Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

Tesla seem to be still testing the big battery.
Yesterday they discharged at 70MW for 1.0 hr and 50 mins continuous, which is 128 MWh.
Looks like a capacity test (129MWh rated)
Unfortunately, i dont have access to see the recharge data, but 10 hrs later they discharged again at 30 MW for an hour.
 
You'd think so, but we also experience 50-80mph wind a couple times a year and that makes things difficult for solar panels.
At least in the valley, where all the energy useage is.

Not to say they couldn't use a couple brain cells and build some aerodynamic solar panels, but instead, we get projects like this here:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/delta-solar-ruins

But nonetheless, the point i was getting at is that our energy consumption is rather high due to our climate.. you cannot currently alternative energy your way out of a problem like this. Only once energy becomes super expensive, do the masses even start looking for creative solutions we are thinking of here, sadly.

billvon said:
neptronix said:
Well, that's how most people live here, from what i observe. At 4,500 feet, not only does it get hot, but the sun is also so intense in the middle of summer that a white person can get burned in 30 minutes ( and it's mostly white people here ). And actually summer highs are closer to 95-105, these days. If you are lucky, it might cool down to 75 degrees at 3am in the middle of summer.

As for the snow.. you measure your snow in inches, not feet like we do.
Sounds like an excellent place for solar. I've spoken to several people who have gone off-grid in such places and had great success. At 4500 feet solar radiation is considerably stronger, which means more power for less $$. And with the dropping cost of solar, vertical arrays for winter are becoming more popular, to avoid issues with snow clearing.
 
If there was ever a renewable energy I respect it would have to be hydro-electricty, of course South Australia is a great example that would kill to be able to have a hydro-electricty dam somewhere in its state but it just can't, but it is rumored to be looking at the idea of concreting the crap out of one of its lovely treed areas around the coast and filling it up with sea-water for a mini-hydro setup.
Anyway, I am surprised when following the news just how frequently these things run out of water even in Tasmania or Africa.

One extra thing to note, only 8% of Malawi are lucky enough to have electricity, so already not enough.
Malawi suffers blackouts as drought exposes 98% reliance on hydro power
Shire river, which generates almost all of the country’s power, has fallen to critical levels, leaving major cities struggling

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/08/malawi-blackouts-drought-hydro-power?utm_content=buffer57003&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

One thing I have realized that helps hide the problems if Australian electricty prices is the fact a lot of NSW and QLD electricty recently got privatised thus when renewable energy subsidies came in at the same time people didn't blame subsidies they just assumed it was the purely just privatisation.
Victoria has been fully privatised since the 1990s from the Kennet government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Kennett#Privatisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Electricity_Commission_of_Victoria#Demise
And electricity prices never changed, the only started to go up in recent years and its all the fault of renewable energy subsidies which completely pervert the free market and encourage coal to be shut down as its more profitable.

Its so obvious subsidies have caused epic perversion of the electricity market because AGL refuse to sell Liddel Power-station to anyone else they only want to shut it down and destroy it so it can never be used again, a normal business would at least try to find a supposedly 'sucker buyer' but not AGL, it wants to shut it down and blow it up.
https://youtu.be/Z81hPg-vma0
[youtube]Z81hPg-vma0[/youtube]
https://twitter.com/SkyNewsAust/status/942210444223062016
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/backing-selfinterest-while-trying-to-look-virtuous-thats-agl/news-story/aad81fe87790d1826ef6e3720afff727
And let’s be upfront: the closure of the Liddell plant in the Hunter Valley (capacity 2000 megawatts) is all about making even more money by further squeezing dispatchable power sources, many owned by AGL. It’s the “last man standing” strategy, which is known to many wily business people.

There is absolutely no doubt that when AGL purchased the Liddell plant (and other assets) from the NSW government in 2014, the company had no intention of closing it down in 2022. In fact, the plans that the previous management had to extend the life of the plant were one of the attractions of the purchase.

