Startup Aims To Tackle Grid Storage Problem With New Porous Silicon Battery (ieee.org) 245
New submitter symgym writes: Recently out of stealth mode is a new battery technology that's printed on silicon wafers (36 million "micro-batteries" machined into 12-inch silicon wafers). It can scale from small devices to large-scale grid storage and promises four times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries for half the price. There should also be no issues with fires caused by dendrite formation. "When you use porous silicon, you get about 70 times the surface area compared to a traditional lithium battery... [and] there's millions of cells in a wafer," says Christine Hallquist of Cross Border Power, the startup that plans to commercialize the battery design developed by Washington-based company XNRGI. "It completely eliminates the problem of dendrite formation." If all of this is true, it's a massive disruptive invention. Hallquist also notes that the new batteries are 100% recyclable. "At the end of the life of this product, you bring the wafers back in, you clean the wafer off, you reclaim the lithium and other materials. And it's essentially brand new. So we're 100 percent recyclable."
"Hallquist says the battery banks that Cross Border Power plans to sell to utility companies as soon as next year will be installed in standard computer server racks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "One shipping container worth of those racks (totaling 40 racks in all) will offer 4 megawatts (MW) of battery storage capacity, she says. Contrast this, she adds, to a comparable set of rack-storage lithium ion batteries which would typically only yield 1 MW in a shipping container."
"Hallquist says the battery banks that Cross Border Power plans to sell to utility companies as soon as next year will be installed in standard computer server racks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "One shipping container worth of those racks (totaling 40 racks in all) will offer 4 megawatts (MW) of battery storage capacity, she says. Contrast this, she adds, to a comparable set of rack-storage lithium ion batteries which would typically only yield 1 MW in a shipping container."
Game changer or another Solyndra/Theranos? (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep telling people that secondary battery technology will keep improving because there's a need for it.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
> I keep telling people that secondary battery technology will keep improving because there's a need for it.
The Fusion research people have been going that for 50 years. "Because there is a need" produces exactly nothing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thing is, there isn't much need for fusion - we've got plenty of electricity generation right now. All fusion does is add to that. The only reason it hasn't been killed is because of how much electricity it can potentially generate - for a small amount of input materials it can power a city f
Re:Game changer or another Solyndra/Theranos? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Game changer or another Solyndra/Theranos? (Score:5, Informative)
If we had practical, cheap, plentiful fusion power for electricity tomorrow morning and all the acreage that wind and solar take up became an irrelevant waste of time, advances in battery technology would still be important and useful for plug-in electric cars. If not vaporware the battery technology in TFA would give fantastic range to electric vehicles as well as significantly reduce charging time.
What I latched onto was the part about cell power/ dendrite formation, as well as thermal runaway. And that the batteries exist, and the issue is now scaling.
The article/video and technology does not trip any of my bullshit sensors, I'll read the white paper when I get a chance. But this is no Waterseer - no laws of physics are being violated, so I'm calling this very plausible.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Game changer or another Solyndra/Theranos? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fusion people have produced a lot. The whole thing will need a century or longer though. Not the kind of thing short-sighted capitalism can even grasp.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Also, Fusion depends on progresses in computing and material sciences. For example, the Wendelstein 7-X (which has already produced a ton of new applied plasma physics) would not even have been possible before, because the simulation capabilities were simply not there. Still took about 15 years to build it. At a rate of 20 years for each iteratively more advanced experiment, 80 or 100 years is not that long. And it does look very much like they will get there eventually, just not soon. The 7-X, for example,
Re: (Score:2)
The Fusion research people don't claim to have manufactured 600 working demo units for interested integrators to test. (Well, not the legit ones at least.)
Nor do they mostly re-use existing, already-scaled manufacturing technology.
The latter is a huge difference which should be considered very heavily when saying "but tech Y might perform even better."
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps a porous graphene/aerogel battery.
Re: (Score:3)
Perhaps a porous graphene/aerogel battery.
Graphene and aerogels make great supercapacitors, but may not work as batteries.
