Giant Batteries Drain Economics of Gas Power Plants (reuters.com) 188
Batteries used to store power produced by renewables are becoming cheap enough to make developers abandon scores of projects for gas-fired generation worldwide. Reuters reports: The long-term economics of gas-fired plants, used in Europe and some parts of the United States primarily to compensate for the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, are changing quickly, according to Reuters' interviews with more than a dozen power plant developers, project finance bankers, analysts and consultants. They said some battery operators are already supplying back-up power to grids at a price competitive with gas power plants, meaning gas will be used less. The shift challenges assumptions about long-term gas demand and could mean natural gas has a smaller role in the energy transition than posited by the biggest, listed energy majors.
In the first half of the year, 68 gas power plant projects were put on hold or cancelled globally, according to data provided exclusively to Reuters by U.S.-based non-profit Global Energy Monitor. [...] "In the early 1990s, we were running gas plants baseload, now they are shifting to probably 40% of the time and that's going to drop off to 11%-15% in the next eight to 10 years," Keith Clarke, chief executive at Carlton Power, told Reuters. Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate.
The cost of lithium-ion batteries has more than halved from 2016 to 2022 to $151 per kilowatt hour of battery storage, according to BloombergNEF. At the same time, renewable generation has reached record levels. Wind and solar powered 22% of the EU's electricity last year, almost doubling their share from 2016, and surpassing the share of gas generation for the first time, according to think tank Ember's European Electricity Review. "In the early years, capacity markets were dominated by fossil fuel power stations providing the flexible electricity supply," said Simon Virley, head of energy at KPMG. Now batteries, interconnectors and consumers shifting their electricity use are also providing that flexibility, Virley added.
In the first half of the year, 68 gas power plant projects were put on hold or cancelled globally, according to data provided exclusively to Reuters by U.S.-based non-profit Global Energy Monitor. [...] "In the early 1990s, we were running gas plants baseload, now they are shifting to probably 40% of the time and that's going to drop off to 11%-15% in the next eight to 10 years," Keith Clarke, chief executive at Carlton Power, told Reuters. Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate.
The cost of lithium-ion batteries has more than halved from 2016 to 2022 to $151 per kilowatt hour of battery storage, according to BloombergNEF. At the same time, renewable generation has reached record levels. Wind and solar powered 22% of the EU's electricity last year, almost doubling their share from 2016, and surpassing the share of gas generation for the first time, according to think tank Ember's European Electricity Review. "In the early years, capacity markets were dominated by fossil fuel power stations providing the flexible electricity supply," said Simon Virley, head of energy at KPMG. Now batteries, interconnectors and consumers shifting their electricity use are also providing that flexibility, Virley added.
The economics that chage (Score:2, Interesting)
As I understand it -
At present Gas plants have two purposes - the first is baseload generation when the renewables can't keep up. That's a lot of work, but it isn't very profitable. The second is maintaining grid stability, keeping the grid frequency at 50 or 60 hertz, second by second. The gas plants were earning a lot of their money doing the first, just keeping their massive turbines spinning but not generating power - but that is a job that batteries can do a lot better. Batteries and their attached inv
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The gas plants were earning a lot of their money doing the first, just keeping their massive turbines spinning but not generating power - but that is a job that batteries can do a lot better.
It is this spinning of gas turbines that aren't producing power that are called "spinning reserve" or "operating reserve".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Whether batteries can do "a lot" better would be something I believe is debatable. They may be able to keep the grid frequency closer to the ideal 50 or 60 Hz but just how critical is it to keep the grid inside that ideal? Certainly getting too far from that ideal would risk damage to turbines but with enough turbines on the grid already spinning it is
Re:The economics that chage (Score:4, Insightful)
The 19th century solution of keeping frequency steady by using massive spinning flywheels just isn't needed anymore. We use electronic devices for frequency stability, and have for decades. They are more accurate and cheaper.
It's like saying that you need a pendulum if you want to keep good time. That's a clever mechanical solution, good idea at a time when we didn't have electronics, but we use quartz oscillators now (or atomic clocks, if you really want phase control that won't drift over the course of a thousand years).
Re:The economics that chage (Score:4, Interesting)
The gas plants were earning a lot of their money doing the first, just keeping their massive turbines spinning but not generating power - but that is a job that batteries can do a lot better. Batteries and their attached inverters can react within half a cycle, 1/100th of a second, gas plants take a few seconds to ramp up.
It's more complicated than that and you're you are mistaken about this. Over short timescales electromechanical means are much better. They don't store a lot of energy compared to batteries in the rotational inertia, but they have vastly higher instantaneous power output. They can also react in well under half a cycle, in fact half a cycle off is, to put it mildly, dramatic. If you try and connect a synchronous machine to the grid half a cycle out the thing will jump clear out of its housing (interesting if it weighs a hundred tons) as almost all the stored energy is dumped more or less instantly. Synchronous machines will generally nor be leading or lagging by more than fractions of a degree, and the power into or out of them goes up very very fast as that angle increases.
