Australia Is Quitting Coal In Record Time Thanks To Tesla (bloomberg.com) 251
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Like so much in our modern era, Australia's high-stakes gamble on renewable energy starts with an Elon Musk Twitter brag. South Australia's last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. When an unprecedented blackout caused much of the country to question the state's dependence on clean power, Tesla boasted -- on Twitter, of course -- that it had a solution: It could build the world's biggest battery, and fast. "@Elonmusk, how serious are you about this," replied Australian software billionaire and climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes. "Can you guarantee 100MW in 100 days?" Musk responded: "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?"
To the astonishment of many, Tesla succeeded, and today, almost seven years later, that battery and more like it have become central to a shockingly rapid energy transition. By the middle of the next decade, major coal-fired power stations that generate about half of Australia's electricity will shut down. Gas-fired plants are being retired, too, and nuclear power is banned. That leaves solar, wind and hydro as the major options in the country's post-coal future. "It's really a remarkable story," said Audrey Zibelman, the former head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, or AEMO, the agency that runs the grid, and now an adviser to Alphabet's X. "Because we're not interconnected, we've had to learn to do it in a much more sophisticated way, where a lot of other countries will go once they've shut down their fossils."
It may be Australia's biggest power buildout since electrification in the 1920s and 30s. And, if successful, could be replicated across the 80% of the world's population that lives in the so-called sun belt -- which includes Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, southern China and Southeast Asia, says Professor Andrew Blakers, an expert in renewable energy and solar technology at Australian National University. That, in turn, would go a long way to halting climate change. Building battery storage is just one critical piece of the national project, and AEMO and others are worried coal plants will shut before there's enough additional electricity supply. Australia needs to increase its grid-scale wind and solar capacity ninefold by 2050. Connecting all that generation and storage into the grid will require more investment. Overall, the cost could be a staggering A$320 billion ($215 billion), and the money is starting to flow: Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., Macquarie Group Ltd., and billionaires Andrew Forrest and Cannon-Brookes have all been involved in headline-grabbing energy deals in recent months. New government support for renewables has also improved investor sentiment, according to the Clean Energy Investor Group, which includes project developers and financiers.
To the astonishment of many, Tesla succeeded, and today, almost seven years later, that battery and more like it have become central to a shockingly rapid energy transition. By the middle of the next decade, major coal-fired power stations that generate about half of Australia's electricity will shut down. Gas-fired plants are being retired, too, and nuclear power is banned. That leaves solar, wind and hydro as the major options in the country's post-coal future. "It's really a remarkable story," said Audrey Zibelman, the former head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, or AEMO, the agency that runs the grid, and now an adviser to Alphabet's X. "Because we're not interconnected, we've had to learn to do it in a much more sophisticated way, where a lot of other countries will go once they've shut down their fossils."
It may be Australia's biggest power buildout since electrification in the 1920s and 30s. And, if successful, could be replicated across the 80% of the world's population that lives in the so-called sun belt -- which includes Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, southern China and Southeast Asia, says Professor Andrew Blakers, an expert in renewable energy and solar technology at Australian National University. That, in turn, would go a long way to halting climate change. Building battery storage is just one critical piece of the national project, and AEMO and others are worried coal plants will shut before there's enough additional electricity supply. Australia needs to increase its grid-scale wind and solar capacity ninefold by 2050. Connecting all that generation and storage into the grid will require more investment. Overall, the cost could be a staggering A$320 billion ($215 billion), and the money is starting to flow: Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., Macquarie Group Ltd., and billionaires Andrew Forrest and Cannon-Brookes have all been involved in headline-grabbing energy deals in recent months. New government support for renewables has also improved investor sentiment, according to the Clean Energy Investor Group, which includes project developers and financiers.
Who Writes This? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know Australia is in the process of okaying new coal mines, right? We are the single largest supplier of coal in the world, and that makes us—per person—the biggest polluter on the planet.
Re:Who Writes This? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know digging something out of the ground is not the same as setting it on fire right? I'd like mining to stop as well but coal is a fungible resource. You don't build a new mine in Australia and there's a precisely 0% reduction in emissions as more mining will simply occur elsewhere.
Also I don't know why you dishonestly attribute other country's emissions to Australians. We're already in the top 10 worst polluters per capita. You don't need to add your dodgy accounting to it.
