energy they produce, without regard to demand at the time. This means night time prices of electricity in tornado alley... I mean "the wind corridor", can go negative and people are paid to take electricity so that the coal plants don't have
Re:Yeah, a project in CA will make budget. Sure. (Score:5, Insightful)
100% electric renewal is undeniably the future. That is still in the far far far distant future. Willfully & politically pushing much cheaper sources of energy away is stupid and expensive. Forcing developing countries to not use cheap energy because of a non-existent "global warming crises" is cruel in the worst possible way.
Anyway, I'm willing to bet $1000 that the project in CA doesn't make budget nor does it work as well as projected.
Hey, 1980 wants its fallacious talking points back.
Renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuel infrastructure in many parts of the developing world, making them preferable in terms of pure up-front material costs. http://ieefa.org/bnef-developi... [ieefa.org]
There's far more in the favor of renewables down the road. Ask Nigerians what they think about the health effects of living near oil pipelines. Ask the people of Shanghai about wearing face masks just to go outside. Renewables reduce disasters, air pollution, and the pretext for large-scale wars in the Middle East that all have huge costs that oil companies and insulated first-worlders don't pay for; they simply plague the global poor.
So, this talking point that renewables are being forced on the world is absurd, and I wonder how much it correlates to the support of slapping huge tariffs on solar panels, like the current US President is doing, while continuing to mold governmental policy around kickbacks around Big Oil.
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Why is battery cheaper? (Score:2)
How the hell is the battery powered electricity cheaper than the direct solar?
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Solar costs X. Battery costs X to charge it from solar, plus Y to build and manage the battery. ...
You are correct, BUT
The sun don't shine at night.
That's why batteries are needed to store excess sunshine to be used at night.
I think that question also came from where the sun don't shine.
(Sorry, didn't mean to be rude, but couldn't help myself.)
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How the hell is the battery powered electricity cheaper than the direct solar?
How much does that solar power cost at midnight? Answer that question and you'll have the answer to your question.
Just in case you can't connect the dots together the answer is that the cost of solar power at midnight is the cost of natural gas turbines at midnight. That's because solar power without batteries is just a proxy for natural gas.
https://powerpastimpossible.or... [powerpastimpossible.org]
Aren't renewables the future of energy?
Renewables certainly are part of a sound energy future. The federal government projects they will supply about 14 percent of our energy in 2050. For renewables such as wind and solar to grow, they need natural gas as a partner - furnishing a reliable, quick-ramping fuel source when it's cloudy or there's not enough breeze to turn a windmill. Natural gas checks the boxes.
There you have it, solar power is endorsed by the American Petroleum Institute.
Once solar power and windmill projects start deployin
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You are right on most counts. However you didn't answer the question asked. Instead, you posed your own related question, and answered that.
How the hell is the battery powered electricity cheaper than the direct solar?
It isn't. Best guess? The 1.3 value listed is just the price of having the battery around to provide peak/emergency "generation" capacity. So yeah, the 1.3 value is added to whatever the cost is to charge the battery. Which could include "solar power that would otherwise be dropped on the floor" as it were.
As you say, battery farms are better stated as filling the
Re: Why is battery cheaper? (Score:2)
I'd imagine the solar revenue at midnight is around $0. Now, I can't calculate the per unit rate of zero units, but I'd say it's safe to say it would not bring up the average cost of solar.
Re: Why is battery cheaper? (Score:2)
Natural gas turbines are not solar. Someone is not using reasonable language.
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If that's your definition of nuclear power being "replaced" by batteries then the same should also apply for solar being "replaced" by batteries when the sun goes down? No?
We will need nuclear power in the future. The alternatives will look dark and cold by comparison. This likely means, at least in the short term, batteries being charged up by nuclear power. What is a likely replacement for the batteries are thermal storage systems that take advantage of the higher operating temperatures of fourth gene
The duck curve! (Score:5, Interesting)
That peak electricity demand is the favorite hunting ground for the spot market scalpers. Where Enron made so much money. Beheading that duck has devastating consequences for the thermal power plants. The most lucrative period, where almost half the profits of the plant is made is gone. Without peak electricity prices these "peaker" powerplants become non competitive. These are inefficient plants, their only raison d'etre was to make money on peak rates. Once the electricity prices become stable, the baseload plants will run at higher capacity and undercut the peakers.
Rate payers should benefit, in theory. But the utilities own their regulators, These peaker plants cost will be marked stranded cost and we will end up paying the utilities anyway.