By themselves electronic inverters cannot stabilize the grid in the very short term, because they lack the power.
Over longer time scales, like scales of multiple cycles, i.e. a second and up, batteries are very good and respond faster than gas turbines. For the short term stabilization they are and likely will be always insufficient and actually do not remotely have the response time of a traditional thermal plant. Gas turbine gensets (and even better, old fashioned Rankine cycle plants) do an excellent job because they are big and heavy and have a lot of rotational inertia, so if you drop all of those you need to replace them with something.
The thing in question is a rotary synchronous condenser which is just a big synchronous machine connected to the grid with no prime mover and usually a flywheel, or at least a design which does not minimize rotating mass.
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The original Hornsdale Power Reserve was capable of producing 150MW output, but has been increased to 200MW since its installation in 2017. It was specified to deliver up to 150MW in under 150ms, and is contracted for a minimum of 70MW standby availability.
Give that's now six year old tech, newer batteries will be even better. With a number of them, any reasonable amount of spinning reserve could be replaced.
Taking the UK as an example, the largest spikes seen are less than 3GW, and are not all that sharp a
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You're talking about different orders of magnitude here, and different types of thing.
150ms is 7.5 whole cycles, I'm taking about degrees, not thousands of degrees.
And batteries plus semiconductors are good but they are not generally that good at massive instantaneous power spikes as a bunch of spinning mass. in rush currents are the kind of thing here which can be 100x the continuous rated power.
There's no tech that replaces spinning mass for the instantaneous and very short term stabilisation at which it
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So what sort of loads create these massive spikes?
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All sorts of things! Big motors, large factories, arc furnaces, transmission line breakers tripping, other faults, random chance from the stochastic process of small loads going at random lining up and so on.
But it's more than just spikes. The grid itself is just a bunch of wires. It has almost no inertia.
Imagine trying to control the position of a 1kG mass. But you have several giganewtons pulling it in one direction (loads), with various bits of that force going on and off at random, and this is being bal
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Do keep in mind that we're talking about two different things here. One is how quickly you can ramp up or down power production to meet changing load, and the other is keeping the frequency and phase of all the distributed power sources in synch to a small fraction of a wave. (You're right that things blow up if you get off by anything approaching a half wave, 8 mS. The controller is supposed to disconnect the errant source off the grid before this happens. You hope.)
For an inverter (converting DC to AC, fo
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Actually, regulation energy is pretty profitable. It just hat gotten more profitable to do it with batteries now.
Re:The economics that chage (Score:5, Informative)
Minor correction: you mean "load following", not baseload :)
And yeah, what's happening is trends leading to a collapse in the value of grid services, with batteries taking that from NG. But it'll correspond with a rise in the value of plants providing backup for low-wind / low-solar timeperiods.
To displace that service with renewables and batteries, beyond e.g. long distance (such as HVDC) interconnects and bulk storage (such as hydro), the cheapest way is "overbuild renewables". They're already cheap, and they keep getting cheaper; if what you'd normally build would only provide half your needs during a low-wind or low-sun period, just build twice as much. The side effect is that for most of the year, you have excess power available at a steal, for anyone who is willing to curtail usage during the lean times (energy-intensive industry, water desalination, greenhouse lighting, etc). Each region also has its own ideal mix of wind and solar, as the two work best together, but it depends on the climate. And then the longer the battery storage, the shorter the number of hours per year you need any sort of backup or industry curtailment. Solar benefits a LOT from the first 12-ish hours of storage, but benefits relatively little after that; solar trends are highly seasonal, and you're not going to store power for a season; overbuilding is generally a more economical choice. Wind by contrast, while also commonly seasonal, has a relatively steady - but declining - benefit for any addition of battery storage over multi-day timescales, due to its greater randomness than solar. For Denmark, it looks like this [twimg.com].
Generally you'll never fully be able to eliminate having some combination of either (A) dispatchable generation, or (B) industry curtailment. And for (A), that means having the plants built and functional, which is a capital cost. But you can bring the mean fuel consumption from such plants down to really low levels (indeed, to the point that "alternative" sources of fuel, such as waste or fuel that was generated with surplus energy, become viable). And normally it's fuel costs that dominate the total amortized cost of such plants in baseload- or load-following roles. Furthermore, if you're designing a plant to be backup, you'll choose a cheaper (albeit less efficient) design.
(This is an oversimplifcation, of course - for example, if you have a NG plant for backup, you still need to maintain the NG production / storage / transport infrastructure, not just the plant).
