[HN Gopher] No Sun, No Wind, Now What? Renewable Energy Storage
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No Sun, No Wind, Now What? Renewable Energy Storage
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-08-20 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (backreaction.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (backreaction.blogspot.com)
| adityamwagh wrote:
| Nuclear energy has so much potential. Pretty sad people are
| scared of it. It's clean, it's energy dense, and we can make a
| lot of it. France gets most of it's energy from Nuclear plants.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nuclear is dead _not_ because people are afraid of it. Nuclear
| is dead because it is _way more expensive_ than alternatives.
| Always was, and getting moreso as renewables cost continues on
| down.
|
| In the foreseeable future, nukes will be mothballed long short
| of their design life just because nobody will want to pay
| enough for their power to enable continuing to operate them.
| Geothermal might suffer the same fate.
|
| When a nuke is mothballed early, every kWh it ever produced
| will suddenly be found to have cost much more than had
| previously been reckoned.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Somewhat disappointing...
|
| Would have liked for her to call out NRGV as the actual
| investment scam it is, rather than just pathetically inadequate.
|
| Would have preferred for mineshaft gravity storage to be
| mentioned, which is not a scam, in place of NRGV.
|
| Would have liked for her to cite ammonia along with hydrogen as
| chemical storage media. And to mention recent, radical
| improvements in hydrogen electrolysis efficiency.
|
| Would have liked for pumped hydro _not_ to be described as if it
| were necessarily dependent on rivers. Or on hills (i.e. mention
| deep underground cavities as storage volumes).
|
| Would have liked for variant battery tech to have been mentioned,
| particularly iron, zinc-bromide, and molten-metal chemistries.
|
| But I am happy to see mention of very substantial compressed-air
| storage systems in production use.
|
| Would have liked for her to mention undersea buoyancy storage as
| the dark horse. But I understand why she would not be aware of
| it.
|
| Disappointed that she brought up nukes without mentioning that
| they are wholly unable to compete with renewables, on cost.
|
| Finally, it would have been very helpful for her to have noted
| that for now and well into the future, money is overwhelmingly
| better spent on building out renewable generating capacity than
| on storage.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > But then there's the dunkelflaute and its evil brother, cold
| dunkelflaute. ... It's a shame there aren't any umlauts in the
| word, otherwise it'd make a great name for a metal band.
|
| That made me laugh.
|
| Sabine is absolutely right that storage is the key, and it's a
| presently unsolved problem. The technologies she lists mostly
| can't scale up to world scale: pumped hydro and CAES need
| particular geography/geology, flywheeels and falling blocks have
| too low energy storage density, and lithium is needed for mobile
| applications. Thermal storage can work for durations of a day or
| so, but it's very capital intensive and has all the problems of
| thermal engines. Not really confidence-inspiring.
|
| There are a couple of infant/ancient technologies that Sabine
| doesn't mention. Iron is plentiful and rechargeable iron-based
| batteries could supply energy at week-long duration. Ammonia is
| under active research as an energy storage medium. That could
| supply seasonal storage.
|
| We have well over a century of experience with both materials,
| and they are already produced at the necessary scale for the
| rapid scale-up we need in energy storage. Both storage
| technologies are near commercial deployment.
|
| I also think that Sabine may be focusing a little too much on
| efficiency. This is because I expect the price of PV production
| to drop fairly quickly to low single cents per watt, so PV plus
| storage could end up in the low double-digit cents per watt.[1]
| At these prices we could perhaps our relax efficiency
| requirements a little.
|
| Synthesis of methane from air-captured carbon is one possibility
| if we do that. That has the advantage of using existing storage
| and distribution structures, already present at the required
| scale.
|
| The recent ESA proposal for space-based solar[2], though, is just
| sad.
|
| The fact that it even exists shows that European officials have
| not yet faced up to the reality of their situation, and they are
| still expecting the technology fairy to wave her magic wand to
| rescue them by lifting a million tonnes of PV satellite into
| orbit in less than a decade, more or less for free. Such
| passivity is very disappointing.
|
| 1. The path to this is via PV cells printed on flexible plastic
| film laid directly on the ground, with the strips laid side by
| side and bonded together. (Think greenhouse plastic strips
| hundreds of meters long, and with hundred-meter widths). No panel
| glass covers or aluminum frames, no galvanised steel stand mounts
| bedded in concrete, no inter-panel wiring, avoiding looming
| bottlenecks in glass, aluminum, and copper production. Minimal
| site prep and construction labor, and good land-use efficiency.
| (Legacy panel farms are only around 50% covered by panels because
| of shading and the need for access to fix wiring problems or
| replace panels with broken glass.)
|
| Erthos is half-way to this installation design, but still uses
| legacy panels. Perovskites are this year at the point where roll-
| printed PV cells are feasible.
|
| 2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/european-space-
| chief...
| ncmncm wrote:
| Except, storage _is_ a solved problem. Different solutions will
| be used in different places. Both compressed-air and pumped
| hydro are nowhere near as dependent on local details as is
| often imagined.
|
| There will be no need for seasonal storage at all, because
| anyplace that needs more energy than they have stored, and
| cannot book enough from transmission lines, may simply order a
| shipment of ammonia from any of many producers in the tropics.
|
| But it is correct that orbital solar will not happen, and ESA
| should be ashamed.
| poutine wrote:
| This is a great summary. Advocates of renewables really need to
| focus on the storage issue. Solving this at scale will be key.
| Until then it's all about nukes.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is no "storage issue". It just has not been built out
| yet. It has not been built out yet because that would be stupid
| use of capital before there is generating capacity to charge it
| from.
| ashtami8 wrote:
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