Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.
This is a shitty Texas-based company cutting corners, who also had fires in 2021 and 2022. There are plenty of battery storage facilities operating safely.
As someone living in Texas presently: you could have saved yourself a full sentence:
This is a shitty Texas-based company cutting corners…
to
Texas company
or honestly:
Texas
Would be sufficient. Any Texan that doesn’t own x texas-based-company is tired of that company’s bullshit. It’s one of the few things natives and transplants agree on.
This PSA brought to you by the makers of: y’all, you all, and all y’all.
You’re right, but I think less dense but safer and more sustainable options are the better choice for this
We can all agree on that, Clearly li-ion is a bad choice for static use cases.
But right now it’s the cheapest option, and it looks likely that will stay true for quite a while unfortunately.
It’s the densest option. The cheapest is probably salt/water or iron/water using scrap
LIthium Iron Phosphate is cheapest relatively dense battery type. Sodium ion will be if lithium get expensive.
Weirdly it’s not, except maybe gravity batteries where nice reservoirs happen to exist already. It should be but it’s not right now.
Li-ion has economy of scale right now. I do think molten metal etc will overtake eventually, but they’re currently playing catchup and li-ion has dropped in price so much over time that it’s surprisingly cheap even where it should make no sense.
I didn’t say molten metal, what? No just a standard chemical battery
I know, I just threw out one of the many contenders for grid power.
Iron water does look promising too.
Ahh, that makes more sense. I misunderstood
I don’t think they should be operating at all.
Ever seen what happens when a coal mine catches fire? Link
I guess we should just go back to water mills right?
i think you forgot to attach an image. or you’re a boring person
Nothing boring about a fire that’s been burning for at least 62 years, possibly 86, and has caused the permanent evacuation of two towns.
i wanted cool images
Not Centralia but Hazlewood in 2014. Thought I’d use a more recent and closer to home image
woah, interesting
They should have updated the road sign to include a fire warning there.
So uh. I guess those coal and natural gas power plants would fare better in a fire. Something seems wrong there but OP clearly wouldn’t possibly post something on the Internet that was utterly detached from reality.
Energy storage is just that. Fire is frequently quite good at releasing said energy.
Lithium? poof.
Oil? yup.
Nat gas? mmhmm.
wood? yup.
Coal? dang.
Guess all we got left is water - I’m sure that doesn’t have any specific regional requirements…
So tell us champ: what energy storage you got all figured out from that armchair?
Nuclear though, never had a problem with excess heat at one of those. /s
Was gonna list it but I figured our energy-tzar OP would just complain about radioactive minerals being like batteries with more steps.
Nobody’s ever died from a dam collapse.
Hey! It puts out fires so it’s like… better!
None. Use demand shaping instead. I like electrolysis of water, but desalination might make more sense in some regions. I suppose you could even redirect excess electricity to certain computational work.
I imagine you, like many, just don’t understand the insane engineering feat that is an electrical grid. Everything is realtime - Every time someone’s AC kicks on the grid must adapt and provide more power immediately. Power storage is a godsend to this process and in terms of relative age … is very new. With regard to power storage - there are very few ways to hold it that don’t run some risk of fire or other calamitous failure mode. That includes water - but I was being coy when making my statement implying it wouldn’t burn.
To your comment: you could use salt/sea/undrinkable water for energy storage but it comes with regional requirements (elevation change typically) in addition to the water. It’s not one size fits all and definitely doesn’t work in many regions.
Regarding your two options which you offered to create potable water (not to store energy:) Both are wildly inefficient and have one or more major drawbacks to them. Topically - one of these drawbacks is their massive energy requirement. So you provided a way to burn energy faster - not store it ;)
If we build out our GHG-free power capacity beyond our electricity demand, efficiency isn’t an issue. We need fresh water. We need hydrogen and oxygen. I’m sure there are other convenient things to produce whenever electricity demand falls off. These energy storage and reselling schemes are just destroying value.
We have sufficient generation. It’s a question of cleanliness, efficiency, and consistency. Consistency comes with storage and enables cleaner methods, while inconsistent, to be used.
Using your example: what need do we have for food storage? We have grain right now - and we’re growing more! Who needs water storage - we have wells!
Hydrogen and oxygen? Yeah we have that. What technology, currently available, are you suggesting we all switch over to, again? While I’m at it: last I checked stored hydrogen and oxygen have a tendency to uh… burn… and very “energetically.”
