Climate Change

[raisingarizona13]

Lets just embrace the next pandemic please.

*impatiently looks down at wrist watch.

[neufox47]

Nat gas peakers are essential. Quick ramp up and down.
Nukes need to spool up. Same with coal.
Solar and batteries are fine. But nowhere near ready for prime time.

Based on what? The cheapest energy being built today is all renewable.

Peakers are being replaced by battery banks. Battery response is instant, and the battery system can be used for arbitrage anytime with very little variable cost other than the cost of power.

[xyz]

Based on what? The cheapest energy being built today is all renewable.

Peakers are being replaced by battery banks. Battery response is instant, and the battery system can be used for arbitrage anytime with very little variable cost other than the cost of power.

Take off your green tinted glasses.

Are renewables cheap at producing power? Yes? Can batteries provide backup? Yes. Do batteries provide instantaneous power? Yes

What you’re conveniently leaving out is the cost of batteries to provide full time backup power. And of course wind and solar can’t be put anywhere. In Alberta their wind and solar can produce zero power for weeks on end. The cost of abattery bank to provide 1 hr of backup is 1M per MW. When you scale the math up for fulltime backup based on current demand it’s trillions of dollars. An impossible sum of money.

Sure battery technology may improve. But in time to be net zero by 2030? Not a chance.

[Bunion 2020]

So don't bother, right?

[grinch]

He's full of hot air. Maybe thats his plan, and NUCLEAR!!!

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[neufox47]

Take off your green tinted glasses.

Are renewables cheap at producing power? Yes? Can batteries provide backup? Yes. Do batteries provide instantaneous power? Yes

What you’re conveniently leaving out is the cost of batteries to provide full time backup power. And of course wind and solar can’t be put anywhere. In Alberta their wind and solar can produce zero power for weeks on end. The cost of abattery bank to provide 1 hr of backup is 1M per MW. When you scale the math up for fulltime backup based on current demand it’s trillions of dollars. An impossible sum of money.

Sure battery technology may improve. But in time to be net zero by 2030? Not a chance.

Who ever said any economy is getting to net zero by 2030? Talk about a straw man. Renewables are now cheap and should be a major component of any new energy development.

Batteries for homes are less than $1,000 per KWH so I don’t know where you got a price of $1m per MWH. My 18kwh system was $12k installed and that included installing a sub panel to pick and choose which circuits will run on it. Lithium iron batteries can be bought at the consumer level for $300 for a 1.2 kWh battery. Again you seem woefully ill informed and trying to defend the status quo at all costs.

[neufox47]

Take off your green tinted glasses.

Are renewables cheap at producing power? Yes? Can batteries provide backup? Yes. Do batteries provide instantaneous power? Yes

What you’re conveniently leaving out is the cost of batteries to provide full time backup power. And of course wind and solar can’t be put anywhere. In Alberta their wind and solar can produce zero power for weeks on end. The cost of abattery bank to provide 1 hr of backup is 1M per MW. When you scale the math up for fulltime backup based on current demand it’s trillions of dollars. An impossible sum of money.

Sure battery technology may improve. But in time to be net zero by 2030? Not a chance.

My post was specifically about batteries replacing peaking power plants. Virtually no one is saying we should use batteries for long term grid power. They are being used specifically to handle power needs in the short term. Natural gas peaking plants are also incapable of running for extended periods.

Who ever said any economy is getting to net zero by 2030? Talk about a straw man. Renewables are now cheap and should be a major component of any new energy development. Just because they aren’t perfect doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be a significant power generator.

Batteries for homes are less than $1,000 per KWH so I don’t know where you got a price of $1m per MWH. My 18kwh system was $12k installed and that included installing a sub panel to pick and choose which circuits will run on it. Lithium iron batteries can be bought at the consumer level for $300 for a 1.2 kWh battery. Again you seem woefully ill informed and trying to defend the status quo at all costs.

[WMD]

My post was specifically about batteries replacing peaking power plants. Virtually no one is saying we should use batteries for long term grid power. They are being used specifically to handle power needs in the short term. Natural gas peaking plants are also incapable of running for extended periods.

Who ever said any economy is getting to net zero by 2030? Talk about a straw man. Renewables are now cheap and should be a major component of any new energy development. Just because they aren’t perfect doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be a significant power generator.