Re:Who Writes This? (Score:5, Insightful)
Increasing the supply of coal lowers its price, and therefore encourages its use.
A lot of people burning coal can't afford other sources, but some can. We should focus on getting the ones who can afford it to switch.
Re:Who Writes This? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know digging something out of the ground is not the same as setting it on fire right?
Why the hell are they digging it up then??
Re:Who Writes This? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's fair to share the blame between the people who dig the coal out of the ground and the people who burn it. It takes both of them to get any coal burned.
I agree that it's not fair to assign all the blame to the people who dig it up, though.
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Most of that is going to China, no?
Re:Who Writes This? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not even close - Australian per capita coal production in 2021 was 133mWh [ourworldindata.org] while the Kuwaiti per capita oil production (not including natural gas) was 358mWh [ourworldindata.org]. Even granting that hydrocarbons release about 33% less CO2 per unit compared to coal, Kuwait takes the crown with the other Gulf petrostates not far behind. And this is not including the copious amounts of natural gas those same states produce.
Heck, Norwegian oil produces more CO2 per capita than Australian coal.
Read the whole article... (Score:5, Interesting)
People should really read the whole article, especially the second part, instead of reading the first paragraph and patting themselves on the back.
But batteries can’t do everything. Specifically, they don’t generate power, and one of the biggest challenges is solving the winter problem known as the dunkelflaute, a period when weak sunlight and low wind combine with high power demand to drain power stores faster than they can be replenished.
What is needed, he says, is “deep storage” which can last weeks. He says currently the only feasible answer is natural gas, a fossil fuel.
Which incidently, is why gas lobbies at a recent COP were strongly in favor of renewables, and are lobbying against their real competing technology: nuclear.
Australia must get building, and fast.
So, we have a huge deployment of renewables only, in a country whose landscape is perfect for it. We had to install a shitload of batteries, and it still isn't enough for reliable generation and grid stability (unless you like black-outs every now and then). And it took 7 years since the initial tweet by Mike Cannon-Brookes. For 1.8M people, which is 0.02% of the world population at best. Yup, that really seems like the way to go. Totally feasible.
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Australia has some pretty big experiments planned for renewable Methane based on pumping captured CO2 and hydrogen in old gasfields.
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You don't need weeks of storage, you just need more turbines off your shores. The wind never, ever stops blowing out to sea. It gets low sometimes, but even then all you need is a lot of windmills to collect more of it.
Beyond that you have tidal, which is extremely consistent all year round. Some types of solar can work on dull days too, like thermal collectors which also have built in storage.
Another option is very long DC transmission lines from one hemisphere to another. When it's winter where you are, i
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The wind never, ever stops blowing out to sea. It gets low sometimes, but even then all you need is a lot of windmills to collect more of it.
It is low enough not to spin most turbines for about a week. This typically happens once or two times a year in North Sea. I assume other seas are similar.
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When? It's never happened since reliable records began.
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Don't know and don't have data for Australia but it was in Europe this January.
https://i.imgur.com/ro589n7.pn... [imgur.com] (from electricitymap.org)
Sure you could just install 10x more turbines as if that's a reasonable solution
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That link doesn't show no wind in the North Sea. It shows low wind in the areas where there are already turbines, which is a tiny fraction of the available energy.
We will in fact install far more than 10x as many turbines in this decade. The technology is maturing and there is already a great deal of competition over contracts.
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Wind turbines don't work when the wind is under a certain speed, or if it is over a high threshold [scottishrenewables.com]. This is just how it works, it is not linear like a first grade student would think it is. You can install more of the stuff, but if it's not producing electricity at some points of the year, you will just have more of those that don't produce electricity... And more of nothing is still nothing.
Here is an example with France Offshore wind farm in Saint Nazaire (use google translate, or just have a look at the
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You are making some rookie mistakes there. One wind farm is not the entire ocean. While there are occasionally local low wind levels, it never, ever the case that there isn't any wind energy anywhere.
You will also note that this is a shallow water wind farm near the coast, and the wind resources in that area are not as good as the ones off the coast of Australia. France is limited by its geography in a way that some other countries are not, particularly Australia.
