[HN Gopher] Apple to build battery-based solar energy storage pr...
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Apple to build battery-based solar energy storage project in
California
Author : drdrey
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-03-31 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| > Apple said the project will store 240 megawatt-hours of energy,
| or enough to power more than 7,000 homes for one day.
|
| By my reckoning this would make it the largest grid connected
| battery in existence. 50MW larger than the Hornsdale Power
| Reserve.
|
| Edit: My reckoning was wrong.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| There are larger. Moss Landing is about an hour northwest of
| this install (California Flats in southeastern Monterey
| County).
|
| > Phase 1 of Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility was connected
| to the power grid and began operating on 11 December 2020, at
| the site of Moss Landing Power Plant, a natural gas power
| station owned by Vistra since it acquired the facility's
| previous owner, Dynegy in 2018.
|
| > At 300MW / 1,200MWh, the BESS is considerably larger than the
| 250MW / 250MWh Gateway Energy Storage project brought online
| earlier this year by LS Power, also in California. Not only
| that, but Phase 2 of Vistra's project will add another 100MW /
| 400MWh and is scheduled for completion by August this year.
|
| > The site at Moss Landing then offers what Vistra called a
| "unique opportunity" to expand the project's size and storage
| capacity even further: the company claimed that the industrial
| zone in which it sits offers the potential to support up to
| 1,500MW / 6,000MWh of energy storage capacity, "should market
| and economic conditions support it".
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/news/at-300mw-1200mwh-the-wo...
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Looks like this [1] should be it - that's a lot of panels!
|
| 1: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8713857,-120.3390994,7197m
| /d...
| 01100011 wrote:
| Scary to see a major energy storage facility less than 20'
| above sea level and right next to the Pacific Ocean. I hope
| they have flood walls built to withstand a Tsunami.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| There is nuclear waste in the cliffs in San Onofre. They
| reportedly have nowhere to put it, and expect to only be
| able to store the depleted fuel there for a few decades.
| cma wrote:
| Reading up on it.. they store it 18 inches above high
| tide in single walled corrosion prone storage that can't
| deal with ground water moisture that is expected to
| eventually seep in and they came within 1/4th of an inch
| of dropping a barrel in a way that would break the air
| ventilation cooling system and require water cooling and
| possibly cause a Fukushima like radioactive steam
| release.. just a few miles from Los Angeles.
| Wohlf wrote:
| Why isn't it in Yucca mountain?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Harry Reid? I am not old enough to know what happened
| there.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "In January 2019 Governor Steve Silolak vowed that "not
| one ounce" of nuclear waste would be allowed at Yucca
| Mountain, and a May funding bill did not include funding
| for the site. In May 2019, the Reno Gazette-Journal
| published a long-form essay cataloging opposition to the
| Yucca Mountain project. According to a tribal elder, the
| Western Shoshone view Yucca Mountain as sacred and a
| nuclear storage facility "will poison everything. It's
| people's life, our Mother Earth's life, all the living
| things here, all the creatures; whatever's crawling
| around, it's their life too." The tribes say they lack
| funds to discredit federal safety claims, but will be
| directly affected by a potential disaster."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_wast
| e_r...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_wast
| e_r...
| deadc0de wrote:
| Tesla/PG&E are also building 182.5MW/730MWh presumably at the
| same site? https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-moss-
| landing-instal...
| jeffbee wrote:
| That XYZ Energy Corp. of Delaware is building a storage
| facility, and that Tesla is selling battery packs in the
| same place, does not really imply two different projects.
| Could be the same project.
| deadc0de wrote:
| Not really. Look at google maps sat view. These are two
| different projects.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Nice! I hadn't heard about Moss Landing. It's only been
| operating for 4 months.
| [deleted]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Bath County Pumped Storage Station("the largest battery in the
| world") can store 24,000 MWh, which puts it at 100x this
| battery.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
| spockz wrote:
| Are there any online resources if one is interested in how to
| write a battery management system? Suppose I have some battery
| packs around, I want to learn how to properly connect them to a
| home grid.
| turtlebits wrote:
| This is an open source BMS if you want to see how it's done.
