Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.
Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.
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.
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
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.
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.
I commend your faith in … ehm… the human spirit we’ll say.
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.
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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.
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.