Australia is massive, so there is huge poten
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It is low enough not to spin most turbines for about a week. This typically happens once or two times a year in North Sea
If you mean with North Sea, the sea between Germany/Denmark/Norway and UK: nope.
Perhaps you mean another "North Sea", which I'm not aware about.
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If you mean with North Sea, the sea between Germany/Denmark/Norway and UK: nope.
The fact that you don't want to acknowledge it doesn't make it less real though.
Dunkelflaute events are well [wiley.com] documented [tudelft.nl]. You can keep denying it, saying intermittency is not a problem, and that the notion of capacity factor is useless, but in the end you are just showing a lack of maturity in your arguments.
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The term is offshore.
And as someone who has actually done some sailing I know that offshore the wind often doesn't blow.
Yes very long High Voltage Direct Current is a thing, however it is very very expensive. Just a small 200MW link across the english channel cost about a billion dollars. Tasmania that little island to the south of the continent is only 3.7 times smaller than the UK. So the cost to wire it up with HVDC would be very expensive.
Also note that 200MW is about 1/10 the size of a single nuclear p
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Wait, you mean you can't just buy some electricity cords at some Home Depots, plug them together, put them at the bottom of the ocean, and get free electricity everywhere?
Don't say that to Amimojo, his fantasy world will crumble.
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And as someone who has actually done some sailing I know that offshore the wind often doesn't blow.
Three options:
a) you were sleeping, as a sailor you should not sleep unless approved by the skipper
b) you were not offshore
c) you are delusional
No wind 30 miles away from the coast in Europe? Seriously? I'm pretty sure you are dreaming that up, see a) above.
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Not thanks to Tesla (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks to the people who voted overwhelmingly to send a strong political message by booting out one coal supporting government after another around the nation. The fuckwit prime minister who infamously held a large clump of coal up before parliament saying "This is not something to be afraid of" was shown the door, and quite critically in the two party system of Australia a *lot* of the votes ended up going to either Greens (which took a record number of seats) or the so called "Teal Independents" - generally Liberal (blue) aligned independents who also favour Green environmental policies.
Telsa provided a bit of pushback against an assault on wind power. But it's not Telsa who is to thank for Australia finally pulling their finger out.
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Can't we just retrain all the coal miners (Score:2)
Flat, dry, hot and basic maths. (Score:4, Informative)
Australia is general hot, dry and flat with 94% being less than 600m.
It's not particularly windy with the roaring 40s being just to the south of the continent.
The lack of water makes Hydro as a storage technology is just plain dumb, and it's implementation, like irrigation will have an outsized impact on the environment. The snowy hydro system and existing dams have effectively driven a number of species to or close to extinction. While Hydro in Tasmania is flouted as the great hope it was protests against hydro in this region which created the Australian Greens party.
Wind farms in Australia require significant subsidies which distort the market. They also kill rare wildlife such as the Tasmanian Wedge Tail Eagle which hold the record for the largest wingspan of any eagle with only 130 breeding pairs, and yet a single wind farm has been killing 3.2 eagles a year for the last decade.
There's lots of sunshine for solar PV arrays but the flip side of solar is gas which generates CO2 emissions. Gas has also become extremely expensive and its cost is driving a large number of the remaining manufacturing businesses in Australia to the wall. Solar is good for a subset of electrical load types but by no means all.
The existing and proposed batteries in Australia can only supply a single existing Aluminium refinery for a matter of minutes, and it's not infrastructure that can be turned off. An unexpected power outage will damage the plants like this and shut them down for months if not permanently. Batteries a good for meeting short term fluctuations in demand but they're not the main show.
And that chestnut of hydrogen, the round trip efficiency of hydrogen is only 40%. That means that you have to overbuild your infrastructure by at least 2.5%, combined with an optimistic solar capacity factor of about 30% means that you need to install nearly 9x the amount of generation that you need. However Solar panels only provide an energy return of about 15:1 so this means that these system efficiencies mean that you have less than 2:1 return on energy which is less the pre-industrial society based on wood fuel.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that the only type of electrolyser that can be throttled, to match the intermittent nature of renewables, is the PEM type which require iridium in quantities orders of magnitude more than exist in industry at the moment. (Just look up the price of iridium on the metals market)
The reality is that for wind and solar are diffuse energy sources, and to power the economy it will require a footprint similar to that of existing farmland, and that will have a huge impact on the environment. Farming in Australia drove numerous species to extinction, wind and solar farming will do the same. Iconic wildlife such as eagles and albatrosses will perish in our quest for "natural power".