| https://github.com/Teslafly/OpenBMS
|
| Otherwise, there are lots of BMS's you can just buy a hook up
| to raw cells.
| voicedYoda wrote:
| I've come across diy powerwalls that have battery management,
| but haven't looked in 3 years
| NickM wrote:
| Battery storage is a great tool for leveling demand day to day,
| but I wonder how soon we're going to need to start looking at
| mechanisms for leveling seasonal demand. Many places need a lot
| more energy for heating in the winter, right when solar
| production is lowest.
|
| Synthetic methane seems like a great solution to these problems,
| and very few people are talking about it. If you used DAC for
| CO2, or got your CO2 from organic sources, and then combined it
| with green hydrogen to make methane, it would be a carbon-neutral
| fuel, and could take advantage of all the existing infrastructure
| we have for natural gas. Plus, it would also bypass the problem
| of trying to replace millions of gas furnaces and other
| appliances in existing buildings. LNG is ten times more energy
| dense than lithium-ion batteries by volume, and a hundred times
| more energy dense by mass; generating methane with surplus solar
| energy in the summer and storing it for later use in the winter
| seems like it might be doable.
| beambot wrote:
| YC backed a company in this space: Prometheus Fuels. The
| science is sound, and the scaling is economical as you look at
| renewables for the electricity. Some links:
|
| https://www.prometheusfuels.com/
|
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/former-playwright-ai...
| eutropia wrote:
| Prometheus Fuels looks cool, but (yeah, standard HN comment)
| their website is janky on firefox.
|
| Fusion + Syn Fuel is definitely in the playbook to reverse
| climate change.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| It definitely is doable, but the efficency of the process
| probably prevents market adoption, until fosil gas gets more
| expensive. (cheap fracking gas)
|
| And if you use a methan fuel cell - you can use its surplus
| heat for heating while generating electricity.
|
| I don't think they are market ready, though. But there are lots
| of options out there and the best solution is likely to combine
| what works now.
|
| Btw. I think there was a breakthrough with natrium based
| batteries. (No lithium needed). They were just not as energy
| dense as lithium based ones, but that matters not so much for
| stationary use. So with no ressource limitation, you could
| produce them in very big quantities..
| NickM wrote:
| _the efficency of the process probably prevents market
| adoption_
|
| I think this is correct right now, but the biggest cost by
| far for generating green methane at scale would be the energy
| costs for electrolysis to get the hydrogen from water. If
| renewables continue to fall in cost, we may rapidly reach a
| point where we have a huge surplus of green energy for parts
| of the year. There are already places in the US where energy
| prices regularly go negative due to excess wind energy, for
| example.
|
| Folks have talked a lot in the past about using excess energy
| from renewables to generate hydrogen gas, but hydrogen alone
| is a lot harder to manage, is much less energy-dense by
| volume, is impractical to liquefy for storage and transport,
| and isn't compatible with existing infrastructure. Methane
| solves all of these issues, and doesn't take much additional
| energy to create beyond what you must spend for hydrogen
| alone.
| patrickk wrote:
| Sodium ion batteries[1] are another promising one for
| stationary batteries that pop up from time to time. Sodium is
| obviously abundant and cheap, and has similar properties to
| lithium. For grid storage, it's heavier weight and less
| energy density isn't a big issue. However like many
| alternative battery solutions it it's the there yet for
| whatever reason.
|
| 1 https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/batteries-
| storag...
| guepe wrote:
| There was recently on HN a discussion about a proposed solution
| for seasonal heat storage based in aluminum - air batteries.
| r00fus wrote:
| Doesn't this simply mean you increase baseload during winter?
| Solar isn't a baseload power option, it's best used in a
| portfolio of energy sources.
|
| Energy _fluctuations_ are what cost Texas so much the last
| month, and that could be greatly mitigated with battery storage
| solutions.
| michaelt wrote:
| To an extent.
|
| But imagine you were writing a plan for northern europe to
| become carbon-neutral for electricity, heating and transport.
|
| If you need the most power in the coldest, darkest months,
| and you manage to meet that demand with renewables that
| aren't solar, why have solar in the portfolio at all?