3D Printed Graphene Aerogel Offers Highest-Ever Capacitance for a Supercapacitor [ieee.org].
Doesn't bode well (Score:5, Insightful)
When they say the batteries will store energy in MW instead of MWh. You'd think someone talking about batteries wouldn't make that mistake, so hope it was a mistake by some idiot 'journalist' instead.
Re: (Score:2)
Probably is is a journalist mistake. An engineer would not make that mistake.
Re: (Score:3)
Probably is is a journalist mistake. An engineer would not make that mistake.
It is a direct quote from the company's CEO. She clearly says "storage capacity", so she is talking about energy, not power. The journalist works for IEEE.org, so he should not make such a basic mistake.
Re: (Score:2)
Sloppy language from a manager tells you nothing about anything.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not a direct quote in TFA. Someone changed it to a direct quote for the summary.
In TFA it's paraphrasing what she said. I agree that the journalist should not have made this mistake.
Re: (Score:2)
It is a direct quote from the company's CEO.
No, it wasn't.
Re:Doesn't bode well (Score:4, Interesting)
Who cares? When somebody uses kW or MW as a unit of energy they mean kWh or MWh. Always. What's the problem? It's like dickering about stating a mass in lbs instead of slugs.
No, no its not. Its like saying the speed I was driving at was 60mi. Its the same as the difference between distance and velocity. Its a good indication that the writer has no idea what they are writing about and likely can be ignored. Maybe the technology is real. But the first data point says no and only time will tell.
Re: (Score:2)
But everyone hearing it will know: you drove 60mi/h ... other wise you would not have used the word speed but "far".
It is very common to answer to a question like: "How fast were you?" with "Around 50"
See: units omitted. It is clear from context.
But I agree that a technical publication about a research or company success should contain the correct units.
Re: (Score:3)
The point is that nobody should be second-guessing. This is engineering, units are well defined and known by everybody.
Re: (Score:2)
"The point is that nobody should be second-guessing"
And yet English has many contexts in which second-guessing is necessary. Do you remember the "you (understood)" clause?
Same thing here. Even fucking engineers that know better just ignore hours and say "x watts" because the hours part is understood.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
IME the vast majority of engineers use sloppy, abbreviated language whenever they're not trying to argue from Authoritay.
Your idea that when you see a typo or missing word then you have to stop trusting the data source is obviously the opinion of somebody who doesn't actually do engineering because when you're doing anything like that, you have to get data from datasheets. They are written by engineers. And they're loaded with typos and missing words.
Re: (Score:2)
Not always. There are two common interpretations:
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately for your argument, pound-force and pound-mass are both valid units. Look up "poundal".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
When they say the batteries will store energy in MW instead of MWh. You'd think someone talking about batteries wouldn't make that mistake, so hope it was a mistake by some idiot 'journalist' instead.
I saw that, and I did some quick math to see how it would compare to alkaline or NiMH AA batteries.
By my estimate, a shipping container packed full of AAs could hold about 17 million cells. If each one can draw about 1A, at 1.5V that's about 25MW of power. That's quite an improvement over the 4MW claim (at least for a few minutes).
Re:Doesn't bode well (Score:5, Informative)
Grid scale batteries are always measured in power, not energy. Power is the limiting factor for grid-scale applications, you always end up with more than enough energy when you size for the power you need. A reasonable rule of thumb for grid-scale is that they're run as 1C batteries, i.e. you can just slot "h" behind it to get the energy. But that is theoretical, they will very rarely be using more than 10% of their energy capacity.
Once the balancing market is saturated, this will likely change. Then utilities will be looking at peak shaving rather than balancing, and for that the limiting factor is energy, not power.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that this struck me as weird or incongruous, too. However, when discussing grid storage, the power rating of the battery system (MW) is an important metric alongside the overall capacity (in MWh). Their entry to the market may well be for frequency stabilization and peak shaving, for which quick rea
Re: (Score:2)
Why do we use mixed standards ? MW is an SI unit (metric) but MWh is a made-up term used by the electricity power generators. Traditionally, battery manufactures use Ah (Amp Hours) a made-up term for energy capacity, just look at your 12V car battery's ratting, it will be in Ah not kWh. So there is a clash now between the made-up terms of kWh and Ah due to 2 different industries converging, it seems kWh is winning.