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The only reason why peakers exist is so that you don't get a typical third world grid. Where you get blackouts several times a day as a matter of routine.
"How to make peakers economically viable" is basically the second challenge you solve on your quest for stable grid, immediately after "hook the base power plants to distribution network".
I wish the utilities owned their regulators (Score:3)
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What I'm hearing, which may not be what you are saying, is that batteries help thermal power plants more than solar power.
If we have big batteries to cover the daily peaks while charging in the valleys then existing thermal plants can run at the slow and steady pace they love. Thermal power includes coal, natural gas, and... nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the lowest CO2 emitting power source we have today, with a possible exception of hydroelectric power. That's lower CO2 per energy produced than solar or
Or the evil side (Score:3)
Interestingly, I wonder if the regulators are thinking about how cheap storage can be used for more nefariuos purposes. Once storage facilties become cheap enough (or effectively free, if they can pay for themselves through regular duck curve arbitrage) you can imagine goldman sachs or their ilk buying them up and then using them to manipulate the market. There is so much fun stuff you could do with such a responsive system. For example, in an area with a lot of coal, you could feed energy into the system s
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Interestingly, I wonder if the regulators are thinking about how cheap storage can be used for more nefariuos purposes. Once storage facilties become cheap enough (or effectively free, if they can pay for themselves through regular duck curve arbitrage) you can imagine goldman sachs or their ilk buying them up and then using them to manipulate the market. There is so much fun stuff you could do with such a responsive system. For example, in an area with a lot of coal, you could feed energy into the system slowly to fool a utlity into shuting off some base load, then pull your supply causing spot prices to rocket. When gas supplies are constrained, you could insert volatility into the system to force utilities to use gas plants, and then cash in off the knowledge that gas prices will soon rise.
That could happen... once. After that you'll have to pry battery storage from the control of the utilities out of their cold dead fingers.
I suspect that many utilities are already taking a close look at battery storage to go with their coal projects. They are already getting beaten up from competition coming out of wind subsidies. If spot prices go too low from subsidized wind then they have to choose between shutting down to lower fuel costs, and eating the cost to get back online later, or eating the l
Article is full of glaring errors (Score:2, Troll)
The article is full of glaring errors. I don't see how anyone can take it seriously.
"the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries [has recently] fallen ... to $187 per MWh".
That is ridiculous. If batteries were that cheap a power wall would cost maybe a couple hundred bucks, and the batteries would be the cheapest part of it. And Tesla wouldn't even bother having different sized battery packs. Every vehicle would ship with the largest battery pack. In fact, if batteries were that cheap we would already b
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The battery is most likely a flow battery, which means it is BIG.
However you are right, the article is pretty bad:
Large-scale battery storage generally relies on lithium-ion batteriesâ"scaled-up versions of the devices that power laptops and most electric vehicles. But Jane Long, an engineer and energy policy expert who recently retired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, says batteries are only part of the energy storage answer, because they typically provide power for only a fe
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Yes. I am really convinced that lithium ion batteries are not going to be the storage solution that get us to 100% renewables. Or shouldn't be. I wish the government had decided, 10 years ago, to grant a lot of money to R and D so that by now we might have a good storeage solution. Grid storeage is the big problem holding back renewables. Subsidizing solar panels has been to a large extent a waste of money (in my opinion). Maybe flow batteries will be the solution or heat storage plants instead of PV. I don
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$200 per kWh with a cycle life of 1000 cycles implies a cost of energy of 20 cents per kWh just in terms of battery replacement cost (and ignoring degradation of capacity with cycle life). But the article said the energy cost would be less than 2 cents per kWh. So this means that the article is bullshit. I think you are missing the point.
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It gets more complicated when you factor in partial charges. LiIon batteries are most efficient if you never fully charge or discharge them. If you use around 40% of their t
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Datasheets for lithium polymer and lithium ion cells specify cycle life. They also specify the remaining capacity at end of life and also the charge and discharge conditions necessary to measure the cycle life. 80% after 1000 cycles is somewhat typical for certain types of cells, but there is a very wide variance.
They didn't specify the cycle life of the batteries in this article. But I am an electrical engineer and design products with lithium ion batteries in them. Cycle life varies over a wide range. 100
65,000 homes? (Score:2)
Why not make it an even 65,536 homes?