You seem fond of the tin foil - you are apparently worried about “big lithium” or some such… wait until you hear about “big energy.”
If you are genuinely posting and not acting in bad faith I imagine you need to broaden your view a bit.
I’m not sure what you mean. Natural fresh water supplies are stressed in many regions. We need hydrogen to fuel vehicles and for the production GHG-free steel and fertilizer. Oxygen of course is necessary for medical and industrial applications. Safely handling hydrogen and oxygen is a solved problem and these gases are not polluting if you have to vent to atmosphere. It only makes sense from a wasteful, financially extractive perspective to store extra electricity by environmentally questionable means instead of actually using that energy right away.
Hydrogen electrolysis is great, but its something to do with “too much” renewables, and also supports having too much batteries, which are more convenient for daily electricity needs from renewables, but also using up high battery storage capacity every day.
We’ve been talking about energy and energy storage up till now. You’ve been mostly ‘on track’ with said responses up till this point - albeit overly generic and somewhat disconnected from reality… In the last couple responses you’ve jumped from water care to what I can only imagine was the first two Google results when looking up hydrogen / oxygen paired with energy.
Is the other guy okay or did his shift end?
Look. Here’s a sobering bottom line: if it were technologically feasible to “replace batteries” we would have already. Hydrogen powered x isn’t functionally acceptable because:
a) It stores like shit.
b) boom (pressure or rapid combustion - take your pick)
c) It is shockingly (hah) hard to get oxygen and hydrogen to split efficiently. Very few sources of hydrogen are actually energy positive or more efficient than what we already have in more convenient, safer, higher density forms.
I’m all for progress… but armchair warriors that claim the “moral high ground” by shitting on what works currently - while not being able to provide a single other suggestion beyond what they got drip fed from their feed and distilled by their echo
groupchamber need to sit the fuck down. Want to “stick it to big battery?” Go back to landlines. Put a crank back on your car. The list goes on.I digress. Back to energy storage: if you’ve got some brilliant solution - get to it. We’re waiting.
This is why you don’t use battery chemistries that can
thermally run awayautoignite in grid storage. The plant was using LG JH4 batteries, which use an NMC chemistry. I don’t think that LiFePO4 cells were as ubiquitous when this plant was first constructed, so the designers opted for something spicy instead.This shit is why you use LiFePO4. It can’t
thermally run awayautoignite, it lasts longer, and the reduced energy density doesn’t really matter for grid storage. Plus, it doesn’t use nickel or cobalt so the only conflict resource is lithium.EDIT: LiFePO4 batteries can enter thermal runaway, but they can’t autoignite.
I don’t think we should be storing and reselling electricity at all.
Feelings based or data driven opinion?
Read that and was like… fuck me why am I debating the guy when I coulda just asked that. Cheers.
There’s no IRL data for the specific model I’ve described, but I’m not sure what you mean by “feelings based”. Using otherwise excess energy instead of storing it is a considered, rational strategy.
The document linked doesn’t go into detail for good reason. It’s a bunch of half cooked ideas distilled to make a good read… but misses a lot of key points. Most notably: it hand waves through storage.
The electrical grid is a lot like a pressure system in a sense: we have a lot of equipment that is designed to work at a very specific pressure. Outside of those ranges things break. The article mentions feeding back into the grid which is fine and well… but fails to mention how that needs to be managed so as to not blow the whole thing up. Also that solar system you have isn’t going to be feeding shit back into the grid without a buffer… which is storage… for the same reason that you likely will struggle to have a solar home without batteries. The sun is variable and your “stuff” needs a very specific range of power. Too much? zap. Too little? brownout. Either way: rip electronics.
The very things you are suggesting as solutions to power storage literally require it to work.
What are the alternatives?
Mechanical energy storage, like pumped hydro or flywheel. Thermal energy storage, like molten salt.
Electrochemical isn’t entirely off the table either: less-volatile chemistries are available, and better containment methods can reduce risks.
Non-electrical chemical storage methods are available: electrical energy can be used for hydrogen electrolysis, or Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbon fuels. Fuel cells, and traditional ICE generators can recover the energy put into those (relatively) stable fuels, or we can export it from the electrical generation industry to the transportation industry.