Batteries for homes are less than $1,000 per KWH so I don’t know where you got a price of $1m per MWH. My 18kwh system was $12k installed and that included installing a sub panel to pick and choose which circuits will run on it. Lithium iron batteries can be bought at the consumer level for $300 for a 1.2 kWh battery. Again you seem woefully ill informed and trying to defend the status quo at all costs.

Thank you!

Xyz believes if he just repeats the same things over and over, and states them as facts, that somehow that will make them true. He's a shill for the fossil fuel industry.

There are many ways to solve the intermittency of renewables, both short term (ie at night when the sun doesn't shine), and long term (such as less daylight in winter). Batteries are one solution that is particularly good for short term, or daily needs. Improving transmission can help with seasonal issues, as well as daily need. Vehicle to grid technology could provide incredible amounts of storage. Smart grids can eliminate a lot of the daily peaks by shifting usage to when power is most abundant. There many other options out there.

In the amount of time and money it takes to build nuclear plants we could overbuild renewables and storage enough to electrify everything possible and power it with renewable energy.

[Markeyz]

Why y’all hate Texas grid?

[Flounder]

Sure XYZ, grid based storage will never work and is too expensive. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Texas, although one could argue the messed up Texas system that allows huge profiteering helps the economics.

It's just a phenomenal kind of scale you can get very cheaply,” Webber said. “They're just so much smaller and cheaper to install than a massive power plant. And they really help us get better economics out of the grid, because they can buy power when there's excess power and then discharge power when there's scarcity.

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/a...waves-00112136

[Bunion 2020]

XYZ aside, how about this?

For decades, scientists have tried to figure out ways to reverse climate change by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it underground. They’ve tried using trees, giant machines that suck CO2 out of the sky, complicated ocean methods that involve growing and burying huge quantities of kelp. Companies, researchers and the U.S. government have spent billions of dollars on the research and development of these approaches and yet they remain too expensive to make a substantial dent in carbon emissions.

Now, a start-up says it has discovered a deceptively simple way to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it for thousands of years. It involves making bricks out of smushed pieces of plants. And it could be a game changer for the growing industry working to pull carbon from the air.

Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates’s investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter — which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks — can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years.

The approach, the company claims, could store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon removal may not seem like a top priority — why not just stop using fossil fuels in the first place? — but virtually every projection of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 involves some amount of it. That’s because certain areas of the economy like aviation, cement-making and steelmaking, are very challenging to do with renewable energy and batteries. It’s hard to make temperatures hot enough with electricity to produce cement or steel, and to fly planes on heavy lithium-ion batteries.

https://www.graphyte.com/

A reminder, there is NO single answer, instead many smaller fixes that "could" keep things viable.

[WMD]

A reminder, there is NO single answer, instead many smaller fixes that "could" keep things viable.

There is no silver bullet but there is lots of silver buckshot.

This sounds promising but as you say certainly isn't going to solve the problem alone. Even at $100/ton, removing all of the carbon we emit each year would cost many trillions. So this could help with the last little bit of hard to abate emissions as we simultaneously stop burning fossil fuels for everything else.

[Core Shot]

Why y’all hate Texas grid?

ERCOT is wild.
The only grid not interconnected.

[xyz]

Thank you!

Xyz believes if he just repeats the same things over and over, and states them as facts, that somehow that will make them true. He's a shill for the fossil fuel industry.
.

How am I shill for the status quo and fossil fuel industry when I won’t shut up about nuclear?

[xyz]

Batteries for homes are less than $1,000 per KWH so I don’t know where you got a price of $1m per MWH.

You answered your own question. How many kW are in a MW?

[grskier]

Nuclear is vastly more expensive than virtually all renewables. The cheapest power produced is solar and wind.

According to many of the grid operators in TX batteries helped prevent brown puts this summer during the record heat.

And regarding the stupid mining tropes, grid scale batteries are probably not going to be lithium ion. Lithium iron batteries at the consumer scale, are now as cheap as $300 for 1 kWh and can be discharged about 3,000 times or $.10 per kWh. And this is at the consumer retail price.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/bat...power%20demand.