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As I understand it -
At present Gas plants have two purposes - the first is baseload generation when the renewables can't keep up. That's a lot of work, but it isn't very profitable. The second is maintaining grid stability, keeping the grid frequency at 50 or 60 hertz, second by second.
There is a third use: "Peaker" plants that come online only at periods of high demand.
There is one near here: Plains End Power Plant, Arvada, Colorado
Interesting aspect is that it does not run turbines, but uses reciprocating engines from Wärtsilä.
Peaker plants (Score:2)
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Re:The economics that chage (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah bless, the naivety of thinking politicians always listen to experts and not polls :)
Re:The economics that chage (Score:5, Interesting)
Moreover this is a discussion about batteries that literally are used to store power for use when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
You simply install a surplus of photovoltaic cells and wind turbines and store the current for use "when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow."
Keep a few additional fueled power plants for the rare times the batteries run out.
Another benefit of the battery storage--you can know ahead of time when to start to fire those generators up due to the known discharge rates of the battery storage.
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"Moreover this is a discussion about batteries that literally are used to store power for use when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow."
Except the important dose of reality missing from the discussion is that for a few winter months here in the high northern hemisphere with 8 hours sun a day and often cloudy, solar is next to useless. And if the wind doesn't blow either those batteries might have to store a week of power. Good luck with that.
Newsflash: Not everyone lives in sunny deserts near t
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I spent decades in the midwest, from Nebraska to North Dakota. Wind doesn't blow? Wait an hour. At most.
You get a whole 8 hours of sun per day in the Winter? I spent close to a decade in Alaska. There, if you didn't time your lunch right, you didn't get to see the sun that day.
Besides, we have these things called "transmission lines". We can ship power from where the sun IS shining(for much of the day) and the wind IS blowing, to areas where it isn't.
Besides, even if we keep the CCGTs operating up nor
Long distance transmission [Re:The economics t...] (Score:2)
...Besides, we have these things called "transmission lines". We can ship power from where the sun IS shining(for much of the day) and the wind IS blowing, to areas where it isn't....
Good for hundreds of kilometers, or even a thousand kilometers, but the efficiency gets poor and the economics get unfavorable for wheeling large amounts of power over continent-scale distances.
Could get better with higher voltages, or with superconducting transmission (the dream solution). But, at the moment, there are some places where solar is a good power source and other places where it is a poor choice. That's ok. One solution doesn't have to fit all problems; the real world will probably incorporate
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With our current technology level, we can transmit gigawatts over 2,500 km. They exist NOW in select spots.
Texas to North Dakota is ~1200 miles. This is a middle to middle comparison, but for most uses you shouldn't need to go that far north or that far south. That's only 2,000 km. 2500 km = 1553 miles. So we have flex.
Keep in mind that with batteries, transmissions lines get a BIG boost, in that now we can operate them at more or less a constant power level, and load level at the destination with batt
Re:Long distance transmission [Re:The economics t. (Score:4, Interesting)
Wind works in a lot of places that solar doesn't. But up in Alaska I'd actually recommend the small nuclear reactors - use the waste heat for zone heating.
Alaska is one of those rare situations where using solar to produce hydrogen from water might actually make economic sense. You can store power in the summer, then burn it in the winter, and even though you'd be wasting half of the power in the conversion process, it would still be cheaper than nuclear. :-)
I'd also settle for letting Alaska burn oil for energy. They have enough oil to last millennia if they're the only ones using it, and the CO2 produced would be a drop in the bucket if everybody who could stop burning fossil fuels did so.
Heat [Re:Long distance transmission] (Score:2)
Good points. Do they really wheel power from North Dakota to Texas? I thought the Texas grid was unconnected to the other states.
...But up in Alaska I'd actually recommend the small nuclear reactors - use the waste heat for zone heating.
Yes, it's really throwing away good energy that we don't use the nuclear waste heat for heating. This would make nuclear much more attractive, at least in high-latitude locations.
(You'd really want high confidence in your safety systems to do this, of course.)
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"I spent decades in the midwest, from Nebraska to North Dakota. Wind doesn't blow? Wait an hour. At most."
Thats nice. Here the in the UK in summer 2022 we had almost a month under a high pressure system producing no significant wind.
" We can ship power from where the sun IS shining"
In an ideal world. What happens where you don't have 1 large country run by a single government for them to cross but multiple countries, governments and a few deep seas? You think any country is going to leave itself almost tota
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Yup, and I just bought a new one. 400 mile range and can refill in 5 mins including payment. But you enjoy sitting in a charger queue in your EV and then waiting another 30-60 mins for it to charge when you eventually get a free spot.
What are you talking about? I have a hybrid. I have 500+ miles range, can use either a gas station or a charging station, and even the pure EVs don't need to spend 30-60 minutes for it to charge if they're at a "good" charging station. It's more like 15 minutes.