There’s also avoiding (or minimizing) the need for storage at all, with “demand shaping”. Basically, we radically overbuild solar, wind, wave, tidal, etc. Normally, that would tank energy prices and be unprofitable, but we also build out some massive, flexible demand to buy this excess power. Because they are extremely overbuilt, the minimal output from these sources during suboptimal conditions is more than enough to meet normal demands; we just shut off the flexible additional demand we added. We “shape” our “demand” to match what we are able to supply.
There’s also avoiding (or minimizing) the need for storage at all, with “demand shaping”. Basically, we radically overbuild solar, wind, wave, tidal, etc. Normally, that would tank energy prices and be unprofitable, but we also build out some massive, flexible demand to buy this excess power. Because they are extremely overbuilt, the minimal output from these sources during suboptimal conditions is more than enough to meet normal demands; we just shut off the flexible additional demand we added.
Bingo.
Find an engineer or an engineering channel to better understand the grid. Energy generation - clean or otherwise - has to be adjusted in realtime… further: the above statement doesn’t clearly understand or solve for over generation vs under generation. There’s a fix: a reservoir. In other words: storage. This (storage) is present everywhere from the grid to almost literally every circuit board.
You’re picking a fight with batteries/energy storage - then making an argument about something unrelated. “Storing cooked beef sure is hard” is not properly solved with “the store stocking more beef.” They are tangentially related… but not the same thing.
edit: clarity / punctuation
further: the above statement doesn’t clearly understand or solve for over generation vs under generation.
Filling a reservoir during the day to run a steel mill overnight is a complete waste of a reservoir: move the steel mill to daytime hours and you don’t need the reservoir.
And yet, we are doing this now: We are driving consumption to overnight hours that can’t possibly be met by solar. We are offering cheap “off peak” power, and incentivizing overnight consumption.
We do have good reason for it: we need that excess overnight demand to improve the efficiency of our base load generation. But, those same incentives are killing solar/wind efficiency and artificially increasing the need for storage.
Yes, we need storage to match the imbalance between generation and demand. But it is far more important that we minimize that imbalance first.
Shifting demand to time of production (demand shaping) is much more efficient than shifting production to time of demand (storage).
OP’s position is rather ludicrous for a number of reasons, but they are not wrong on this particular point.
This is just factually ridiculous.
Filling a reservoir during the day to run a steel mill overnight is a complete waste of a reservoir: move the steel mill to daytime hours and you don’t need the reservoir.
This isn’t a logical comparison. Here’s an apples to apples: It’s the rainy season - my plants have water … I take excess water and keep it in a rain barrel. An unexpected dry spell occurs: My plants have water.
We’ll return to this in a moment.
And yet, we are doing this now: We are driving consumption to overnight hours that can’t possibly be met by solar.
Being night I’d imagine that’s a tough fight for solar… I’ll give you that. 🙄
…But, those same incentives are killing solar/wind efficiency and artificially increasing the need for storage.
No.
Storage - or a buffer if you will - is simply a requirement of many systems. Electricity is no different. Renewables benefit substantially by having it and would be horribly inefficient without it.
…Shifting demand to time of production (demand shaping) is much more efficient than shifting production to time of demand (storage).
Demand shaping when we’re taking about the grid is largely the result of seasons, the availability of light, and our day to day actions. We turn lights on at night, the heat on when we are cold, and the air on when we are hot. We cook meals before and after work. Demand shaping on the scale that is being suggested requires a positively insane amount of change and has an infinitesimally small chance of occuring.
Now: we have solar during the day and turbines for when it’s windy. This is your production. You cannot shift it. It is raining - my plants are getting water. How then, do you water your plants when it is dry? This answers itself.
OP’s position is rather ludicrous for a number of reasons, but they are not wrong on this particular point.
Op believes that energy storage shouldn’t be necessary. At all. They have clearly stated elsewhere that their opinion is not based on research and it shows. A grid requires a buffer - or a series of fast acting production which effectively simulates one. Solar / wind without that buffer would be nearly unusuable.
Op is misguided at best and while technically not completely wrong: for them to be right we’d need to live in some utopia with vastly different technologies that we have presently. I like sci-fi too… but I’m not going to lobby congress to get rid of planes in favor of teleporters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw
OP is… trying his best, I guess. For now lipo is the best solution. Actually multiple things are the solution. Pumped water has a delay that needs to be covered by something else. Flywheels have mechanical chalenges. Molten salt also has problems. Etc. They all compliment each other. IMO best single solution would be nuclear. Salt will be better then lithium, but in some years.