But of course, we should be using Joules as this is the SI unit of energy along with Watts for
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You failed physics, didn't you? Power is the rate at which energy is consumed or produced. In a sense batteries don't really store anything (unless you consider the cells contained within the battery). The cells contained within the battery convert chemical energy to electrical energy when discharging, or the reverse when being charged. However, the increase in chemical energy does have mass proportional to the energy stored (E=mc^2). So,a 16kWh battery (200kg) should increase it s mass by approx 6E-10
Re: (Score:2)
In classical physics that holds true. In modern physics not so much, you can convert mass to energy and vice versa. You could argue that mass is just a form of energy but it's not a terribly useful concept.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I am an electrical engineer. I know about yards being the volume measurement for a variety of things, including concrete, compost, gravel, earth that needs to be removed, etc.
NOBODY in the electrical engineering community uses MW instead of MWh or kW instead of kWh. Nobody. Anyone who makes that mistake is not an engineer. People may abbreviate bandwidth (100 Meg or 1 Gig instead of 100 Mbits/sec or 1 Gbit/sec) but I have never heard it done with energy storage for a battery.
Re: (Score:2)
Grid storage is always in MW, not in MWh. No one in the industry cares how much energy it stores because that will never be used anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends if it is primary, secondary or tertiary reserve ... for the first you assume it does not last longer than 30 - 60 seconds, for the others there is no rule of thumb.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Except it turns out that being able to follow load at the cycle level is a really good thing that firstly makes the grid a whole lot more stable and secondly saves a shed load of carbon output because you now don't have to have a bunch of generation that is producing carbon but not actually producing power being used by the grid.
Frankly every grid in the world should be investing in some large batteries for been able to smooth the grid fluctuations out regardless of whether it saves carbon output, that it d
Re: (Score:2)
Concrete is generally measured in cubic yards. When people in the concrete business talk about quantities, though, they talk about "yards" instead of "cubic yards". When a server hard drive filled up and I deleted some files to make space, I told my colleagues that I deleted "70 gigs" of logs instead of "70 gigabytes".
I think it's pretty common for people in an industry to abbreviate units in casual conversation.
dom
So why don't they call it a "4 meg" battery (or something like that)?
Re: (Score:2)
Concrete is generally measured in cubic meters, not cubic yards.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The fact they mentioned yards should have clued you in to where they live. In the US it is always measured in cubic yards.
So a US engineering degree is obviously not very useful elsewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Fixed that for you.
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone cares how much it stores - sure it also matters how fast it can draw or push back. But if you can draw 100MW for only 1 hour before its full, that makes it pretty useless for grid-scale storage. That's only useful for peak levelling.
Re: (Score:2)
For which there is a solid business plan. This may well be their entry into the market, until they have megatons of wafers in production.
MW are not a unit of energy (Score:4, Insightful)
A pet peeve of mine are all the media reports of batteries with x GW or y MW of capacity. GWh or MWh please, or go all the way and just use MJ or GJ.
Re: (Score:2)
They need an editor (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing says "fly by night" quite like a website [xnrgi.com] and technology whitepaper [xnrgi.com] full of misspellings and grammatical errors. I'm therefore very skeptical of their claims until I see them verified by a reputable third party.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing says "fly by night" quite like a website [xnrgi.com] and technology whitepaper [xnrgi.com] full of misspellings and grammatical errors.
I'm also going with "scam".
That whole website is obviously aimed at people who want to "invest", not people who want to learn about a product. By the second sentence they're already dropping big names and telling you how many patents they have.
Re: (Score:2)
So when I read old Motorola datasheets that are full of typos I should think they were some fly-by-night outfit?