But a change of management has meant a change of strategy and cashing in on government policy that puts emissions reductions and subsidisation of renewable energy ahead of electricity reliability and affordability. (Recall that the Renewable Energy Target runs to 2030.)


While subsidies from the federal government are supposedly coming to an end there is a new more insane government that has found a way to restart the madness and that's state-level subsidies.
Dan Andrews is now creating a state energy Renewable Energy Target with state-level granted subsidies to deform and pervert the market to new levels so that its more advantageous to shutdown coal-power stations and hope the wind can provide electricity and if it doesn't then buy electricity off the spot market at around $450 a MWh or from diesel generators.

The Yallourn brown coal power station in the Latrobe Valley could close early under Victoria’s renewable energy scheme, as part of which the Andrews Labor government has just launched reverse auctions to underwrite $1.3 billion of new wind and solar by 2020.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/yallourn-coal-plant-faces-threat-of-early-closure-under-andrews-ret/news-story/a7735edcd63be47905d1c75e13dc603f

The only equally as dumb clueless thing Dan Andrew has done is when he suddenly tripled the royalty price of mining coal for Hazelwood because hes desperate for money and was so clueless about the electricity market that he then gave a rant/warning to Hazelwoods owners daring them to increase electricity prices because of it, not understanding that they would make more money if the owners of Hazelwood just shut down to make electricity more scarce and profitable from their other power-stations. Hazelwood was doing the Victorian government/people a big favour being open and Dan Andrews simply had no idea because he only gets his views of the world from Facebook renewable energy memes or things of that nature.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victorias-own-mining-tax-to-triple-as-treasurer-gouges-brown-coal-for-revenue-20160422-gocymk.html

cac32b32b8d226bfe1d9e2a8d6f4_oo.jpg

billvon said:
TheBeastie said:
Sure but the carbon cycle is a bit of red herring in the face of having a population of 10billion people and because carbon is the 4th most abundant element in the universe after Oxygen.
Definitely true; much of our planet is made of carbon. And if we as a society decide to leave it in the ground rather than putting it into the air by the gigaton, then we're good.
So its no surprise humans are spewing so many billions of tons of carbon dioxide from breath from our bodies.
Acid rain doesn't come from co2 but from other emissions from burning fossil fuels like nitrogen oxide which can be converted into co2 with a catalytic converter
Actually, the bigger problem comes from SO2 which cannot be converted to CO2 by a catalytic converter. SO2 plus water becomes sulfuric acid, which you generally don't want in your lungs.
Everyone should know there are plenty of SO2/Sulfur dioxide scrubber technology on coal power-stations that clean all that stuff up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue-gas_desulfurization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrubber
And there are a constant stream of new scrubber technologies coming that make it even more efficient https://www.wired.com/2016/03/new-tech-give-coal-scrubbing-renewables-ready/

billvon said:
So grow grass under them. Grasses process far more CO2 per pound than trees do, and they are quite happy under solar arrays (check out any solar farm that's been there for a while.)
This whole insane argument about trees etc giving up all their CO2 must stop, where the hell do you think coal and oil come from? The very well known fact is that it comes from prehistoric dead vegetation from the energy that plants absorbed from the sun millions of years ago, they very reason why coal and oil exists is that plants absorb and trap and store co2, god help us all if we can't get past that.
Accuse me of conspiracy theories but please if you can't accept coal/oil come dead plants/forests stored in the ground than that is a really big problem of being in denial. And yes Solarfarms are epically evil in doing that, the fact they are building a huge solar farm between two koala inhabited forests in Queensland that could easily be one big forest is insane and destructive to the environment.

The environmental destruction of solar farms is epic from so many perspectives, I think its incredible people don't accept REAL WORLD DATA on the worlds most expensive most advanced solar farms, you gotta get in the real world.