Hell, last week I had to go to a different gas station because 100% of their pumps were down. They didn't even have signs up.
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"can use either a gas station or a charging station"
And you halfway through a journey and have the option of
A) Refilling the fuel tank in 5 mins or
B) Charging up the battery for X mins
You like most phev owners will pick A. Phevs are for people to feel good about themselves enviromentally but not actually do anything about it apart form drag 100kg of pointless battery around with them.
"and even the pure EVs don't need to spend 30-60 minutes for it to charge if they're at a "good" charging station. It's more
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This depends on the battery. A hydroelectric dam power plant is a kind of battery, if you pump the water up to the reservoir. There are also flow batteries based around separation of electric charge. Lifting a weight is a kind of battery. You can separate hydrogen from oxygen and recombine them as a kind of battery.
If you want a quickly reacting battery setup there's usually a tradeoff with how much power it can store, but the tradeoff is because you're designing a system to react quickly, not because y
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A tesla powerwall, which is marketed for single homes, is generally good for 2-3 days.
So if you want to supply a whole city of like 100k households, you'd need about 20k units. While there's a lot of scaling necessary if you want to do that, well, there's already initiatives to take and use retired EV batteries and "put them to pasture" for uses in situations like this.
I agree, using something like biogas for longer term increased generation needs is a good idea. Another good idea would be to make another
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"That's a lot of work, but it isn't very profitable. "
Until a lot of short sighted politicians go all aboard the renewables gravy train and forget that the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow
Which brings you back to the actual article we're discussing [reuters.com] which claims that power-plant operaters are finding that batteries are now able to solve that problem at a lower cost than gas turbines.
Excellent (Score:2)
Batteries have a very long research path, but we are getting there. Obviously they are the best regulation energy you can get tech-wise. Now that cost has caught up...
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In the wider sense, yes. In the finer sense, supercapacitors should be superior, but we can't make them to handle the load. (Supercapacitors *are* batteries, in the wider sense.)
Biased data? (Score:5, Interesting)
Europe has one reason for the cancellation of such plants I do not find in this article: Russian supplies are cut and the era of cheap gas is gone.
The economy of gas plants is primarily the price o gas. The article does not even mention it :).
Also, state regulations are a big factor. If you put regulation burden onto gas and subsidy solar... Wow, look how the economy shifts!
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No one wants to draw attention to the conclusion that maybe starting fights in Ukraine was bad for Europe.
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Russia started the fight, so why would anyone be shy about drawing attention to that fact? They had already invaded another neighbor on bullshit pretext recently, why does anyone believe anything they say about invading Ukraine — a country that had cities with multi-story buildings while the Russians were still living in huts?
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Sure, the Russians decided to expand NATO in direct contravention of the agreements in the 1990s.
The Russians sponsored a coup of a lawfully elected government in 2014.
The Russians decided to not honor the Minsk II agreements, and then bragged about never having intended to fulfill them in the press like Angela Merkel did.
Just giving you the short preview of how history is going to view this, not well. Seems reminiscent of the Allende or Mossadegh things, in retrospect. Or our intervention in Laos. Even A
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No one wants to draw attention to the conclusion that maybe starting fights in Ukraine was bad for Europe.
Oh don't worry. Everybody knows that Russia starting a war in Ukraine was bad for Europe (including Ukraine) and Russia.
Best thing to do now is pick up the pace of weapon shipments to Ukraine so they can win the damn war and not end up with some BS ceasefire that creates another frozen conflict for 10 years.
Re:Biased data? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, state regulations are a big factor. If you put regulation burden onto gas and subsidy solar... Wow, look how the economy shifts!
Fossil fuels are inherently massively subsidized as long as you ignore the externality of CO2 emissions. If you internalize that, with a carbon tax or similar, so that gas plants have to either capture and sequester all of their carbon emissions or else pay the cost of mitigating the climate impacts of the emitted carbon, then the economy would absolutely shift and no subsidies on renewables would be required.
Not enough lithium production (Score:3)
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Great, but we are not scaling lithium refining and battery production capacity nearly enough to make grid-wide switch to batteries.
It would be foolish to decide that Lithium batteries was the path forward. In a system that does not need the high performance of Lithium based energy storage, there are many other options that don't require that complexity of process.
I've long agitated for Nickel-Iron batteries. You'd never want to use them in a phone, but they would function well for power storage. Batteries that are tough and can stand a lot of abuse, long lasting and handle lots of recharge cycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Don't get hooked on one particular kind of battery. There's no reason that a stationary battery should need to use lithium.
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Great, but we are not scaling lithium refining and battery production capacity nearly enough to make grid-wide switch to batteries.