Texas Instruments has higher quality datasheets because they spend more engineer-hours writing and correcting them, but that only tells us about their documentation.
It tells us exactly nothing about their engineering.
Some people are willing to pay extra to design their product with parts that have nicely-written datasheets. Others are not. Nice datasheets may or may not make things more convenient
Re: (Score:2)
Engineering companies usually have technical writers.
Sometimes even software companies.
I had two software projects where my own documentation was rewritten by a technical writer and I had to proofread it for conceptual errors.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Since most technical papers in the world are written in English (as is the convention for the most reputable, peer-reviewd journals) it would stand to reason that they would have a good mastery of English if they have performed any research. Which they would have to do to be awarded "$80-million of investment from Intel, Motorola, Energizer, the United States Navy, Argonne National Laboratory / US DOE Department of Energy". Of course, they could have some script kiddie create the website and the CEO's bas
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps they never applied for a grand.
Can a company even apply for a grand? Never heard about that in Europe.
Re: (Score:2)
Well in the UK a grand would be taken to be 1000GBP, so you could certainly apply for a grand and despite the wishes of the Brexiteers we will still be in Europe even if we leave the EU.
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. I am dyslexic and as a result my spelling is generally very poor (though these days spelling and grammar checkers help a lot). Technically I qualify as disabled under equality legislation, judging me by my spelling is to me (I happen to be white european) is to me just as offensive as judging a wheel chair user by the fact they use a wheel chair, which is just as offensive as judging someone by the colour of their skin.
Internal resistance? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Silicon is a semiconductor, what's the internal resistance of these cells? Supercaps can store massive amounts of energy, but because of the extremely high internal resistance, it's hard to get any decent levels of current out of them - which is precisely what you do NOT want for a backup battery (you want big current instantly).
It's almost as if you don't know that big power transistors, etc., are made with silicon.
Re: (Score:2)
As for supercapaci
A Quick Correction (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
"Silicon is a semiconductor, what's the internal resistance of these cells?"
Very fucking low, as silicon solar cells can currently dump 10+A and you get over 100+A running over your doped silicon in older computers.
Yeah, probably not (Score:5, Interesting)
This appears to be an attempt at a reboot of Neah Power Systems, formally and tellingly known as "Growth Mergers, Inc." [nasdaq.com] back in the 2000s. Their prior claim to fame was going to be fuel cells -- apparently that didn't go so well for them as they've never made a profit [seekingalpha.com] and their penny stock was finally delisted around 2017.
Their technology white paper for this supposed battery technology is 5 pages of poorly-written buzzword bingo and fanciful graphs. Particularly given their history, I'll cheerfully eat my hat if this is suddenly The Big One for them.
Mulderism (Score:2)
Just great (Score:2)
One shipping container worth of those racks ...
In addition to having to convert things to units of "Libraries of Congress" I now have to do "Shipping Containers" too.
Re: (Score:2)
In this particular metric, it is pretty useful. Just don’t know if they are talking 1TEU or 2.
Would you prefer parking spaces as the unit of measure?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Mehh (Score:5, Interesting)
I am way more impressed with the approach of another startup - AMBRI. Watch this talk of the professor who founded it https://youtu.be/NiRrvxjrJ1U?l... [youtu.be]
I hope they deliver soon.
Sigh. (Score:2)
Oh look a new battery technology promising (X times more capacity/power in the same space).
Guess I'll have to wait until I can hold on in my hands before I believe it, certainly before it's any use to me. ....
Oh look a new battery technology promising...
Re: (Score:2)
porous silicon lithium-metal battery (Score:4, Interesting)
A google search for "porous silicon lithium-metal battery" indicates that XNRGI/Neah aren't the only ones investigating this technology.
Here's a pair of articles from 2018:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42004-018-0026-y [nature.com]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221128551830363X [sciencedirect.com]
And a Swiss company from 2015: https://www.poroussilicon.com/ [poroussilicon.com]
Mass Problem? (Score:2)
But to make a dent in the world, they are going to need to produce, say, 10 GWh of capacity (per year), which at their claimed ~400 Wh/kg, will require 25 megatons of batteries, which will require
megatons of silicon wafers.