Then there is the epic greenhouse gases the manufacturing of these solar panels and green tech cause the creation of that completely blows away co2, if not for the fact they are 1000's of times more warming then its the epic lifetime they are expected to stay in the air like 3,200 years, that is abhorrent amount of time. If you guys actually cared about GHG you wouldn't support solar at all.

ccgg.MLO.co2.1.none.discrete.2015.2017.png
hats.MLO.sf6.7.none.monthly.2015.2017.png
2015-2017 data on both greenhouse gases. Notice how CO2 drops significantly during the months of the northern hemisphere summer via photosynthesis and SF6 just goes higher and higher, not even a hint of SF6 dropping. SF6 really is 23,900 times more potent than co2 and has an incredible atmospheric lifetime of 3,200 years, you can see it in the relentless going higher charts, far more than co2.
Look for your self https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=MLO&program=hats&type=ts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_trifluoride#Greenhouse_gas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride#Greenhouse_gas
https://youtu.be/v6uVnyjTb58?t=12m48s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
There are so many flaws in Solarfarms aside from epic environmental vandalism like this video points out https://youtu.be/EJ8L9EAWF3E
The epic size for the tiny amount of power and there is almost no place where they are being put where they don't displace life and thus crucial co2 sequestration https://phys.org/news/2016-12-solar-panels-repay-energy-debt.html
That other obvious flaw is the time it takes to replace a single conventional power-station.
If you need to build 27 Topaz Solar farms to replace a single power-station as talked about here https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=89002&start=1100#p1337725
Then according to the time it took to build Topaz Solar farm on Wikipedia it took 3 years which is very quick for a solar farm of that size most take 4 years for around that size.
3 x 27 = 81 years to replace a single power-station. If you're going to try and squeeze it into a really tiny amount of land so only a few panels can be installed at once then its probably going to be 4 x 27 = 108 years for a single power-station replacement, it probably increases the larger the farm gets.
Topaz with its $2.4billion cost x 27 = $64 billion to replace a single power-station and that's without an epic battery.
If it takes 108 years for the solar panels to be laid how much time energy and effort will it take to build a decent battery to go with it? So much that no one so far is silly enough to bother trying, I guess we will have to wait for the latest Facebook memes that are full of epic lies to cause the public to vote someone into power to try and build such a mess, but probably getting close to half a trillion dollars? Never mind the money you say? I agree you should be hanging your heads in shame covering that much land that can support real life and co2 sequestration.

Look at the latest 20700 cell life cycles, the fact is if you use these batteries a lot then you're going to find your self needing to replacing them quickly enough. Only 400cycles before the capacity is halved, sure you can use a lot more together so it all lasts longer but the fact is those cells are dying everytime they are used, you can make a nuclear or coal power-station last for over 60 years with enough maintenance. Hazelwood was originally expected to shut down in 2030, it opened in 1964 thus 66years. Only reason it was closed early was because of the reasons I mentioned/articles above https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station

Panasonic_NCR20700A_2c_vs_3c.png



Like I said there are constantly new technologies on the way to deal with CO2 emissions.
Like this new carbonate fuel cell technology that uses fuel cells to capture carbon.
http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/technology/carbon-capture-and-storage/advanced-carbonate-fuel-cell-technology/advanced-carbonate-fuel-cell-technology
Advancing economic and sustainable technologies to capture carbon dioxide from large emitters such as power plants is an important part of ExxonMobil’s suite of research into lower-emissions solutions to mitigate the risk of climate change.

These videos came out a few weeks ago.

https://youtu.be/9i41P68YgOI
[youtube]9i41P68YgOI[/youtube]

https://youtu.be/592lX78baGk
[youtube]592lX78baGk[/youtube]
 
Hillhater said:
Tesla seem to be still testing the big battery.
Yesterday they discharged at 70MW for 1.0 hr and 50 mins continuous, which is 128 MWh.
Looks like a capacity test (129MWh rated)
Unfortunately, i dont have access to see the recharge data, but 10 hrs later they discharged again at 30 MW for an hour.

