Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

Punx0r said:
With a little practice and some past data, it is not beyond the wit of man to reliably predict the sunshine/wind/waves a few hours in advance. Bringing gas peaker plants online occasionally might be inefficient utilisation of them, but it's practical and achievable.
if you looked at the data link, you would have been able to see they already had many of their gas peaker plants running, but they were not prepared for the near total drop in wind and the exceptional sudden demand peak.
Remember up to this point rhey were already generating 5-10 GW surplus to demand.

Punx0r said:
....Your position seems to be "if 100% RE can't be implemented immediately, with complete reliability, no change in required usage patterns and no increase in cost then why bother with RE at all?" ...
i suggest you stick to predicting future weather patterns etc, ..because your mind reading skill fall short on accuracy !.
You obviously have no clue of "my position" , or my interest in RE power implementation .

Punx0r said:
....As any technology matures it becomes more effective, more efficient, cheaper and more reliable. It's continuous refinement and improvement.
Going forward a decade or three, stationary storage for $10 or maybe even $1 kWh is likely.
Aaahh, now your prediction skills are getting a little carried away also.!
Most of these technical development / cost / time relationships, tend to follow an "Exponential" curve..an bit like "Moores Law" ..they reduce in cost by 50% every few years, as capacity and sales increase ....up to a point where they become "commodity" items.
THEN.. normal market forces take over..Supply vs Demand. ..and that is where the price hits a floor totally unrelated to quality, efficiency, reliability, production costs , material costs , etc.... its just how many are available vs how many are in demand.
They used to say Computers would become ultra cheap, and to some extent they are cheaper than when they were first introduced, but they are not any cheaper today than they were 20 years ago.
How about TVs ? ..they are better , bigger, different, but i bet you paid more for your last TV than you did 20 yrs ago.
More relative, those little AA batteries, are they any cheaper now than they were 30-40 years ago ??
NO ! ...because the market dictates the price,..not the production costs etc.
If batteries ( or PV panels) are a solution to RE power, then there is going to be a very, very, large demand.
Sendler has pointed out a few times the scale of battery capacity required to support a RE grid system, and how impossible that supply task would be, ...so think how that may affect your $1/kWh price.
And the battery manufacturers will also have their own idea of costs for a viable business plan.
 
billvon said:
... New processes that allow batteries to be made faster and with less material will speed the price drop. New batteries that will replace lithium ion for stationary storage will do even more to speed it.
OR.. new technology could set us back up the development /reliability/price curves !!
...as Lithium did to batteries
....as EVs have done to automobiles.

billvon said:
..And in 1910 there was no production capacity to turn out tens of millions of cars.
.... The world makes 100 million cars a year; a car is a lot bigger, more complex and expensive to make than a 60kwhr battery pack.
Mr Musk may disagree with you at the moment ! :wink:
But there has been 100 years of learning, development, and mistakes , to bring us to 100m car capacity.
You can quickly increase production, but unless you have the correct product, materials , and processes, ..all you do is make more of a bad product.
( and that is from experience of having to be involved in scrapping 100 million bad products due to a rushed production start up ! :shock: )
 
Hillhater said:
OR.. new technology could set us back up the development /reliability/price curves !!
...as Lithium did to batteries
....as EVs have done to automobiles.
Nope. Basic storage technology that doesn't confer any new advantages - just increases costs - will not be competitive and will fail. Economics 101.

Lithium ion batteries (and their cousins) are now technologically adequate, and nothing more than economies of scale will drive its reduction in cost. New technologies that do not deliver cheaper $/wh will fail, because no one wants worse technology that costs more. New technologies that _do_ deliver cheaper $/wh will succeed.

billvon said:
..And in 1910 there was no production capacity to turn out tens of millions of cars.
.... The world makes 100 million cars a year; a car is a lot bigger, more complex and expensive to make than a 60kwhr battery pack.
Mr Musk may disagree with you at the moment ! :wink:
Somehow I think Mr. Musk would agree that making a lot of cars quickly is really, really hard!

But there has been 100 years of learning, development, and mistakes , to bring us to 100m car capacity.
Indeed! And cars have gotten better (safer, faster, more efficient, more maneuverable, more reliable) every step of the way while staying about the same price in real dollars.
 