| netflixandkill wrote:
| In the very long term converting excess generation into methane
| is almost sure to happen provided that can get accurately
| carbon priced versus ground extracted gas.
|
| It's not even just seasonal capacity shifting, any situation
| that weight matters in will favor LNG over electric batteries
| for the foreseeable future even if batteries get 10x better.
| samcheng wrote:
| Honestly, good-old heat pumps work well for most climates. You
| heat up the ground underneath your house in the summer, and
| harvest that heat during the winter. That seems a lot more
| economical than synthesizing methane and hoping it doesn't leak
| back out into the atmosphere.
|
| If we can get synthetic methane from atmospheric CO2 to work in
| an economic fashion, I imagine we could also use it to directly
| reduce atmospheric carbon (maybe by permanently fixing it into
| a solid). Problem solved!
| NickM wrote:
| Heat pumps are certainly a good option in some cases, but
| other times they are not practical.
|
| For dense urban areas, there may not be enough open ground
| available to bury the heat pump coils. Also, in colder
| climates, many houses and buildings use hot water or steam
| radiators, and heat pumps can't efficiently heat water hot
| enough for this type of system. Retrofitting ducts to replace
| radiators and switching to forced air heating can be
| prohibitively complex and expensive.
|
| Methane leaks are certainly a valid concern, but if we
| mandate better monitoring systems and do a better job of
| repairing leaks when they occur, it seems plausible we could
| get leaks down to acceptable levels. Methane is indeed a
| potent greenhouse gas, but it doesn't last nearly as long as
| CO2 before it breaks down, so if leaks are kept to a minimum
| I don't know whether they would ultimately be a huge deal in
| the long term.
| Wohlf wrote:
| Interesting, I'd never heard of this before. If we didn't use
| carbon-neutral CO2 sources would it still be an improvement
| over status quo?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That's about 2-3 million Teslas of storage.
| gok wrote:
| No, a few thousand. 240 megawatt hours = 240,000 kilowatt
| hours, a BEV car is around 80 kWh
| fastball wrote:
| To be precise, 4800 if you are conservative and use the
| battery pack capacity of early production Tesla Model 3s
| (864,000 MJ / 180 MJ).
| 01100011 wrote:
| How does this compare with Tesla's offering, technology wise?
|
| It seems to me that battery-based storage isn't very advanced
| technology, and is something that is enabled by declining battery
| prices. I see Tesla fans pointing to it as another one of Tesla's
| trillion dollar markets, but it never seemed like something Tesla
| would have an exclusive lock on.
| fastball wrote:
| Except for patents nobody ever has an exclusive lock on
| anything.
|
| What Tesla does have is:
|
| 1. A helluva lotta actual battery cell production.
|
| 2. Practical experience deploying / analyzing / etc more Joules
| worth of batteries than probably anyone else.
|
| 3. Advanced battery research that is focused on more practical
| improvements than the pie-in-the-sky research we've seen a lot
| of over the past few decades ("this battery is flexible and has
| 10x storage of Li-ion and charges in 1 second") that never
| makes it out of the lab.
|
| With (3), there is always the risk (to Tesla) that one of these
| futuristic battery techs actually works out and makes it into
| production, but until then Tesla's approach (making
| improvements to things we know work in production / at scale)
| is probably a wise one.
| amelius wrote:
| 1 and 2 -> easily duplicated by some Asian country.
|
| 3 -> how much improvement are you talking about?
| gpm wrote:
| > 1 and 2 -> easily duplicated by some Asian country.
|
| This implies some curious assumption that Asian countries
| are somehow innately better at this sort of work? I'm not
| sure that holds up.
|
| Certainly the environments are different, different
| standards for acceptable pollution, acceptable levels of
| corruption, wages, safety, government subsidies, etc. These
| vary as wildly within Asian countries (Japan, Korea, China,
| ...) as they do between western countries and Asian
| countries though, and it's really not clear to me which
| countries environment is superior.
|
| Assuming you're comparing to a high corruption low
| safety/environment/wages country... Lack of corruption and
| fraud goes a long way. Wages and safety cost less as things
| become more automated. I'm not sure how subsidies break
| down, but I suspect that there are more available for this
| sort of technology in the western world. Etc.