A few years ago I read an article, which I sadly can no longer find online, written by a physicist who was a student in the 60s, just when color television was becoming available. As a young man, he had come to a startling realization: The particular red phosphor used in color TV cathode ray tubes was an extremely limited resource. In fact, the world's total supplies of the phosphor were enough to manufacture only a few hundred thousand TV sets. He predicted at the time that color TV would be available only
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I do - I plant a few every year. It doesn't help much when in the 15 or 20 years it takes for the tree to grow the climate (average temperatures, precipitation levels, etc) changes so much, that the tree has trouble surviving. The birch trees I planted as a kid some decades ago are half dead now, although they grew very well for the first 15 years.
Re: plant a tree (Score:3)
To be fair, the growing is exactly what traps the carbon. Once itâ(TM)s fully grown itâ(TM)s doing very little other than looking pretty. The problem is more what to do when it dies. If youâ(TM)re not careful, all youâ(TM)ve done is convert a bunch of that CO2 to CH4 as the tree rots, and re-released the rest of it. Donâ(TM)t get me wrong - thereâ(TM)s things you can do to permanently capture that carbon, but just planting trees isnâ(TM)t it.
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The amount of Carbon which was added to the atmosphere
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Of course it will take Carbon out of the atmosphere - in the long run. It takes decades up to centuries to do so though. And for the first few decades of a tree's life, it is carbon negative. It releases more carbon to plant it and get it grow than the tree sequesters into wood.
No, it doesn't.
Depends on how you do it, I guess, I suppose you could find an energy-intensive way to grow trees. What do you do, saturate them with fertilizer by the bucketful? But, as a general thing, tree growth comes from solar power. Large forests exist with no fossil fuel use to grow them.
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The Romans did an excellent at deforesting much of Europe and their descendants haven't really bothered putting the trees back. The same applies to most of the other planet's regions as well, so I'm not singling out Europeans.
Still a fart in the wind compared to burning fossil fuels.
Re: plant a tree (Score:4, Informative)
Mature forests are generally in steady state between rot and new growth. The main net sequestration occurs in the first couple decades (depending on the forest) after planting (or natural recovery after fire).
It's still a critically important carbon sink. But it's not long-term storage; it's not meaningful removal of carbon from the system. Only minimal carbon is removed by land plants, except in areas that are either very cold, very wet, or both. Freezing-cold conditions (climates with a permafrost horizon) or anoxia (swamps/marshes) stores carbon over geologic timescales. And while "merely cold" climates and "merely hypoxia" don't completely shut down decay, they do slow it greatly, leading to a larger level of soil carbon in steady-state (e.g. cold-climate grasslands hold more carbon in the soil than warm-climate grasslands, and so forth), with said steady-state taking longer to reach. There are also certain minerals (for example, in Iceland, allophane) which, if present, can bind carbon over long periods of time as well.
Another factor that one must consider is albedo. In the winter, in temperate climates, snow covers the ground, but if you reforest, esp. with evergreens, this absorbs light instead of the snow reflecting it back into space, which causes a warming effect. Now, of course, that warming effect is contingent, only present so long as the forest is there - but so is the carbon that said forest is storing, so the two should be considered together. In modeling, this is actually a meaningful problem. Though it's not something people in the tropics should concern themselves much with, people in high latitudes should strongly consider "large deciduous trees" if their goal is preventing warming. For example, if you want conifers, consider larch.
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Mature forests are generally in steady state between rot and new growth. The main net sequestration occurs in the first couple decades (depending on the forest) after planting (or natural recovery after fire).
Where do you get this nonsense? Mature trees of most species fix MORE CO2 than young ones. That's because of basic biology: All growth occurs in the cambium, and is based on photosynthetic activity. The cambium is larger in older trees, which also have more leaf area to collect solar energy, and larger root systems with which to draw in water. The main net sequestration occurs in a forest's middle age, when the trees have grown enough to have a good rate of growth, but when the forest hasn't yet choked itse
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Mature trees of most species fix MORE CO2 than young ones.
From https://www.ncasi.org/wp-conte... [ncasi.org] : "Old forests have accumulated more carbon than younger forests; however, young forests grow rapidly, removing much more CO2 each year from the atmosphere than an older forest covering the same area."
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https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Wow, fascinating article. Thanks for the link.
Do note that the article is about productivity (i.e., carbon fixation) at the individual tree level, not the forest level. The key paragraph in the article is this one:
Re:Who makes them? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it is the Chinar, we get into the same shithole EU got with the ryuzke gas.
Not true. A battery is a capital expense. Gas is a consumable.
If Russia cuts off your gas supply, you won't have any gas.
If China cuts off your battery supply, all the installed batteries will continue to work for 20 years.