How does that square with the existing production capacity for the semiconductor industry? In 2018, the worldwide production of wafers
Re: (Score:2)
The real innovation will be to produce a wafer that is a solar cell on one side, and this battery technology on the other. I think the efficiency in material use would be obvious.
Re: (Score:2)
"I wonder if the technology could make a fuel cell where the active materials can be stored in bulk outside the cell."
IIRC Toyota was working on something like that, micro fuel cells that were something like 90+% efficient in converting gas into electricity. That would've made for a great gas/electric hybrid if they could've scaled that up.
My prediction (Score:2)
This will come to nothing. In a few months, nobody will talk about it any longer. It will disappear.
This is just based on experience: battery breakthroughs announced in this forum always seem to come to nothing.
Why aren't we just pumping water or making H2? (Score:2)
Seriously? Why aren't we simply using excess energy to pump water to a higher elevation and then allowing gravity to run it through a turbine when we need the energy? Absolutely NO new tech is needed.
In areas with sufficient rainfall to make pumping water into existing reservoirs a bad idea (don't want to over-fill), we should build hydrolyzers and use excess energy to make H2 for use in natural gas-burning power plants or for fueling hydrogen fuel cells (which can then power grids or vehicles).
We need to s
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously? Why aren't we simply using excess energy to pump water to a higher elevation and then allowing gravity to run it through a turbine when we need the energy? Absolutely NO new tech is needed.
In the places where the local topography makes that feasible to do, we do it. The problem is there simply aren't that many places that are suitable, and trying to construct a structurally sound reservoir for this purpose is typically too expensive to make it worthwhile.
We need to stop trying to find the best solid-state battery
No. We shouldn't "stop" anything. Humanity has 7.5 billion brains available, so there is absolutely no reason why we need to stop pursuing idea A so we can instead pursue idea B, as if there was some kind of either/or trade-off that had to
Re: (Score:2)
"Seriously? Why aren't we simply using excess energy to pump water to a higher elevation and then allowing gravity to run it through a turbine when we need the energy?"
Seriously? You do know that a massive fucking chunk of the USA is flat desert, right? That isn't going to work everywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
We need to stop trying to find the best solid-state battery
We definitely do not need to stop trying to find the best solid state battery.
What we need is a less treacherous market environment where innovations are rewarded and winning innovations rewarded moreso, rather than engaging in a cut-throat high-wire double-or-nothing venture which is more like gambling than investing, and drives a lot of investment away as a result.
Re:Batteries won't fix the EROEI (Score:5, Informative)
source [nrel.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
Good news, the actual number for Solar PV is 9 (3 year payback for 27 successive years of service), so, we're saved.
First, I'm not so sure the EROEI payback calculation is that simple. Second, once the energy loss in batteries are added to that computation the EROEI us unlikely to remain above 7. Third, we still see a better EROEI from hydro, wind, and nuclear. Fourth, this EROEI on solar is highly dependent on location. Fifth, if you want to take that path then I'm not going to stop you. All I want is the political roadblocks to nuclear be removed, or at least made to hurdles that can be cleared. I'm merely pointi
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Note: parent's cited NREL article is from 2004, whereas the GP's numbers appear to come from Weissbach's 2013 paper [festkoerpe...nphysik.de] that someone else already took the time to rebut [rameznaam.com].
TL;DR: Weissbach assumed half of the solar power is just thrown away, silicon use and energy costs from 2005, insolation from Germany, and 10 days of storage. Using recent figures and more realistic estimates of poly-Si PV puts average EROI somewhere above 10 and as high as 25.
Re: (Score:3)
Using recent figures and more realistic estimates of poly-Si PV puts average EROI somewhere above 10 and as high as 25.