"At cost" is an absolutely meaningless statement (Score:2)
because power generation financials are so convoluted and non-transparent, that only the people who get the subsidies and the kickbacks know the whole truth. Is the cost to the end users of electricity going to go up or down? I keep hearing about "cheap" solar, wind and whatnot, yet the "green energy" part of my bill has not gone down.
CA Solar (Score:1)
Finding new and enlighten ways to break the state of CA. How about they first figure out ways to keep their residence from leaving CA.
money (Score:2)
Cost Understatements galore! (Score:2)
Let's be real here for a sec.
First, let me say that I'm a HUGE fan of solar and wind generated electricity. Massive potential to get power by utilizing existing sources that are "free".
Second, let me say that on a large scale Solar and Wind are simply not ready yet to take over for fossil fuels yet. Infrastructure isn't there yet. Tech isn't quite there yet either. Heck, even the "green" groups war among themselves about some of these things!
Green Group 1: "Wind power is great! It can save humanity"
Gre
Healthcare costs (Score:3)
We should keep evaluating the impact of saved healthcare costs from reduced air pollution alone, because this isn't just about the bean counters.
https://www.yaleclimateconnect... [yaleclimat...ctions.org]
Let me know the cost/kWh after it is built (Score:2)
I would be much more interested in the generation costs AFTER it is built and online. Technoeconomic projections, like talk, is very cheap.
How many cents for winter backup? (Score:3)
A couple hours of backup is nice, only need to multiply that by a thousand or so to even consider actually shutting down or not building the corresponding dependable power to get us through the winter.
When you are building that winter backup any way the solar power doesn't have to compete with the levelized cost of the fossil fuel power, it has to compete with the fuel cost of the fossil fuel power.
As long as it can't do that, including solar will increase consumer electricity costs.
Re:Perhaps cheapest, perhaps not (Score:5, Informative)
In what part of the world is 1.997 cents not less than $0.05 or $0.15?
Hint: 1.997 cents is $0.01997, so it's less everywhere.
And it's even better at 1.3 cents ...
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Power has two primary components to the cost, firstly the cost of generation secondly the cost of transmission.
I don't know if your 5 to 15c includes transmission or not but I think the solar prices do not.
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Your math is off. US energy usage is 3.82 trillion KWh or 1000 times your 4 TWh number. This is 440 GW, so that number is right. 1 GWh or battery is good for 8 minutes. The 3 minutes posted in the original message might very well be correct as the 440 GW is an average, and the peak usage would be higher.
The original article is also wrong on it's costs. It quotes "to $187 per MWh". This should be $187 per KWh. If it were $187 per MWh, then a 9 KWh power wall would cost $1.12. At $187/KWh, this projec
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Your math is off. US energy usage is 3.82 trillion KWh or 1000 times your 4 TWh number. This is 440 GW, so that number is right. 1 GWh or battery is good for 8 minutes. The 3 minutes posted in the original message might very well be correct as the 440 GW is an average, and the peak usage would be higher.
The original article is also wrong on it's costs. It quotes "to $187 per MWh". This should be $187 per KWh. If it were $187 per MWh, then a 9 KWh power wall would cost $1.12. At $187/KWh, this project's battery will cost $150 million. It's "1000 cycle" (the battery life) output will be 800,000,000 KWh for a cost/KWh of $0.1875. But the cost will be double this as the project does not amortize at 0% interest.
This is why the non battery storage solutions are less expensive than batteries. If electricity is $0.02/KWh and your storage is 60% efficient (this is about what pumped hydro is), then the 60% efficiency only "costs" you $0.133/KWh. Consider the San Luis reservoir. It is 2M acre-feet x 400 ft x 60% or about 480,000,000 KWh, which is 500x the storage of the battery project. This is storage that shifts power by seasons, not hours.
Batteries are great for smoothing short term peaks. For even shorter term, super-caps are actually better than batteries. For long term storage, there is pumped hydro, stored hydrogen, stored heat (ie, molten salt), and others. Even though these may only give you back 50-70% of the power you put in, their massive capacity makes them a better choice for really large, really long term storage projects.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Interesting! I'm always suspicious of an article title that uses a word like "shoving" instead of "nudging", or "may eventually pose a viable competition to...". And I'm pro-solar btw.
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Your math is off. US energy usage is 3.82 trillion KWh or 1000 times your 4 TWh number
No, it's not, I just mistyped 4000 TWh as 4 TWh. The rest checks out.
1 GWh or battery is good for 8 minutes.
In what way is it 8 minutes? As I see it, it's 8 seconds daily, or 49 minutes annually.