Re:Who makes them? (Score:4, Funny)
If Russia cuts off your gas supply, you won't have any gas.
Joke's on them if they tried that here in the USA - we've got Taco Bell.
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Joke's on them if they tried that here in the USA - we've got Taco Bell.
I have bets on them winning the future franchise wars.
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Batteries are consumables - they die off after a few hundred, or maybe thousand charge/recharge cycles. Look it up.
Re:Who makes them? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the trick though, at the level that the current generations of batteries are expected to die off of, if you're going to consider them consumable, then so isn't a gas turbine power plant itself. You're going to need to replace the turbine sooner or later...
There's different levels of "consumable". In general terms, things that are capital expenses are expected to last more than a year. Buildings, vehicles like cars and trucks, etc... In terms of accounting, consumables are "expenses", you write them entirely off as an expense when you purchase them (or sometimes use them), because they aren't expected to still be around next year.
With capital expenses, you might write off 10% of the value per year.
current batteries have a few thousand complete charge and discharge cycles. 1k charges = over 2.5 years. If they are relatively babied, and average only 10% cycle daily, that's 25 years. We also know that lithium type chemistries generally really dislike complete charge and discharge cycles, so if you can avoid those last 10% levels - over 90% and under 10%, you drastically increase the life of the battery. No real reason not to do this with utility batteries.
Remember, they're expecting most EVs today to last as long as gasoline cars, and most EVs aren't going to get a battery changeout, that being around as common as changing out the engine of a gasoline car.
Meanwhile, batteries used for infrastructure can trade energy density in both mass and volume for durability and cheapness.
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Batteries are consumables - they die off after a few hundred, or maybe thousand charge/recharge cycles.
My EV has a range of 240 miles. I drive about 20 miles per day.
If I let it drain and then fully recharged it, a thousand cycles would be 32 years.
I mostly keep it between 30 and 70 percent, so it might last even longer.
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And to add to that, it isn't like the battery turns into a pumpkin after 1000 cycles. Even if it's at 50-60% of designed capacity it'll be a perfectly capable daily driver for a lot of use cases (purely considering the battery - there are plenty of other systems I'd expect to crap out after three decades).
And while an EV with only half of its original range may be useless for some people and use cases, the same doesn't happen with grid-scale storage. Unless there's some reason that space is very limited, there's no reason to retire a storage battery because it only has 50% of its capacity; you just install additional storage and use both.
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> Batteries are consumables - they die off after a few hundred, or maybe thousand charge/recharge cycles. Look it up.
They don't "die" after X cycles, they lose capacity gradually. How much reduction of capacity you're willing to tolerate is a function of the application; For a laptop or cell phone, probably not much more than 20%-30%. For stationary storage? Maybe you're okay with a 50% reduction in capacity. That extends the service life considerably.
And when the day comes they no longer fit for purpose
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Indeed. But the "China baaaaaaad" crowd is not capable of such a simple thought.
And, bonus!, in those 20 years you can easily ramp up you ron battery industry. Which is why it will not be necessary to do it.
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Batteries need to get replaced frequently. This actually is a problem
You should get rechargeables.
Re: Who makes them? (Score:2)
Rechargeable still have a maximum number of charge/discharge cycles. Capacity drops over time too.
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Re: Who makes them? (Score:4, Informative)
By the time existing in-use lithium battery capacities start to drop due to cell aging we should have a few new varieties of batteries become available with longer lifespans, higher energy densities and improved recyclability. And perhaps even some new varieties of high capacity super-capacitor will be developed that could be useful too.
Sodium versions of Li-Ion batteries has almost the same capacity as Li based batteries, and is safer. And we certainly have a lot of Sodium.
But importantly to the topic of battery storage is that we don't need the high performance of Lithium or Sodium batteries.
I've pushed for Nickel-Iron rechargeable batteries for a long time. These are in present day use in subway cars. And those bad boys have a long life.As well, they are tough as nails.
On the surface, they don't have good energy retention, and they are heavy. But in a solar or wind energy storage system, they have plenty acceptable retention.
So you just calculate the capacity you need, pour concrete pads, place the batteries and power conditioning electronics, and have a structure around it.
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Many of the new technology batteries are already in the process of scaling up, with factories already under construction. LFP is cheaper, can undergo more charge cycles, and already in mass production. Same for redox flow batteries, thermal batteries, etc..
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Rechargeable still have a maximum number of charge/discharge cycles. Capacity drops over time too.
But they don't need to be replaced frequently like the post I responded to claimed.
They'll last decades, and still be functional at reduced capacity.
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You should get rechargeables.
Recharge them with what? In this scenario Russia cut off the supply of natural gas, and presumably if China won't sell batteries then they are also not selling solar PV panels, rare earth magnets for windmills and electric vehicles, or any of a number of other commodities.