A bit more installed and operating.

At least here on the project I'm currently managing.

[Core Shot]

10c per kWh on a battery discharge?

Yayyyy winning bigly

[old goat]

XYZ aside, how about this?



https://www.graphyte.com/

A reminder, there is NO single answer, instead many smaller fixes that "could" keep things viable.

I don't get it. Turning plant waste into bricks and burying it certainly beats burning it but that's not the same as pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere--that's done a lot better by letting plants continue to grow. There is a lot of plant waste that needs to be disposed of--rice straw as well as the hulls, logging slash from thinning and commercial logging and this process sounds like a solution for that--at least it prevents the plant matter from turning back into CO2 or methane. It belongs under the category of CO2 emission reduction, not capture.

[LongShortLong]

Nuclear?
Discussion of how it's useful on the near future grid, and who's working on what. By DW, Germany's public media.


Brief discussion of grid stability, but minimal discussion of fast ramping, which as I understand it nuclear can't really do. My guess is short term (<hours) stability will be met by batteries and dispatchable demand response.

Batteries b/c I did some reading and thinking on pumped hydro, and the thought is that battery price is close enough and falling fast, that it'll be cheaper by the time your new hydro plant comes online if battery isn't already cheaper.

[neufox47]

You answered your own question. How many kW are in a MW?

Are you really that dense? You posted that thinking you were right!? The article says current storage with lithium ion batteries is $500 a kWh, that would be $500,000 a mwh. If a homeowner can install a battery for $666 a kWh, why can’t a commercial project? And if commercial can’t, due to a lack of or inverse economies of scale, then every house can have a battery for less than the amount you stated. Which in many ways is more beneficial because you don’t have to transport it.

This article says it’s actually cheaper.

Regardless, at best you are off by 50%.

https://about.bnef.com/blog/top-10-e...rends-in-2023/

[xyz]

Are you really that dense? You posted that thinking you were right!? The article says current storage with lithium ion batteries is $500 a kWh, that would be $500,000 a mwh. If a homeowner can install a battery for $666 a kWh, why can’t a commercial project? And if commercial can’t, due to a lack of or inverse economies of scale, then every house can have a battery for less than the amount you stated. Which in many ways is more beneficial because you don’t have to transport it.

This article says it’s actually cheaper.

Regardless, at best you are off by 50%.

https://about.bnef.com/blog/top-10-e...rends-in-2023/

Good to see your basic math working this time. I called you out because you couldn’t connect the dots between 1000$/kW and a 1M /MW.

I see Tesla selling 0.8MW batteries for 1.2M.
And you can’t just drop a battery on the ground and run away. They have significant installation costs with concrete pads etc. the installed cost is the real cost.

Anyway, we can argue about the cost of batteries all you want but it’s doesn’t make a difference. A full battery storage system even using your numbers is still in the trillions for a single province in Canada.

Once again I’m not saying wind and solar aren’t cheap at producing power. And I’m not saying batteries aren’t capable. I’m only saying that when the cost of storage is taken into account wind and solar are not cheap or possible as a single solution for grid power. Roof top/household solar with storage can make sense for sure.

[oldnew_guy]

Nuclear?
Discussion of how it's useful on the near future grid, and who's working on what. By DW, Germany's public media.


Brief discussion of grid stability, but minimal discussion of fast ramping, which as I understand it nuclear can't really do. My guess is short term (<hours) stability will be met by batteries and dispatchable demand response.

Batteries b/c I did some reading and thinking on pumped hydro, and the thought is that battery price is close enough and falling fast, that it'll be cheaper by the time your new hydro plant comes online if battery isn't already cheaper.