Actually it's still the testing phase
 
TheBeastie said:
Topaz Solar Farm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm ) in the desert of the USA. 25km2 sized. 2016 generation: 1,265,805MWh (great year 2016, 2017 looks to be a lot lower)
Average power 144MW = (1,265,805MWhours / 8760_hours_in_a_year)
Average coal or nuclear power station: average output 3927MW = (34,402,000MWh / 8760)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paluel_Nuclear_Power_Plant
3927MW / 144MW = 27 times more power.

25km2 x 27 = 675km2 of land covered in solar panels to generate the same average power (if you have a super huge battery as well, that will require a lot of land and a lot of energy to dispose of once used)

Sorry to come again ;) but please stop using old data for solar energy.
The ratio easily achievable today is 1 MWp/ha for solar fixed tilt, and 0.5 MWp/ha for single-axis trackers (the technology mainly used in countries with high irradiation).
In the first case, with average irradiation you can count on 1500 MWh/MWp/year of energy produced, in the second case (trackers) 2000 MWh/MWp/year. With 99.5% availability. For nuclear and coal plants, it's more around 90%.

So it makes for fixed-tilt 150 GWh/km2/year, and for trackers 100 GWh/km2/year, for average sites (for Nevada with high irradiation it will be more).

If you compare to a nuclear or coal plant of 4000 MW with 90% availability, the equivalent production of 31,500 GWh will require between 200 and 300 km2 of land (and probably 50% less for Nevada). Not 675. By the way what surface of land does require a 4000 MW plant for coal mining ?

And concerning the batteries, their size is totally anecdotal : just have a look at the 129 MWh battery of Hornsdale : a few dozen of containers.
https://electrek.co/2017/09/13/tesla-celebration-event-giant-powerpack-site-sept-29/
 
Solar power is ineffective and uneconomical in much of the world.
And In all of the world , it is not continuous , and unreliable, needing storage or thermal backup to ensure continuity of supply. When you factor that in to the costs, and life expectancy, it is a very poor option only made viable by heavy subsidies.
Jil said:
And concerning the batteries, their size is totally anecdotal : just have a look at the 129 MWh battery of Hornsdale : a few dozen of containers.
Certainly battery size is trivial,....... but then again so is its ability to back up the output of RE generators ( see previous post) Batteries of many GWh capacity will be needed to be meaningful in any heavily RE loaded supply system.
 
If you are SO SURE that solar energy has no future, don’t forget to explain it (with better arguments) to the majors like Total, EDF, Eon, and many others, who invest heavily in the sector ;)
 
Jil said:
If you are SO SURE that solar energy has no future, don’t forget to explain it (with better arguments) to the majors like Total, EDF, Eon, and many others, who invest heavily in the sector ;)

Well of course it has been mentioned many times that there are big government incentives encouraging solar right now. The USA has a 30% refund on total system price and and additional $0.03/ kWh feed in incentive for grid scale with full priority to the solar farms. Various states have additional refunds. New York state has an additional 25% refund on top of that for example. And energy prices will skyrocket to a point of good profitability as the price of crude oil also increases over the next 30 years.
.
But it must be said that near future civilization will have vastly less energy at their disposal and having some electricity even just during the day will obviously be much better than nothing.
 
Jil said:
If you are SO SURE that solar energy has no future, don’t forget to explain it (with better arguments) to the majors like Total, EDF, Eon, and many others, who invest heavily in the sector ;)
Oh , im sure it has a future, in some form, on some scale....but not without some supporting system of storage or backup.
Most current solar utility systems are "just add ons" to already established grids which have ample existing generation capacity to cover for the deficiencies.
Companies are not concerned with the future beyond the next financial review or AGM, they inves in projects they can see a profit from in the next 1-5 years.
There is much profit to be made for companies to invest/install Solar and Wind generation currently, but without the incentives and rebates they are not so attractive (See the Spanish experience)
 
Hillhater said:
Oh , im sure it has a future, in some form, on some scale....but not without some supporting system of storage or backup.
I agree with you (not on the scale, but on the needed storage system support)

Hillhater said:
Companies are not concerned with the future beyond the next financial review or AGM, they inves in projects they can see a profit from in the next 1-5 years.
I disagree. Look at Total, one of the major in oil industry, their vision is not a today quick profit, for this purpose the oil and gas business is more than enough. No, they are really looking beyond that, they know that the fossil fuel industry will disappear one (faraway) day, and they just want to be in the game when its successor is starting to rise.