I have an idea, nuclear power plants. It looks like KEPCO out of South Korea is nearly done with a power plant in UAE, doing well on getting it built on time and on budget, so perhaps they could be persuaded to apply their experience som
Re: Who makes them? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Lithium can be found elsewhere, and so called "rare earths" aren't actually all that rare. But mining them is a nasty business, and only a few countries do it.
Sodium batteries are a good replacement for Lithium batteries. Not quite as high energy density as Lithium, but close enough. And safe as well.
Sodium batteries [Re: Who makes them?] (Score:2)
Lithium can be found elsewhere, and so called "rare earths" aren't actually all that rare. But mining them is a nasty business, and only a few countries do it.
Sodium batteries are a good replacement for Lithium batteries. Not quite as high energy density as Lithium, but close enough. And safe as well.
For stationary batteries, the fact that sodium is heavier isn't very important. Turns out sodium is a lot more reactive than lithium, though, so no, it's not safer.
And, it's not quite a one-for-one replacement for lithium. The higher reactivity of sodium makes it harder to move the ions in and out of the graphite; it's a much trickier battery. (I was just at a conference a few weeks ago listening to presentations about this.) Not an insolvable problem, but at the moment, sodium batteries aren't as good as
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Lithium can be found elsewhere, and so called "rare earths" aren't actually all that rare. But mining them is a nasty business, and only a few countries do it.
Sodium batteries are a good replacement for Lithium batteries. Not quite as high energy density as Lithium, but close enough. And safe as well.
For stationary batteries, the fact that sodium is heavier isn't very important. Turns out sodium is a lot more reactive than lithium, though, so no, it's not safer.
It sounds counterintuitive, I know. Yes, sodium is more reactive. They aren't using metallic sodium. As well, Sodium batteries can ship and live at 0 volts. Li-ion batteries get unstable of you take them to 0. Here's a link discussing the issue https://renewtechfuture.com/so... [renewtechfuture.com] and Wikipedia reference ( a long read, but a good one) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And, it's not quite a one-for-one replacement for lithium. The higher reactivity of sodium makes it harder to move the ions in and out of the
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"rare earth"
So called because when they were initially discovered, they were thought to be rare.
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Lithium can be found elsewhere, and so called "rare earths" aren't actually all that rare. But mining them is a nasty business, and only a few countries do it.
Mining lithium is not "a nasty business"; most of it actually comes from brine.
You're thinking of the horror stories about "artisanal" cobalt mines in Congo. ("artisanal" means small producers, who use human labor instead of machinery.) The industry is going away from cobalt, though.
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Of all the things you can mine, lithium isn't really any nastier than most. In many cases mining lithium is much like cleaning up contaminated land.
Most countries don't mine it because until recently lithium was a minor commodity and the market was flooded by a few mines.
Re: Who makes them? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are four arguments against investment in nuclear power: Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, and Vogtle. These are the four major latest-generation plants completed or near completion in Finland, the United States, the United Kingdom and France respectively.
Cost overruns at these recent plants average over 300%, with more increases to come. The cost of Vogtle, for example, soared from US$14 billion to $34 billion (A$22-53 billion), Flamanville from €3.3 billion to €19 billion (A$5-31 billion), and Hinkley Point C from £16 billion to as much as £70 billion (A$30-132 billion), including subsidies. Completion of Vogtle has been delayed by seven years, Olkiluoto by 14 years, and Flamanville by at least 12 years.
A fifth case is Virgil C, also in the US, for which US$9 billion (A$14 billion) was spent before cost overruns led the project to be abandoned. All three firms building these five plants – Westinghouse, EDF, and AREVA – went bankrupt or were nationalised. Consumers, companies and taxpayers will bear the costs for decades.
Too expensive to build run and decommision, too slow to build, unsolved waste problem.
Thats why nobody wants nukes.
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The nuclear advocates say that the high cost of nuclear power plants is not inherent in the power plant itself, but in the regulations and requirements levied on these plants, and hence if well-designed, next-generation nuclear plants should be able to be much cheaper.
I do not have enough insight into the complex economics of the nuclear industry to be able to analyze this belief. It seems reasonable to think so, but "seems reasonable" is not the same as "true."
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Yes, but do you really want fewer safety rules and regulations in regard to nuclear plants?
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Yes, but do you really want fewer safety rules and regulations in regard to nuclear plants?
Yep, good question. It's most important to have the right safety rules and regulations, not just the most safety rules and regulations, but, yes, this is the problem.
The argument is that you can design nuclear plants that are robust against the failure mechanisms we've seen. True? As I said, I don't have enough insight into the subject to be able to evaluate that.