The 3 minutes posted in the original message might very well be correct as the 440 GW is an average, and the peak usage would be higher.
I don't see how you get from almost an hour annually to 3 minutes by considering peaks. Peaks don't give you an order of magnitude of change. Maybe tens of percent at worst.
The original article is also wrong on it's costs. It quotes "to $187 per MWh". This should be $187 per KWh. If it were $187 per MWh, then a 9 KWh power wall would cost $1.12.
Are you talking now about storage capacity costs, or lifetime per-kWh costs? They're kind of not the same.
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My question is, is it really $0.015 or is it subsidized with ever increasing taxes to make it look profitable only charging $0.015. If its the latter then its just robbing from peter to pay paul. The net effect wont amount to the sort of savings the article wants to imply. Paying just 10% the cost sounds too good to be true. My experience is that when things seem to good to be true, they almost always are. If its driven by subsidies, you still pay, but its much harder to realize how much more than the stick
Re:Perhaps cheapest, perhaps not (Score:5, Informative)
What the fuck are you talking about, "not enough sun"?
Germany has bucket loads of solar. Germany's southernmost point is at ~47 degrees latitude... that's about the same as the northern most tip of Maine. Germany is effectively north of Seattle. Virtually all of the continental Unites States is farther south.
So how the hell does the US not have enough sun?
=Smidge=
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Your Numbers (Score:2)
Re:Your Numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the rest of the articles section, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] higher voltages really help, at least till corona losses add up. Notable quotes,
For example for possibilities, my Province has 18,286 km of high voltage transmission lines, some stretching from Alaska to Washington State I believe and definitely close to that difference.
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1. The 765kV number I quoted is a typical long-haul high voltage line in the U.S.
2. Those transmission/distribution losses you quoted are total cumulative losses and assume a much shorter average current transmission line than the long distance lines described by the post to which I was responding, which was talking about 1400/2800 mile lines.
In any case the main point is that any time you reduce the distance between power source and the destination you cut current losses and in
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This, considering the actual nature of the losses, means there's considerable room for improvement. Not that it's impossible.
You're forgetting that a huge amount of the losses incurred is because they are a percentage and, in the current state of things, it's not profitable enough to fix them. If the losses start mounting because the absolutes starts going up, and there is no viable way to simply pass the cost to the consumers, it will suddenly become quite attractive to fix the crappy distribution network.
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But why would you need a 2800 mile line, unless you plan to do some transcontinental daytime load/generation balancing? To remove the latitude effect for solar, you mostly need a north-west line.
2800 miles is the greatest "straight-line" distance across the United States (Washington to Florida). It makes for a handy worst case scenario, which is what the great-great-grandparent article was calculating.
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A 100 mile (160 km) span at 765 kV carrying 1000 MW of power can have losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. That would make the MINIMUM loss of a 2800 mile span 14% and as much as 30.8%.
So you are saying that even in the worst case, using an inefficient long distance AC power line implementation, this is quite practical to ship power from coast to coast in the U.S. since even a 30% power loss of zero-fuel cost unit of power, generates zero carbon emissions, and is competitive with the losses in existing power storage technologies in current commercial use (pumped water loses 13-30% of the power, round-trip). Good to know.
What, you thought you are were making a case that it was prohibitive?
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We've dug out most of the easily accessible coal, its increasingly more expensive as time goes on. Right now, the cheapest is gas (next to geothermal, but that's not quite as easily accessible as burning natural gas).
Onshore wind is 3rd cheapest BTW. Don't know why everyone thinks solar is the answer to renewables.
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Same here.
Your point is interesting, but impossible to know if valid or not because you have confused cents and dollars or else misplaced you decimal points. Please repost your comment with the numbers accurately defined and stated so that we can properly take it into consideration.
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The article is wrong about the price of batteries. It is (let's just say for argument) $187 per kWh (not MWh as it says in the article). That means that after 1000 charge cycles of the battery pack, the cost contribution of the battery pack to the electricity will be 0.187 per kWh. And that is just the battery. It doesn't include any other costs. So the claims of the article make no sense.
These are just rough calculations, but I don't think they are too far off. Even if you get 2000 cycles of the battery, i
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Batteries used for grid storage are over specified for capacity, ie a 1000Wh battery will come in a package with 1200WH of capacity. This is to maximise the damage caused to the battery by repeated discharge to 0. The extra ensures the battery never gets completely discharged, but always has 10 or 20% left (or its the other way round, and never charges to 100%) Either way, they do it to get more life out of the things.