Hillhater said:
There is much profit to be made for companies to invest/install Solar and Wind generation currently, but without the incentives and rebates they are not so attractive (See the Spanish experience)
That's a really good example : the spanish market has collapsed in 2008, because it was backed by direct governement incentives, much too high, and the crisis has ended them brutally. But now Spain is opening again new tenders for solar, because of the unprecendent fall of its price :
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/07/26/spains-auction-allocates-3-5-gw-of-pv-capacity/
 
I found some more data on the Tesla Big Battery charge and discharge testing..
They seem to be trying different charge rates ,..30MW and 70 MW..
DH1TkZ.jpg


I must admit, i dont see what they are testing with this pattern of charge/discharge at varing rates and durations, but i know the demand in the grid is very stressed over this period and this may represent the battery working as FCAS support more than power supply...
Aq3Ur4.png
 
TheBeastie said:
Its so obvious subsidies have caused epic perversion of the electricity market because AGL refuse to sell Liddel Power-station to anyone else they only want to shut it down and destroy it so it can never be used again, a normal business would at least try to find a supposedly 'sucker buyer' but not AGL, it wants to shut it down and blow it up.

That seems a lot like a drug addict cleaning up and flushing his stash down the toilet instead of selling it to someone else.

Except that in the case of pollution, the drugs would continue to harm the addict personally even if he sold them to another drug abuser.

I say flush 'em.
 
Hillhater said:
Solar power is ineffective and uneconomical in much of the world.
Agreed; it will never be economical in Antarctica. But for most places where people live, it's pretty effective.
Batteries of many GWh capacity will be needed to be meaningful in any heavily RE loaded supply system.
Yep. Fortuntely we now have plants capable of building that much battery storage. A plant in Nevada will be building 35 gigawatt-hours worth of batteries every year - and that's just one plant in one state.
 
Your electric bill should show you how many kWh you are using per month. If there is a big rebate, you have a clear view to the equator angle to mount them, and it is sunny where you live, you should go for it.
 
solarbeam said:
Can anyone let me know that is 5kw solar system perfect for a single Aussie family? How much power it generates and how much it costs?
Depends on:

Where you are (sunnier areas generate more energy, of course)
How much power you use (shown on your power bill)
How your rate structure is set up (tiered? time of use? flat rate?)
What deals you can get from local companies
What tax breaks, rebates etc you can get from your utility or government.

In general, here in the US you can get solar for about $3 a watt installed. A watt in my area will generate about 5 watt-hours a day on average over the course of a year. So my system, which is 9.88 kilowatts, will generate about 50 kilowatt-hours a day ideally; in actual practice with dirt, inverter inefficiences etc it generates about 38 kwhr a day. That usually zeroes out our bill, so we pay only a $10 a month minimum charge. I'd expect to pay $30,000 in upfront costs for such a system today and get $9000 back in the form of a tax credit, for a net of $21,000.
 
billvon said:
Batteries of many GWh capacity will be needed to be meaningful in any heavily RE loaded supply system.
Yep. Fortuntely we now have plants capable of building that much battery storage. A plant in Nevada will be building 35 gigawatt-hours worth of batteries every year - and that's just one plant in one state.
do you know how much... "that much".. Is likely to be ?
Australia alone would likely need several hundred GWh, ..Germany many times that,...USA, ???....China ????
...and the Nevada plant already has its capacity sold out for the planned EV production. Other plants have yet to be confirmed. 24M have anounced a battery factory in Australia to produce cells for Solar Storage, ...
.....its annual capacity ? ..1GWh .!!
There are also serious doubts as to the availability of some key materials required for large scale of battery manufacture.
 