The reasons above will eventually drive Australia to nuclear, however I fear that this won't be before the environment pays an enormous price and huge sums of money are pissed against the wall.
Just keeping not doing maths and rub those crystals and the stupid will inherit what they deserve.
Re:Longevity of such a system (Score:5, Funny)
1. Sell lithium batteries for mobile cars where energy density is critical for efficiency.
2. Collect the batteries from the cars once their optimal efficient life span is done.
3. Use those still functional batteries in stationary applications where weight/energy isn't critical since it doesn't move.
4. Post this on slashdot and get downvoted because someone is butthurt about dogecoin and elon still promotes it.
Re:Longevity of such a system (Score:5, Informative)
5. Enjoy the lithium fires once those old batteries develop enough dendrites to short out a few cells and ignite the entire building full of batteries.
6. We're already doing it, and so far there haven't been any fires, so apparently, this isn't a real problem.
1300 recycled EV batteries used for grid storage [thedriven.io]
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https://www.canarymedia.com/ar... [canarymedia.com]
However, it was successfully contained ant put out the same day, so in a way that's an additional level of assurance that it can be coped with.
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Indeed. It is just the usual idiots that have irrational fears of everything new. That the actual engineers behind this have obviously thought of that aspect does not even enter the minds of these nil-wits. Inseat they claim that obviously these solutions must not work because they cannot imagine anything else. What a failure.
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Indeed. It is just the usual idiots that have irrational fears of everything new.
It's unsinkable [simscale.com] they said.
Re: Longevity of such a system (Score:3)
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Indeed. It is just the usual idiots that have irrational fears of everything new.
It's unsinkable [simscale.com] they said.
Insightless quote is insightless. I get that you probably do not understand why you completely fail here.
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6. We're already doing it, and so far there haven't been any fires, so apparently, this isn't a real problem.
There have been fires at some battery storage plants, just not that one, so it's a real concern even if not there. The plant in Davenport CA caught fire twice. I have no idea why, though.
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Usually that only happens with the defective ones. The notorious Samsung ones were built without industry-standard safeguards in place, in a reckless attempt to save a few hundredths of a millimeter of thickness.
Re:Longevity of such a system (Score:4, Informative)
5. Enjoy the lithium fires once those old batteries develop enough dendrites to short out a few cells and ignite the entire building full of batteries.
I was going to suggest you write to Tesla and the Australian Government expressing your concerns about their engineering, but:
a) They don't put them in "buildings"
b) They build them in blocks with separation between them.
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Wait, are you suggesting that some engineer didn't put on their Stetson hat, yell "YEEEEE HAWW" and just start piling up vast amounts of lithium batteries on top of each other; and maybe perhaps they installed them into cabinets, with space between each cabinet in order to allow work crews to maintenance the installation properly, as well as to cause fire blocking?
That's unpossible!
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6. Enjoy your lethal internal combustion engine full of a deadly explosive liquid called gasoline. Any spark or ignition can cause an explosion that will blow your dick off.
Just to nitpick, gasoline vapors (and aerosolized gasoline) are explosive, whereas liquid gasoline is simply flammable -- or inflammable, as Archer learned [youtube.com]. So a full tank of gas is more likely to burn, whereas an empty tank is more likely to explode -- both assuming the correct air/fuel mixture.
Full Tank vs. Empty Tank / Which will cause the biggest explosion? [youtube.com]
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you can use many flammable liquids and gases to power and ICE.
While true,
1) you can't just switch off between most of them, they require changes in the engine
2) of those you can switch between, most either require a lot more equipment or cause problems
3) all of the convenient ones are still polluting
4) at the very best you're always going to be burning lube oil
5) the cleanest one requires all new infrastructure except for roads and delivery trucks, but you do need new tank trailers.
Saying "we'll just switch fuels and everything will be great" is total bollocks. The IC
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Unless you are driving an M1 Abrams that uses a turbine engine that is tuned for jet fuel / kerosene but can actually run (poorly) on just about any flammable liquid you can find in a war zone up to and including whiskey and vodka, that's a fantastic way to fuck your engine over and give yourself a multi-thousand dollar repair bill.