| amelius wrote:
| The point was that battery tech is not very advanced
| (compared to, say, building a microprocessor), and hence
| the assumption that an Asian country can easily duplicate
| it, especially considering the points you make (low
| wages, different standards, etc.)
| fastball wrote:
| - Battery tech can be very advanced. Tesla's
| manufacturing techniques are far from trivial.
|
| - The most advanced chip fab (TSMC) is Taiwanese (i.e.
| Asian).
| fastball wrote:
| 1. Tesla is outpacing Asian manufacturers, not the other
| way around.
|
| 2. Your first point doesn't really apply to my point (2),
| as that was more about how Tesla is actually getting
| feedback on their batteries in the field, through servicing
| their own cars / battery packs and getting constant battery
| data from the cars themselves and from use of their
| Supercharger network. This is incredibly useful, others
| aren't really doing it, and "being Asian" isn't really a
| silver bullet for this one...
|
| 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK79ioBW8Mg
| drcross wrote:
| Tesla has first mover advantage in that they secured lithium
| salt flats in Peru back in like 2015. Last year they announced
| an aggressive pathway to halving the cost of kwh storage due in
| part because their business depends so much on it.
| google234123 wrote:
| I wonder how much more a project like this costs than in
| California than in a state like Arizona.
| speransky wrote:
| Why not a private nuclear power station, Apple
| [deleted]
| jp0d wrote:
| Has anyone looked at copyrighting iPower?
| jkestner wrote:
| At some point you have to wonder what products these are practice
| for.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I would guess data center cost savings from off peak energy
| consumption.
| Ninjinka wrote:
| Cars?
| stcredzero wrote:
| Smart homes?
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| A whole City?
| stcredzero wrote:
| The Apple Arcology? Their headquarters is a prototype?
| ben_w wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me, given Musk is hoping to do a Mars
| colony and Bezos is hoping to do O'Neill cylinders.
| stcredzero wrote:
| I've been waiting for over a decade for IKEA to get in on
| the action with an IKEArcology!
|
| They already have model apartments with the square
| footage listed. They just need to establish different
| SKUs, and then instead of going to the warehouse to get
| your flat pack, you get a key card for the elevator and
| go up to your apartment! Though I think if the Swedish
| Meatballs became my staple diet, and I were exposed to
| their desert display daily, I'd die an early death.
|
| I've had those books on Space Colonization by TA
| Heppenheimer, and some of the illustrations inside have a
| definite IKEA-ish vibe.
| fudged71 wrote:
| >enough to power more than 7,000 homes
|
| I get that this is used to quantify the energy capacity, but no
| homes are directly benefiting from this.
| ZachAttach wrote:
| This installation is right at the base of my family ranch. I am
| excited to hear about the development of new ways to generate and
| store power, but man if these panels don't mess up the natural
| beauty of the area. I can only assume the batteries will as well.
| lifty wrote:
| I am curious what battery technology they will use. I have
| recently found out about Ambri's liquid metal battery
| (https://ambri.com) which got me excited about grid level
| batteries. If this technology pans out it could be the missing
| ingredient for making renewables feasible.
| deelowe wrote:
| Did they ever solve the corrosion issues with those?
| pengaru wrote:
| I fully expect grid energy storage to be where used BEV batteries
| spend the end of their usable life before getting recycled.
|
| It'd just be nice if the manufacturers would establish some
| vendor-neutral standards already, paving the way for this future.
| I hate the idea of buying a BEV with a proprietary battery of
| such obvious long-term value beyond my vehicle's needs,
| especially when it forms such a huge portion of the vehicle's
| cost. At this point I'm half assuming I'll need to DIY a
| powerwall out back when the time comes to replace my future BEV's
| battery.
| ldbooth wrote:
| The power plant operators do not agree, currently. the energy
| storage margin is thin and li-ion lifetime too short already...
| if you refer to grid scale. Look at the APS battery 'event' and
| the hazard to emergency response personnel batteries pose as a
| grid asset. Some form of home hybrid using recycled batteries
| may work, but the safety expertise and market payback don't
| work except at the DIY scale... Maybe it's a biz opportunity.