When batteries (ahcually accumulators, but whatever) are done properly, the fires should not go beyond one cell, if at all.
PS Gravity, except pumped water, is hilariously bad.
OP is… trying his best, I guess.
I commend your faith in … ehm… the human spirit we’ll say.
PS Gravity, except pumped water, is hilariously bad.
Keenly aware. I got a good laugh out of it when I saw it mentioned.
Practical Engineering is great. He does a fantastic job of explaining things simply and frequently provides models to demonstrate things.
100% on the combination of things statement. Many different storage mediums have different advantages and disadvantages. The right tool for the right job. Flawed though it is I always loved reading about molten salt… It just seemed like such a metal way to store energy. 😂
Realistically - I don’t mind people being incorrect or even just leaning into their particular beliefs or preferences… but OP emphatically stating incorrect information and then arguing as people corrected him was irritating.
A really strong elastic band.
Lifting your mom with a pulley.
I believe there is battery tech that is newer but being deployed into production that is iron based. It is heavier and less energy dense than lithium. But for power grid level deployment that should be fine and iron is a bit harder to catch on fire.
Pumped hydro
No, it’s not, at least not at scale, because you need specific geography and plenty of water. Why do you think we are not massively using it?
Can prob dig a whole system the same as they did to get all the materials for this mess.
The water would also not be useless like all the water used to process the battery materials.
Abandon the model of buying and storing electricity when demand is low and reselling power back to the grid when demand is high. Instead, electricity should almost always be generated in excess of demand with the difference going to hydrogen and oxygen production for various medical, industrial, agricultural, and transport applications. If we ever run out of storage, they can be safely vented to atmosphere.
Electrolisis is relatively inefficient and wears down the electrodes. While not as bad on an industrial scale, those are still problems. And then you have to convert it back, that is even less efficient.
Good in theory, barely passable in practice. Growing sugar cane and making ethanol would be better, like brazil does it.
You’re hard pushing hydrogen / oxygen pretty blindly. Do you happen to know what the best efficiency of it is? It’s not great. And it gets worse when you have to harvest it (typically electrolysis which is brutally energy intensive.) Worse still when you need to compress it - and don’t even start me on energy density. Oh and that compressed gas needs to be kept cold. More energy.
Hydrogen cells have been around for ages and are still functionally worthless until the storage and generation problems are solved.
deleted by creator
Before you can can do that, you need enough renewable generation capacity to exceed peak demand. And of course that will never happen because of the bottomless appetite of AI and bitcoin mining for electric power.
AI and Bitcoin miners can be a part of the solution rather than the problem.
There are disincentives to overbuilding solar, wind, tidal, wave, and other passive energy collectors. If we overbuild, the lower output from suboptimal production is still enough to meet demand. But, under normal conditions we will have far more power than we can use.
We already have periods of time where power prices go negative: generators are forced to pay to dump excess power. This melts the return on their investment, and stifles further rollout.
We can justify overbuilding such sources if we can adjust our demand to meet whatever we can supply. That means turning on additional loads when the sun shines, and turning off loads when the wind stops blowing.
Data centers can be put on highly variable rate plans that are at or even below costs during ideal generation conditions, and wildly expensive during suboptimal generation conditions. Data centers on such plans will halt processing when power is overly expensive, and only draw on the grid when it is profitable to do so.
Data centers aren’t the only industry where this can be done, and this isn’t a novel concept. Steel mills operate overnight to increase the load on baseload generation like nuclear. Baseload generators need the daily demand “trough” as high as possible, and the “peak” as low as possible. They need the curve as flat as possible, so they offer incentives to heavy industrial consumers to shift their demand. As we continue to shift to passive collectors instead of traditional generation, we need to reverse these old demand shaping practices to match the capabilities of new generation methods.
We need an authoritarian figure to nationalize the energy supply, shut down these wasteful expressions of late stage capitalism, mandate rooftop solar, and build out our nuclear fleet.
We need an authoritarian figure
No. We absolutely do not need that.
Well, I don’t know how we’re supposed to fix the climate while playing nice with bourgeois interests.
Build a tower, use excess power to lift heavy weights. Drop them when you need electricity to spin generators
Video on weight storage. Pumped hydro is proven and efficient, but it’s location specific.
Adam Something is awesome. I genuinely wish I could see his face as he reads through the next tech bro’s idea for pods.
Practical Engineering is a great one for anyone curious about how things work.