Even going to a larger percentage of ethanol mixed into gasoline can fuck the seals of your fuel system unless they are designed for it, to say nothing about trying to use any ot
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While technically correct, fuel tank ruptures happen in sufficiently forceful collisions all the time. When the gasoline evacuates from the ruptured tank, it will greatly increase it's surface area, greatly increasing the rate of vaporization. Essentially, if you're really unlucky about the size and location of the rupture combined with when a poorly timed and located spark happens, you've created the potential for a really shitty fuel-air bomb depending on the stoichiometric ratio.
A whole lot would have
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Oh yeah all the burning plastic in an ICE vehicle isn’t toxic.
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Re:Longevity of such a system (Score:5, Informative)
Actually I'm not sure this matters because the battery cost $90 million in 2017, then saved $40m in 2018 and $116m in 2019.
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Actually, I am sure it very much does _not_ matter. That said, the numbers on the lifetimes of these batteries are known (even if possibly not published) and since this is non-mobile storage you can these run down to the lowest residual capacity where using them still brings in more value than the maintenance costs. These are _very_ low.
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Honestly, I want to see what the longevity of the battery storage is.
If it's 5-10 years, it just flat out isn't economical yet.
Do you have any idea how much money this is saving them in infrastructure?
Re:Longevity of such a system (Score:5, Informative)
It's also not "5-10 years". Given that the standard warranty on Megapack is 15 years [archive.org] (just the warranty period (80% minimum charge capacity), let alone the expected lifespan), with optional "performance guarantees" up to 20 years, said 5-10 year speculation is... "curious"
I'm not sure why people have so much trouble understanding that these aren't cell phone batteries here, that li-ion chemistries aren't all the same thing. Cell phone batteries are designed around an expected product lifespan of only a couple years. Nobody is going to engineer a cell phone battery to last 20 years when the phone is only designed to last for a couple years. They're also too small for cooling systems and other longevity extending techniques (even the "BMS" is really primitive), and run frequent deep discharges. Cell phone batteries are designed to be high energy density and low cost.
Li-ion is a whole family of different chemistries, the only thing of which that they share in common is that lithium ions are intercalated in the anode and cathode and shuttle back and forth across a separator. The anode materials vary (from titanates to graphite to high-silica anodes bound with synthetic graphitic carbon), the cathode materials vary (from iron phosphate to high nickel blends with cobalt and either manganese or alumium, to high manganese cells, to high cobalt cells, and onward), the area loading varies by well over an order of magnitude, the form factors (which affect properties) vary (pouch, prismatic, cylindrical), the pack designs vary greatly, the cooling systems vary greatly, on and on and on. And how deep your discharges is matters tremendously. Battery packs in non-plugin hybrids charge and discharge several times per day, and thus need lifespans on the order of tens of thousands of cycles. How do they do that? A proper chemistry, shallow charge/discharge cycles, and a good BMS.
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I'm able to with my new phone. First phone I've had that's offered that feature, which is honestly ridiculous. It's just a single user-adjustable floating point variable, for crying out loud...
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Re: Longevity of such a system (Score:2)
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Re:Longevity of such a system (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, I want to see what the longevity of the battery storage is.
1. They've already paid for themselves several times over.
2. Batteries in static applications last longer than mobile applications (phones, EVs) because the temperature, humidity, and usage patterns are strictly controlled. Plus degraded capacity doesn't matter as much: If your EV drops to 70% of capacity, you won't be happy. If grid storage drops to 70%, just add 30% more.
2. Lithium is easy to recover and recycle. So when they wear out, break them down and build new batteries.
Re:Longevity of such a system (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got a set of lead-acid cells (Century-Yuasa), 1320ah, that were installed in 2009.
When the weather's cloudy they need a top-up from the backup generator around 6 or 7pm, but they're still good for overnight needs - fridge, freezer,etc.
Treat 'em right and they'll last a long time.