Crazy AUS pumped hydro scheme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_..._Power_Station

Snowy 2.0 Pumped Storage Power Station or Snowy Hydro 2.0 is a pumped-hydro battery megaproject in New South Wales, Australia. The dispatchable generation project connects two existing dams through a 27-kilometre (17 mi) underground tunnel and a new, underground pumped-hydro power station.^[2] Construction began in 2019.^[2] It is expected to supply 2.2 gigawatts of capacity and about 350,000 megawatt hours of large-scale storage to the national electricity market.^[3][4] It is the largest renewable energy project under construction in Australia.^[5]

It is designed for grid stabilization; to be a backup at times of peak demand and for when solar and wind energy are not providing power.^[6] Snowy Hydro acts like a giant battery by absorbing, storing, and dispatching energy.^[3] The battery is designed to operate for up to 175 hours of temporary supply.^[7] It is Australia's largest energy project,^[8] estimated to cost 12 billion Australian dollars. By 2023, AU$4.3 billion had been spent.^[1] The project is led by public company Snowy Hydro Limited.^[8] When complete it is expected to have a large impact on the price and reliability of electric power.^[9]

[muted reborn]

Since you guys are on a nuclear tangent, the nuclear activists got a big setback last week out west.

https://www.nuscalepower.com/en/news...m_medium=email


"The anticipated and feared nuclear renaissance suffered a major blow this week when Oregon-based NuScale and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems killed plans to construct a small modular nuclear reactor power plant in Idaho. Several years in the making, the project had become too expensive and there were too few subscribers to make it financially viable. "

From The Land Desk

[LongShortLong]

Crazy AUS pumped hydro scheme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_..._Power_Station

Snowy 2.0 Pumped Storage Power Station or Snowy Hydro 2.0 is a pumped-hydro battery megaproject in New South Wales, Australia. The dispatchable generation project connects two existing dams through a 27-kilometre (17 mi) underground tunnel and a new, underground pumped-hydro power station.^[2] Construction began in 2019.^[2] It is expected to supply 2.2 gigawatts of capacity and about 350,000 megawatt hours of large-scale storage to the national electricity market.^[3][4] It is the largest renewable energy project under construction in Australia.^[5]

It is designed for grid stabilization; to be a backup at times of peak demand and for when solar and wind energy are not providing power.^[6] Snowy Hydro acts like a giant battery by absorbing, storing, and dispatching energy.^[3] The battery is designed to operate for up to 175 hours of temporary supply.^[7] It is Australia's largest energy project,^[8] estimated to cost 12 billion Australian dollars. By 2023, AU$4.3 billion had been spent.^[1] The project is led by public company Snowy Hydro Limited.^[8] When complete it is expected to have a large impact on the price and reliability of electric power.^[9]

So, if they run that at capacity for 10 hours a day for a 30 year project life, I get 30*365*10*2.2GW = 240,000GWh. At $12B, that works out to $50k/GWh, or $0.05/kWh. And they started this project with a usable site, and the site already contained both reservoirs. That looks like a good deal for storage.

Using NREL estimates for battery storage, I take the 10hour system with installed cost of $338/kWh. Run that for 365 days for 30 years, and it costs $338/365/30 = $0.03/kWh. And I can site it just about anywhere and don't need to find or build reservoirs.

Obviously systems can't be directly compared, as you'd need to dig into a bunch of details and evaluate assumptions. E.g. I assumed ongoing costs for both systems are small compared to upfront capital. I ignored the storage advantage of the reservoir system - it can run for 175 hours on a full charge and this can be a useful benefit, though it doesn't lower cost per kWh and may raise costs (esp if you have to build the reservoirs). And I assumed minimal degradation over 10,000 battery discharge cycles. The point is battery systems are cost comparable for storage, and are easy to site, permit, and build.

The trouble with all the green tech (nukes included) is it has high upfront capital cost and low ongoing cost. A fossil plant is much cheaper upfront and you mostly pay as you use it for fuel and maintenance. This means your dirty plants tend to give you cheaper kWh's compared to building a nuke and idling it, or building solar/wind plus battery, or nuke + battery to not idle it, etc. Or building pumped storage and discharging it once per year. If you aren't cranking out kWs, the upfront capital is blowing up the per kWh cost. And demand varies throughout the day and throughout the year, and we build for peak demand plus a margin to avoid blackouts. That means most of the day and most of the year is not peak and some plants must go offline.

Looking at available tech, any of it is gonna cost more than dumping CO2 into the atmosphere for free. Usable planet or cheap power, choose one.

[neufox47]

Good to see your basic math working this time. I called you out because you couldn’t connect the dots between 1000$/kW and a 1M /MW.

I was asking you for a source for your price of $1M a mwh. The advertised price of the 4mwh Tesla battery is a little under $2M.


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