Hillhater said:
They used to say Computers would become ultra cheap, and to some extent they are cheaper than when they were first introduced, but they are not any cheaper today than they were 20 years ago.
In 1996, a Gateway Solo was $6200 in adjusted dollars. 166MHz pentium, 24MB RAM, 100MB hard drive, 12 inch display.
Today a Dell XPS13 is $900 for a 1.6GHz i5, 8GB ram, 256GB SSD hard drive, 13 inch display with 4x the resolution. 3 times the battery life. Much smaller and lighter. And 7 times cheaper in real dollars.

http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/04/15/how-much-a-computer-cost-the-year-you-were-born/7/
How about TVs ? ..they are better , bigger, different, but i bet you paid more for your last TV than you did 20 yrs ago.
Got a 42" LCD TV about 12 years ago. $4000. Today at Best Buy I can get a 55" 4K TV for $429.
More relative, those little AA batteries, are they any cheaper now than they were 30-40 years ago ??
Nope. But most people don't use them any more. Most people use lithium ion batteries that cost far less per use than disposable batteries.
If batteries ( or PV panels) are a solution to RE power, then there is going to be a very, very, large demand.
They are certainly a solution right now. Why would anything change in the future? Uptake will be driven by price, and thus will follow a curve similar to PV.
 
Hillhater, so what if Germany has excess capacity during normal times to account for peaks? We may be used to running a thermal-based grid at 95+% capacity, but that may have to change and RE will require a larger over-capacity to account for variability in the weather. This is either a necessary evil (reduced in utilisation efficiency of the RE generators), or that excess power can be exported to other parts of Europe. On average across a large geographical area there's likely to be a surplus offset by a demand somewhere. If not, the excess goes into storage or variable industrial loads optimised to use power when it's cheap. Likewise, if power is short, those loads are reduced.

It is not complicated. I worked at an industrial facility a few years ago and during the couple of months in the middle of winter, the place was on warning that it might it might not be able to run during the evening peak demand hours (6-8pm IIRC). The procedure involved getting a phone call or not in the afternoon saying "you can't run tonight". Well, we could, but the contracted financial penalty was huge. It disrupted the work schedule but was manageable. The determiner was how cold the weather turned out to be and the corresponding demand for domestic heating. This was on a reliable grid powered almost solely by coal, gas and nuclear.

I get you're angry about whatever is going on in Australia, but it's the politicians that are causing the problems with your power supply. Germany (and other countries) appear to be doing much better, yet the technology is the same.



sendler2112 said:
Makes perfect sense to some people here.

No one is claiming 18650 cells will ever be $1/kWh. Of course they won't - the metal in the cans is worth more than that. We're talking industrial or grid-scale batteries of different construction/chemistry, like the flow batteries I already linked to.
 
Only a few years ago a microscope was made capable of imaging single atoms in materials.

It's already enabled dozens of material tech improvements, and is the vision system needed for atom level precision in mfg.

This is the exponential age where AI tech develops better AI tech and we leverage neural network self designing and self learning technology to develop rapid mfg of atom perfect batterkes and capacitors.

Keep in mind, with nothing more than beach sand and atmospheric CO2 as input materials, if you have atom perfect mfg you can make perfect graphene and glass insulation followed by graphene and beat the energy density of gasoline with a device that could potentially last centuries if not millenia. The machine that prints it only requires light on its solar cells and to be located on a sand source.

The machine making the solar cells would only need a sand and clay(clays with metals are extremely common) and sunlight on its panels to generate more panels.

Not to mention, when a solar cell can be designed and assembled with atom perfect mfg, it will likely be possible to achieve over 90% light conversion efficiency, meaning even very poor solar radiation areas will be fine, and sunny areas will only need a few square meters of panel area to feed all EV transportation and be a net grid provider (but my hunch is grids won't remain a thing due to lack of need like old phone lines, possible exceptions being specialty industrial areas).
 
Punx0r said:
Hillhater, so what if Germany has excess capacity during normal times to account for peaks? We may be used to running a thermal-based grid at 95+% capacity, but that may have to change and RE will require a larger over-capacity to account for variability in the weather.....
how much overcapacity do you suggest for when the wind dies at that 6pm peak demand as it did in germany on Oct 18th?
.... or how much storage capacity do you estimate would be needed ?
and the more capacity and storage you install, the more your power costs increase ..thats why businesses move overseas .!
Demand Management ?
Try telling an aluminium smelter, or a steel works, they need to power down for a few hours,..or any serious process industry . ( you know many industries work 24/7 for a reason).. thats why businesses move overseas .!
 