(From my status as an amateur, I'd think "sure, that ought to be easy," but experience tells me that when an amateur says "that should be easy" an
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Re: Who makes them? (Score:4, Interesting)
Batteries need to get replaced frequently. This actually is a problem
The alkaline batteries in your GF's vibrator may need to be replaced once a month.
The big batteries used for grid storage (which is what we're talking about here) last for decades.
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Batteries need to get replaced frequently. This actually is a problem
The alkaline batteries in your GF's vibrator may need to be replaced once a month.
The big batteries used for grid storage (which is what we're talking about here) last for decades.
Hey - be nice! he's still hurting that he's been replaced by the toy.
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They'll last a decade or 2 and they get recycled so not really an issue
Even the fuel in nuclear reactors needs replaced, so that adds to the non-issue of battery replacement.
Re: Who makes them? (Score:4, Interesting)
Tesla Megapacks are warrantied for up to 20 years.
These aren't laptop batteries.
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Sure, having to replace cells is *a* problem. But every technology has its problems, the mere *existence* of a problem isn't the automatic deal-breaker some people think it is. For lithium cell based grid storage, this particular drawback is about as easy to deal with as any drawback can be: it's a purely financial calculation. If the net present value of future cash inflows exceeds the value of future cash outflows, *having to replace the cells doesn't matter*. It's just another thing you have to do t
And WHAT problem? (Score:2)
And importantly, it's not the same problem that we're facing with CO2-driven warming. Replacing those batteries in 20-30 or even more years isn't going to warm the planet anywhere near as much continuing to lean on just-in-time generation utilizing fossil fuels.
Batteries — in fact pretty much any kind of energy storage, pumped s
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Batteries need to get replaced frequently. This actually is a problem
No, it really isn't. Right now, we aren't really recycling lithium-ion batteries, because it is just starting to be economically viable to do so. The price of lithium is cheap, and apart from the little pouch batteries in cell phones and laptops, there just aren't that many of them out there waiting to be recycled. It takes over 13,000 typical laptop batteries (60 Wh) to add up to the amount of lithium in just one Tesla 100D pack, so unless you already have a recycling plant built, those tiny packs aren'
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That's also why €/kWh numbers for various power generators don't mean a whole lot if you don't know the economics in which they operate. The published per-kWh price of nuclear and gas look pretty attractive... if you u
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Indeed. Some people apparently _still_ have not noticed there is some real problem here....
Re:T. Boone Pickens is rolling in his grave (Score:4, Insightful)
...out of embarrassment for being wrong about investing in natural gas.
What was he wrong about? I don't follow, it would be helpful if you or anyone could fill in specifics.
I recall the TED Talk Mr. Pickens did on natural gas as a "transition fuel", a means to bridge the gap from where we are (mostly coal and petroleum) to where we'd rather be. Where would we rather be? Mr. Pickens made it clear in his talk that he didn't know and that he wasn't going to be around long enough to figure it out. He did mention a few possibilities on what the future might bring as long term solutions, including nuclear fission, but his call for investing in natural gas as a bridge fuel still looks to be valid to me.
The fine article points to less demand for natural gas as an intermittent energy supply to fill in the gaps created by intermittent wind and solar, but says the demand isn't going away. This also doesn't touch on the larger point of the TED Talk that Pickens produced, that is natural gas as a transportation fuel. We know how to make natural gas trucks, cars, and other vehicles, and this is done quite routinely for fleet vehicles for businesses looking to save on fuel costs. Pickens would not commit to stating what comes after natural gas for vehicles, and stated it is possible that natural gas is where transportation stays. A couple guesses on what comes next is ammonia and synthesized methane. I don't know how practical it is to have a truck built to run on either natural gas or ammonia but once people are trained on using one compressed gas for fuel the transition to another should not be difficult. Moving from natural gas to synthetic methane is trivial since natural gas is already mostly methane, there would be no real adjustments to be made.
We have seen SpaceX, NASA, Chinese space launch companies, and more being interested in synthesized methane because synthesized methane is very pure, an advantage for sensitive rocket engines, and a carbon neutral fuel that could be produced on a future mission to Mars for rockets back to Earth. There's been plenty invested in synthesized methane already so it is likely inevitable that this becomes more than just an experiment for spaceflight. If that happens then Pickens would be proven correct to invest in natural gas as a bridge fuel.
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Hydrogen, ammonia, and methane will never be popular for road transport. It will all go to battery electric, even haulage. Batteries are just too cheap and most of the infrastructure to charge them is already in place (i.e. the electricity grid).
In Europe the rules limit how long commercial drivers can go without a break anyway, so charging stops are not going to add additional time to deliveries. We already have 400kW chargers, and CCS has been demonstrated at 1.5MW. Right now some commercial users simply
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Nuclear is only useful for baseload. You would not use it to stabilize the grid on a short timescale.