Thanks for the link, I've noted it for future reference. The problem with poor EROEI from solar PV still remains. Even at a ratio of 25 solar PV is still lower than coal and natural gas, which is the standard upon all replacements must be compared. Solar PV also does not do better than hydro or nuclear. This higher EROEI is also from optimizing the location, moving from Germany to a sunnier location, which only highlights how much the energy returned is based on location. This higher EROEI also does no
Re:Batteries won't fix the EROEI (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason is energy return on energy invested...
Nuclear 75
Hydro 35
Coal 30
Closed-Cycle Gas Turbine 28
Solar Thermal 9
Wind 4
Biomass 4
Solar PV 2
How do you reconcile those numbers with the wildly different ranking by market cost of electricity from the same sources?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Do you think that the market is failing to reflect the true energy cost of those things? In other words, do you spot an opportunity for arbitrage that the market is currently missing?
Re: (Score:2)
Renewables don't need paid shills, they are winning anyway. It always comes down to cost.
Re: (Score:3)
The economy of scale argument applies to all sources of energy. If we build more renewable energy and storage, the cost will come down.
Scale won't help with regulatory issues. Every new reactor still needs to be looked at in detail to determine if the area is suitable for it, and to develop plans for bringing nuclear material to it, storing it on site and then removing it safely. Plans need to be made for emergencies, including access for emergency services and evacuation of surrounding settlements. It's ne
Re: (Score:2)
The economy of scale argument applies to all sources of energy.
Of course.
If we build more renewable energy and storage, the cost will come down.
But the EROEI will not improve with scale.
If you want to argue that it will then that would also apply to nuclear power, creating an even greater spread on an already large difference in EROEI. For EROEI to increase with scale for wind and solar, but decrease for nuclear, would seem unlikely and would require some explanation on how this could occur.
Scale won't help with regulatory issues. Every new reactor still needs to be looked at in detail to determine if the area is suitable for it, and to develop plans for bringing nuclear material to it, storing it on site and then removing it safely. Plans need to be made for emergencies, including access for emergency services and evacuation of surrounding settlements. It's never going to be as cheap as planning a natural gas plant or windmill.
Scale does help with regulatory costs. Even if it doesn't then there is still the matter of having a high enough EROEI to maintain the economy. Nuc
Re: (Score:2)
You realize that EROEI is a problem for the corporations backing nuclear power, not for us consumers and citizens, right?
Why would any of us care about helping the nuclear industry get the EROEI down to a point where their product is viable, when there are much cheaper and cleaner energy sources available to us?
Re: (Score:2)
You realize that EROEI is a problem for the corporations backing nuclear power, not for us consumers and citizens, right?
Huh? Did you forget what EROEI means? Did you not have your coffee yet? It means "energy returned on energy invested". Nuclear power has an EROEI of 75. Meaning if I put in 10 joules then I can expect 750 joules out over the life of the plant. Solar and wind, with batteries, has an EROEI of 2 and 4 respectfully. Solar gives out only 20 joules from the 10 put in, and wind gives out only 40. You can argue about the specific numbers if you like but nuclear will be much, very much, higher than solar or
Re: (Score:2)
The fact is that renewables are cheaper than nuclear. You can't even give me a figure for the true cost of nuclear, because the price of free state backed insurance is incalculable.
Your argument that "if we just put loads of money into nuclear it would get cheaper" is extremely weak. Why take a risk on that when renewables are already cheaper and free from heavy regulation and liabilities? Even if you were right, no-one is going to take that gamble. Why would they, there is zero incentive.
This is the desper
Re: (Score:2)
Why take a risk on that when renewables are already cheaper and free from heavy regulation and liabilities?
Because the calculated EROEI for renewable energy is below the threshold to maintain our society.
For renewable energy to sustain a modern society then it would have to be a place with enough rainy mountainous territory to provide ample dispatchable hydroelectric power, which can serve as storage, like Norway. Then have plenty of calm and dry open plains for solar power, like Arizona. Wide open wind swept plains for onshore windmills, like in Oklahoma. Then to get geothermal power there would have to be
Re: (Score:2)
LOL you actually think that there isn't enough energy in the world to build enough renewable energy?