Weight lifting is slightly less efficient due to friction and heat generated by pully system, and the vast amount of weight and space needed may limit available storage possibility and scalability. But its simple, and safer.
We lack the materials and engineering necessary to make lifted weight storage systems enter the order of magnitude of energy storage needed to compete with batteries, let alone pumped hydro. It’s just really, really hard to compete with literal megatons of water pumped up a 500 meter slope.
I believe that the plant in question was using something besides Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. This press release mentions LG JH4 which are deffo not LiFePO4. LiFePO4 batteries are far, far safer than other Lithium chemistries, and are now the norm for BESS (not cars tho, since they have lower energy density but better a better lifetime than NMC/NCA). This fire would not have happened with a BESS using LiFePO4 batteries.
Now that batteries with aqueous sodium-ion chemistries are becoming available, we should begin transitioning pre-LiFePO4 sites to those wholesale. Aqueous sodium-ion batteries should be even safer than LiFePO4, and while they have kinda shit energy density, they’re still fine for grid storage.
EDIT: correction, LiFePO4 batteries can run away, but they are incapable of autoignition.
It’s important to remember that engineers and scientists are having to fight with 3-4 competing forces: efficiency, density, safety, cost. Even if we have a promising idea it just may not yet be technologically feasible to make the switch over yet. LiFePO4 definitely hits the Goldilocks zone where it gives up some density / weight / charge speed (if I recall) for longevity and overall safety. I think they’ve found a solid niche in home storage for sure. I personally prefer those cells over lithium ion for that reason… and honestly was using lead acid prior to that simply because lithium ion came with too many risks.
LiFePO4 batteries are safer and harder to ignite, but they can still go into thermal runaway and can burn. If a fire started in a battery that big, it would still spread and it wouldn’t be practical to extinguish it.
You’re correct that they can enter thermal runaway, they just can’t autoignite. I really suspect that if this site has been using LiFePO4 cells instead of NMC, it wouldn’t have gone up like it did. 3000 MWh of NMC cells sounds absolutely bugnuts crazy to me.
… 3000-megawatt Moss Landing energy storage …
“megawatt” is not a quantity of energy.
Also, are those battery fires more frequent // important than petrol ones ?Also, are those battery fires more frequent // important than petrol ones ?
Petrol fires use oxygen from the air. They can be extinguished by removing the oxygen: covering it in firefighting foam, or displacing it with CO2, for example.
Batteries contain both their fuel and their oxidizer together in one case. You can’t remove the oxygen. So long as they are hot enough, they keep burning, even if they are underwater. The only way to extinguish them is to remove the heat. Which is practically impossible.
Good point.
And so, i would expect large accidents in tunnels in next decades that will prompt laws & regulation to restrict electric vehicles from (access to) tunnels …
No. And the petrol fires are many and ongoing in everyone’s cars. Also large petrol fires are not always reported in the US. I can think of one specific instance that tho’ a major fire, producing a wall of smoke, yet I could only find one news report of it’s existence.
How is a Megawatt not a measure of energy?
It’s power, not energy.
MegaWattHours is energy for example.
And power is a measure of energy over time.
Yes, and? Measuring an energy storage facility in terms of power is not a good idea.
If you asked someone how big a water tank was and they said “five liters per second”, would that be useful?
It would be very useful if you were asking the right question. The storage facility from the article has a 750 MW storage capacity (energy) which it can deliver at a max output (power) of 3000 MW/hr Power plant and storage facility capacities are measured in MW since what they are intended to do is supply power at a steady rate. Who cares if you can store a billion TW of power if you can only output it at 5mW/h. It does no good if you can’t get it out. Supply is what we really care about here.
True to your name, you’re using those backwards. You’re thinking of MW hours per hour, or just MW. Put differently, MW is a rate, MWh is a quantity.
deleted by creator
Lol didn’t see the name 😂
This guy gets it.
We shouldn’t have either.
Per the AP, “There were fires at the Vistra plant in 2021 and 2022”.
Agreed, yet, you know that, since this is a new technology in development, it is more subject to accidents. What’s more is that media are more inclined to report any even small accidents about it. So, finally, information and news here are not necessarily representative of the whole reality.
Thanks anyway for this striking breaking news i didn’t know about 😌
Enlighten us with better approach. Also there are battery types that are less flammable.
Edit: is -> us
Here’s another article from AP: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/17/g-s1-43268/fire-battery-storage-plant-california-moss-landing