Hillhater said:
do you know how much... "that much".. Is likely to be ?
Refer to the previous post for the gwhr of batteries that one plant, in one state, will build every year.
Australia alone would likely need several hundred GWh,
So one plant would take six years to build that amount. Other countries would have to build more than one factory.
...and the Nevada plant already has its capacity sold out for the planned EV production.
Good! Storage is storage. And when you tell investors that a plant's production is sold out for years, then they throw money at people who want to build similar plants. So in ten years we will have ten such factories - and could outfit Australia in a year.
Other plants have yet to be confirmed. 23M have anounced a battery factory in Australia to produce cells for Solar Storage, ...
.....its annual capacity ? ..1GWh .!!
Sounds like they'd have to build 35 of them, then!
There are also serious doubts as to the availability of some key materials required for large scale of battery manufacture.
Like what?
 
Hillhater said:
do you know how much... "that much".. Is likely to be ?

Here we go again. People don't want to be bothered by such information. World electrical consumption is about 21,000 TWh per year.
.
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/electricity-domestic-consumption-data.html
.
57 TWh/ day. It's dark at least half the time. 30 Twh of storage will help. 1,000 GigaFactories? And a cornucopian supply of raw materials which we continue to dig up and process by the Billions of tons even after crude oil hits $150/ barrel. Just to replace electricity which is a fraction of the total energy we eventually need to replace.
 
billvon said:
There are also serious doubts as to the availability of some key materials required for large scale of battery manufacture.
Like what?
Cobalt ?
....Trent Mell of First Cobalt, a Toronto-based mining company, said: “Cobalt is tricky because of the scarcity of supply. There aren’t a lot of producers. We’re relying on more discoveries. It’s out there: we’ve just got to find it.”

The First Cobalt boss added that his company was currently confident of making discoveries in Idaho and Ontario. Investors see a chance of cashing in on the mineral’s key role: the price of shares in the Canadian firm has risen from C$0.06 to C$0.76 in the past year.
This is the mother of supply chain headaches, and one hi-tech car manufacturers and electronics firms could do without. At the heart of the global cobalt trade is Glencore. The metals and mining giant produces almost a third (28,300 tonnes) of the world’s annual supply. As much as 65% of this global supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where cobalt production has fallen this year because of the unstable political situation. This sparked a 90% jump in the price of cobalt to a peak of $61,000 a tonne earlier this month.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/29/electric-cars-battery-manufacturing-cobalt-mining

Lithium..
https://www.ft.com/content/90d65356-4a9d-11e7-919a-1e14ce4af89b
 
Cobalt is only needed if specific energy density matters. Mature grid storage cells use no cobalt.

No shortage of lithium, but for grid where energy density isn't important, many other ions store energy through changing oxidation states just fine, Mg++ as an example.
 
liveforphysics said:
Cobalt is only needed if specific energy density matters. Mature grid storage cells use no cobalt.

No shortage of lithium, but for grid where energy density isn't important, many other ions store energy through changing oxidation states just fine, Mg++ as an example.

Who knows what chemistry may be used for future large scale grid batteries,..but the current "standard" seems to be Teslas PowerPack NMC chemistry... (actually using Samsung's INR equivalent in the "BFB"). Or LG's equivalent.
....Domestic Power Wall packs were also reported to have changed to NMC rather than the NCA originally used.

Lithium ?...as the man said, no shortage of raw material, but the mining , processing , etc is limited.
 
billvon said:
sendler2112 said:
How long does it take to make 30 TWh of storage?
8.4 years with 50 factories similar to Nevada's.
...Or, 4.2 years with 100 similar factories ! :roll:
....assuming they are not all dedicated to EV battery production, which is the main driver of battery production plant proposals so far .
 
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