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A coal or NG plant pays for itself several times over as well. However in this case, they didn't deliver what they offered. They also catch fire and are very difficult to put out. This second one can lead to a very difficult power situation. These are valid criticisms that need to be addressed. The first may or may not be technical, but I don't know how you fix the second one.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/australia-sues-tesla-big-battery-for-failing-to-deliver-what-it-promised-170059.html
Re: Longevity of such a system (Score:2)
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Re: Longevity of such a system (Score:2)
Re:Longevity of such a system (Score:5, Interesting)
Keeping storage between 20% and 80% greatly extends it's life but there are other forms of storage than batteries too.
I'm pretty sure we'll see chemical storage using energy to form chemicals that can then be used to produce power. Then there are flywheels (good for the 1 to 24 hour range), various kinds of gravity storage, and heat storage.
But bottom line, many different battery tech types are being developed. The iron chemistry batteries are too big for cars but may be perfectly suited to cheap, long term storage.
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I'm pretty sure we'll see chemical storage using energy to form chemicals that can then be used to produce power.
You mean, batteries? Batteries are chemical storage.
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Guess who foresaw the future?
Greta Thunberg in 2018?
https://twitter.com/GretaThunb... [twitter.com]
Re:Think about how long your phone battery lasts (Score:5, Interesting)
"This page doesn't exist" - Did Elon get upset that you credited Greta instead of his almighty battery tweet and booted her off Twitter?
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Close. Greta got upset and deleted it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
"A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years." - 4:18 AM - 21 Jun 2018
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In 6-8 years they'll have 80% capacity.
Get with the times. Your facts are outdated. In dubio pro reo I'll assume it didn't happen on purpose.
Re:Think about how long your phone battery lasts (Score:5, Interesting)
That is not true.
Quality home batteries that can be bought now, e.g. from "Sonnen" (https://sonnen.de/stromspeicher/), are guaranteed for 10 years and should have 10000 cycles, i.e. that is 30 years long a daily full cycle.
I don't know why so many people keep painting such a bad picture of various alternative energy aspects, and alsmost seem to wish that no realistic alternatives for the current energy system can exist. Vested interests? Childish longing for fast and loud cars? Fatatism?
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So instead of using existing electrical transmission lines to existing garages and parking lots in order to recharge a battery, your solution is to still trade out every car and truck in existence, as well as trade out every fuel station, pump, and tank in existence, as well as to ship a more volatile liquid than gasoline in trucks on highways that are now pressurized and / or cryogenically cooled, and every tanker trailer, in-ground tank, and vehicle fuel cell would have to be scrapped after a number of ye
Re: Think about how long your phone battery lasts (Score:2)
Batteries being caned daily at high temperatures.. (Score:3)
..die quickly. But batteries with carefully monitored temperatures driven optimally will last a lot longer.
Car batteries are giving us a baseline. We are seeing minimal degradation over 10 years, unless they are being driven really hard. The failures that are happening are usually manufacturing faults. And that's the early cells which weren't very good to start with.
I'd see the need to add capacity to counter degradation starting at the 10 year mark, and retiring packs for recycling starting between 15 and
Re:Think about how long your phone battery lasts (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess who foresaw the future?
If it was Elon, he should have been able to skip punking himself into blowing $44B on Twitter. :-)
Re:Think about how long your phone battery lasts (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps he can and saw the good for the country that will come from the Twitter Files dumps.
There were no significant revelations in the released information.
We are learning that the federal government of the US cares nothing about the First Amendment,
No, that's the Catholic Court.
and has no problem interfering with US elections to get one guy elected over the other.
No one who was involved agrees [npr.org].
Keep peddling that nothingburger, though. It will keep you and yours chasing stupid shit all the way into the toilet.
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Sure. At the time they will need to replaced, they will have brought in profits of 10x the cost. This particular installation apparently paid itself off in less than 1.5 years.
So your point (besides demonstrating you have no clue) is?
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You're lifetime estimate is off by 1/2 to 1/3. Tesla warranties the Megapack installs to "up to 20 years" at >80% nameplate capacity [tesla.com]. And even if you do have extra degradation, you can just install a few more cabinets of batteries to make up for the lost capacity, and switch out cabinets with newer (read: higher capacity and resiliency) models when the currently-installed ones are beyond the designed lifetime and then recycle the old batteries to make new batteries.
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So if they don't have an active cooling system then range is decrased and with some days it would be possible to have the heat damage your batteries.