Or course, they could use a better grid-scale battery tech, but nobody wants to consider v
Only true if you're willing to externalize costs (Score:2)
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You're comparing the retail price of a branded device that happens to contain batteries to the wholesale price of batteries.
There is lots of value added for the Tesla Powerwall, like being able to interoperate with Tesla's line of luxury cars. Also, their bottleneck is the batteries, and they absolutely need them for their cars, so of course anything they let out the door in another product will have "early adopter" levels of markup.
All of that said, it is a typo. $187 per KWh would be consistent with norma
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All of that said, it is a typo. $187 per KWh would be consistent with normally-cited numbers.
There's been so many B.S. claims when it comes to anything "green" (solar freakin' roadways, anyone?) that I half expected it not to be a typo. But yeah, $187 per KWh is a little cheaper than half of what Tesla is selling their Powerpack 2 [wikipedia.org] for, which is specifically designed for grid load balancing.
Surprisingly, there really isn't a huge $ per KWh difference between the Powerwall sold for home use and the Powerpack intended for utility use.
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kWh (Score:1)
$187 dollars per kWHr for large-scale utility storage.
400 cycles for-charge cycles is said to be claimed for laptop computers. At 1000 cycles, you are talking 1.87 cents/kWHr for storage. Wholesale, not retail. Before the costs of distribution and other costs to give the metered price to the residential customer.
It sounds plausible. We shall see.
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$187 dollars per kWh. 1000 charges is 1000 kWh delivered over the life of the battery. That means the battery contributes $187/1000 = $0.187 per kWh. Not $0.0187 as in your post. You are off by 10x, unless I have made a mistake.
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400 cycles for-charge cycles is said to be claimed for laptop computers.
It's going to be much, much more for grid storage. They're not trying to push the energy density as high as possible, nor trying to heavily cheap out on charging components to hit the bargain bin.
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> 400 cycles for-charge cycles is said to be claimed for laptop computers.
Good thing we're not talking about laptops, then.
Mobile device batteries live an exceptionally hard life as people try to get the most out of them, operating from one extreme state of charge to another. This shortens their life significantly.
If you want to keep your laptop/phone battery as healthy as possible for as long as possible, limit yourself to between ~20% and ~80% state of charge. Of course that reduces operating time so n
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Yep. Maybe they meant $187 per kWh. Who knows. Even that may be a bit optimistic.
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butt your head does!
Oh noes, socialism! (Score:2)
Social security is socialism. Unemployment insurance is socialism. OSHA is socialism. FDIC is socialism. Roads are socialism. The creation of the internet was socialism.
Please go hike a deer trail to a hermit cave and stay there if you are opposed to socialism. You will not be missed.
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Social security is socialism. Unemployment insurance is socialism. OSHA is socialism. FDIC is socialism. Roads are socialism. The creation of the internet was socialism.
The Green New Deal is socialism without anything "green".
You want socialism? You want green energy? Then where are the elected officials in government calling for the mining of rare earth elements needed for our solar power collectors and windmill magnets? Where are they demanding the building of government owned low CO2 energy? Well, I'll give them some of this for their efforts in the TVA on solar, nuclear, and hydro projects. For the most part the government, federal and state, isn't taking this ser
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So socialism is when people can power their houses by themselves?
Having the government buy the solar panels on "your" rooftop is not capitalism. That's the government taking ownership of "your" home.
And the "capitalist" way is to have massive nuclear plants that need constant alert and protection by the government to not blow up and huge subsidies by the same government to quarantine their output which remains radioactive for millions of years?
That would be true if the government that is taking those funds from nuclear power plants earmarked for nuclear waste disposal and actually disposing of the waste. What we got is a hole in the ground in Yucca Mountain, a project in the planning since 1987, and it's still not taking any waste. Instead we have private investors and private engineering firms designing nuclear
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"Subsidize to the extent necessary getting solar installed right on houses where it makes the most sense to do so."
If we'd just stop subsidizing fossil fuels, it would not be necessary at all.
Carbon cap-and-tax now. Not cap-and-trade, either, that doesn't work.
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That's just the efficiency barrier, not a barrier to cost reduction of manufacture.
The cost limits of flexible thin film solar panels with polymer barriers and nanowire transparent electrodes are hard to say ... there's not a lot of material in them though. No more glass, no more metal support structure, very little semiconductor material, no more ITO. Most of the intrinsically expensive materials gone.