If only we had an infinite supply of clean energy... Oh wait, we do!
Re: (Score:2)
LOL you actually think that there isn't enough energy in the world to build enough renewable energy?
I believe that there is in fact enough renewable energy in the world to build an economy. It would simply be an economy far less wealthy than we have today.
If only we had an infinite supply of clean energy... Oh wait, we do!
I agree. There's enough uranium and thorium on this planet to last humanity until the sun strips it of its atmosphere.
You don't believe me? Prove it. I'm tired of giving my sources when you provide none. How about you back up your claims with a source for once.
Re: (Score:2)
How do you reconcile those numbers with the wildly different ranking by market cost of electricity from the same sources?
Costs for nuclear is higher than the EROEI would imply due to the spreading of non-recurring costs over so few reactors. Costs like those of engineering, regulatory review, and licensing. This can be reduced significantly by using economy of scale. Such as more reactors based off the same design, and more reactors on a single site. Michael Shellenberger discusses this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
Do you think that the market is failing to reflect the true energy cost of those things? In other words, do you spot an opportunity for arbitrage that the market is currently missing?
We need to fix the energy policy. It take a week to get a natural gas plant licensed. It takes years to get a nuclear power plant licensed. Companies get paid by the government to put up solar panels in places with so little sun that they might not ever make back the energy put in to making them. The market reacts to the costs of policy just like any other cost. We can fix the costs off bad policy with good policy. What we cannot fix so easily is the physical limitations of solar PV.
Let me get this straight, you are calming that the Trump administration is paying companies to set up solar panels in places with hardly any sunlight? Can you please provide some data, and not some obscure conservative blog, some real data to back this up?
Re: (Score:3)
Because he's a nuclear industry shill who posts the same old copy/paste arguments that have been debunked multiple times here.
His posts all follow the same formula, where he posts a link to someone he hopes the reader will assume is an authority on the matter (appeal to authority) but which doesn't really support his claims. He then blames regulation and scale, because the nuclear industry hates regulation and obviously wants more of its products to be made.
It's incredibly transparent and people are getting
Re:Batteries won't fix the EROEI (Score:5, Informative)
Batteries for wind and solar will not maintain our economy. The reason is energy return on energy invested.
You can see the year 2015 right in your link, and between then and now the people making those predictions already ate their hats.
Re: (Score:2)
You can see the year 2015 right in your link, and between then and now the people making those predictions already ate their hats.
I don't believe you. Maybe I would if you linked to some data. Data that shows things like CO2 emissions per energy produced, safety of the energy source, and material costs. Links kind of like these...
https://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
http://rameznaam.com/2015/06/0... [rameznaam.com]
I expect you might be able to find more recent
Re: (Score:2)
First, Forbes obviously doesn't know WTF it is talking about, Solar PVs score is higher than that. Next, EROEI is a weird measurement and needs to take into account the actual source of power for producing/building the technology, which it doesn't. Lastly, solar is nuclear. We're literally harnessing the products of a massive fucking fusion reactor at the center of our solar system.
Re: (Score:2)
First, Forbes obviously doesn't know WTF it is talking about, Solar PVs score is higher than that.
Then what should it be? Provide a link to your source or it's just a rumor.
Next, EROEI is a weird measurement and needs to take into account the actual source of power for producing/building the technology, which it doesn't.
EROEI is a perfect measurement. If EROEI isn't high enough then a solar powered factories that makes solar collectors, using the raw materials from solar powered factories, then the economy will slowly grind to a halt as the energy embedded in the materials is burned up. Embedded energy we obtained from the fossil fuel economy it replaced.
The true costs in dollars for the solar panels can be hidden in the accounting, but the energ
Re: (Score:2)
Does that EROEI for nukes include decommissioning and waste disposal? Because some waste is going to require decades of maintenance in storage before it's safe.
Yes, those costs are included. The costs are broken down more at the link below. Decommissioning appears to be a small portion of the costs.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org]
Re: (Score:2)