"If"?
It almost sounds as if you didn't bother to check any facts before posting that.
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And the guy might be so deep inside an info-bubble that he literally can't see articles about the improvements over the last decade.
However, agreed- I wish people would do a little googling before posting. Even 30 seconds worth.
Plants absorb CO2 while biofuels give off CO2. If the plant takes in more CO2 than the biofuel process produces, you have a carbon negative fuel. Brazil is thought that it would be close, if not already there if they didn't burn off their leftover biomass for electricity. Regardless, I'm not your research assistant. Go look it up yourself.
Re: Think about how long your phone battery lasts (Score:2)
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You need to be careful when looking up and talking about this. Those figures sound like energy consumption.
In terms of electricity generation (which is typically what we're talking about when we talk about coal,
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Re:multiple issues (Score:5, Informative)
Coal generation is not as deterministic as you seem to think. Here in Australia Coal generators trip out [theconversation.com] all the time [reneweconomy.com.au]. I'm sure wind power trips out too, but a single turbine doesn't take out 500MW in one hit. Quoting from those links:
Nor is the "unreliability" of renewables is a big a problem as you seem to think. South Australia has been at 80% renewable for the last six months [reneweconomy.com.au]. There hasn't been a reliability issue, as there were 0 blackouts in that time. Granted, that could not happen without the gas peakers - nonetheless apparently the "don't shine and the wind don't blow" less than 20% of the time.
Finally, the article misses perhaps the most important point, and that is the reason Australia (the country, as opposed to the state of South Australia) is racing towards renewables. (While South Australia is a 80%, the rest of the country is much lower.) And the reason is ... drum roll ... (it's not Tesla, batteries or Elon) ... power prices in South Australia are dropping [aemc.gov.au]. Meanwhile the other states are being hammered by power rising power prices. They are predicted to go up by 30% in the next 2 years [abc.net.au]. It would have been 50%, but the government could not stomach that so they stepped in with subsidies. Yet, South Australia, which has always had the most expensive power prices since federation because it has no coal or gas, is regularly lower than the rest of the states now they have gone 80% renewable.
The article is not wrong. It's basically all over bar the shouting now. Everyone state in Australia wants what SA has achieved and is rushing toward the fossil exits. That said, it took SA 17 years to go from 1% renewables to 80%, so it's going to take a while.
Finally, one of the solutions to renewabes unreliability is over provisioning. Just about every household that installs solar here over provisions. So in short, unreliable bursts there is lots of unused electricity. So, Australia is attempting to use the free electricity to build a hydrogen export industry [pm.gov.au].
Re: (Score:2)
They are PLANNING to drop their coal reliance in 12+ years. However, they have not dealt with issues on AE. In the last 12 years, they have gone from 4.8% wind/PV to a whopping 8%. And hydro only provides 2% of their energy. That means that currently, 10% of their energy is clean. All the rest is FF.
The longest journey starts with a single step.
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Unfortunately those that do not understand how a transitions works, will never understand that statement. They have totally unrealistic expectations that it should happen overnight
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Re: (Score:3)
Here's a more encouraging graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
As you can see, Australia's rate of installation of new renewables is increasing exponentially. It takes time to ramp up production, and gain the knowledge and skills needed, and to build investor confidence. Profit from the first wind
and solar gets fed back into new ones, along side investor money.
They have barely begun exploiting their offshore wind resources too. There is massive scope for becoming a huge exporter of clean energy to countr
Re: (Score:2)
While you try to make a "good point": Australia is located close to the equator which means good sun and yet, they still have only gotten up to less than 10% clean. :P
No.Australia is not close to the equator. Looking at a map might help
Re: Yay (Score:2, Offtopic)
https://i.imgur.com/P69na.png [imgur.com]
Re: Buy a new car every 10 years (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hahahaha, my thoughts exactly.
At first I was thinking maybe they werent a native English speaker and that was just a mistake but the rest of the English in their post is fine and then I got to the "Most of this gets down to the propaganda that so many people follow. BLM, LBGTQwhatever, Covid face nappies etc. rather than calm and rational objective research." and "The former UK PM was pushing EVs but he was fully aware that they are unsuitable for a lot of UK users but he simply wanted a reason to build 30
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