| Animats wrote:
| That sounds right. What utilities want are components that
| you install and thereafter take little attention. Re-using
| recycled batteries does not fit that model. They'd be much
| happier with something that cost more but lasted 20-30 years.
| netflixandkill wrote:
| It's not even really a question of attention so much as
| maintenance. Fixed up front costs are easy to handle as
| capital that can go into their rate cases, but more so
| power equipment lifetime is measured in decades and the
| discharge lifecycles of available battery technology is
| already not great for an installation expected to go to
| near full discharge on a regular basis.
|
| If the planned usage is only a 10% semi-daily scenario for
| stability support that may result in 5-10 years longer
| lifetimes versus daily discharges for capacity shifting.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I watched this last week and was blown away at how useful
| "used" cells could be in the right hands. Also, imagining what
| low skill labor looks like a battery offset world.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PenPYwa00CA
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| My understanding is that used laptop batteries are
| particularly good for this sort of thing, because what
| happens is that one cell (out of six or nine) dies and the
| laptop battery becomes unusable since they are wired in
| series, and then you have five (or eight) used but relatively
| healthy cells to reuse.
|
| I am not sure whether the same idea could be applied to a car
| battery with much more advanced battery management systems,
| since in those situations dead cells don't cripple the
| battery, so the other cells keep getting used until they lose
| efficacy. So I suspect cells scavenged from car batteries
| will be of lesser quality than those scavenged from laptops.
|
| Not totally sure if I have it right.
| mmaurizi wrote:
| I'm imagining for a more advanced BMS system that manages
| dead cells for you, you don't scavenge cells but instead
| use the battery pack as a whole unit, just separated from
| the car.
|
| Think something like a conversion kit that turns your Model
| 3 battery pack that you've removed from your car into a
| powerwall.
| kube-system wrote:
| Not sure about EVs, but replacing single dead cells is
| common on hybrid vehicles. It's pretty common for them to
| be series'd up as well.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| They form a huge portion of the vehicle's cost today, but
| battery prices have been dropping 21% a year. Assuming the pack
| in the car lasts 10 years, by then a new pack would cost just
| 10% of the one put in the car. At that point is it even worth
| reconditioning, adapting and reusing over recycling?
| pengaru wrote:
| I didn't mean cost strictly in the monetary sense.
|
| The battery in a BEV accounts for a substantial portion of
| the resources involved in its manufacture. The battery forms
| basically half the mass of the entire vehicle, and we're not
| talking about a sack of unprocessed dirt here. If it has
| usable life left for energy storage purposes as-is, we should
| absolutely take advantage of it.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| The decision on whether to reuse or recycle should be
| informed by lifecycle analyses of the costs and
| externalities of both options. Maintenance isn't free of
| externalities and it will presumably be much higher in a
| system made up of older batteries. The opportunity costs
| shouldn't be entirely dismissed either - lower hanging
| fruit for removing emissions may be available elsewhere.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| For Tesla's the battery pack is about 1/4 of the vehicle's
| weight. The battery pack weighs around 500Kg and the car is
| around 2,000Kg, depending on the model. The main problem as
| EV manufacturers look to shave weight the batteries are
| going to become more integrated into the car's structure,
| which is going to make them harder to remove and reuse the
| cells at the end of the car's life.
| r00fus wrote:
| Do you have any examples of designs where batteries are
| literally integrated into vehicle structure?
|
| The iconic Tesla battery-skate design is still
| modular/replaceable for example (they're all
| 18650/2170/etc cells).
| Retric wrote:
| Individual cells might in theory be modular, but Tesla
| for example is gluing them to their battery packs which
| makes them much harder to reuse at the individual cell
| levels. The battery pack it's self is becoming a
| structural element though it can still be removed, but
| unfortunately it's proprietary.
|
| On top of this EV batteries are getting very close to
| lasting the normal lifetime of the vehicle. Car
| manufacturers are likely to tray and leverage this as a
| form of built in obsolescence by making replacing the
| battery unappealing under normal usage patterns.
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