Modern factories soon enough will all be built with all the energy storage needed to operate cast in some super cheap $/Wh long lasting geopolymer, and the whole building and parking areas will both all be roofed in high efficiency solar cells charging that basement.

I get that incredibly heavy power consumers like data centers and smelters may have to still get fed by some off site solar farm and its energy storage batteries and inverters.
 
Hillhater said:
thats why businesses move overseas .!
China is making more correct moves with future energy and will be the indisputable superpower to dwarf the rest of the planet when it owns all of the rights to GenIV. Fortunately Canada is at least working with the Moltex SSR people to keep that out of their hands.
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Terapower held out as long as they could to try to find a more neutral country but in the end they too have been relegated to starting in China it seems.
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http://terrapower.com/updates/
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Hillhater said:
how much overcapacity do you suggest for when the wind dies at that 6pm peak demand as it did in germany on Oct 18th?

This is only a "problem" you imagined. In reality there was zero problem at that time. Quite likely that short "spike"(?) was some pump storage plant, maybe one in Luxembourg or Astria that belong to German operators but are considered imports.

We had a grad grid realibility test during the particuar eclipse in 2015 that introduced a power gradient similar to power gradients with more than 3x times the installation of PV Systems on "normal" sunny days.

img_001073_00.jpg


Our grid was able to handle that quite well.

.... or how much storage capacity do you estimate would be needed ?
and the more capacity and storage you install, the more your power costs increase ..thats why businesses move overseas .!

Up to around 80% if RE not so much extra storage capacity is needed if you have strong and large grid and highly flexible gas power plants.

I assume we take that steps next in the next 15-20 years.

Demand Management ?
Try telling an aluminium smelter, or a steel works, they need to power down for a few hours,..or any serious process industry . ( you know many industries work 24/7 for a reason).. thats why businesses move overseas .!

For some it works, for others not.

Demand management has potential in heating, AC and other cooling processes, slow charging of EV or electrolysis for example...
 
liveforphysics said:
it will likely be possible to achieve over 90% light conversion efficiency,...


unlikely because of Shockley Queisser limit, but 20" efficiency is very fine for solar power plants (photosyntheses usually is around 0.1% to 1%)
 
Hillhater said:
Go study economics, ..then we can discuss the relevance of energy costs to countries and individuals...


I assume it is much cheaper than paying the Price for a +2K or +4K world.

In Germany we sit on a aweet spot North of the alps.

There are no hurricans and lant growths will propably improve in Germany in a +2K world, it would lower heat cost much mor than it would rise cost for AC (which could be supported with cheap solar "overproduction") and it wouldn't hurt most of our toursimen either.
There will be more flooding but we already built infrastructure for that.

I assume other countries will be hurt much much more.

So "we" also watch...
 
sendler2112 said:
The sulfur/ air battery in the link has a calendar life of 60 days.

It's a proof of concept, not a finished product ready to be commercialised. If it doesn't work out, no matter. There are dozens of other equally promising projects on the go at the moment. The odds are that at least one of them will pan out.

Hillhater said:
how much overcapacity do you suggest for when the wind dies at that 6pm peak demand as it did in Germany on Oct 18th?

As much as is found to be necessary using empirical dating gathered as the percentage of RE in the grid gradually increases.

Manufacturing can't "move overseas" if energy cost is similar all over the world. China is pushing RE more than anyone.

I don't know about the big ones, but I've seen examples of smelters that operate only at night to take advantage of cheaper, off-peak electricity. There was a big smelter in the UK a long time ago that had its own hydroelectric dam. Many things are possible.
 
India is forecasting 8% per year GDP and energy growth requirement for the next 20 years. Predicted maximum possible installations of new renewables will triple the current total in 10 years to 240GW. But this still leaves a shortfall of 3X and will actually be a lesser percentage of overall electricity than it is now despite the huge solar and wind build out. 300 Million people in India currently have NO access to electricity. What will make up the 3X deficit if fossil fuel is to be reduced?
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https://youtu.be/yGhEdcwXxdE
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23131594_1491041944308246_832638697677854573_n.jpg

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Your point is that if a country with a very large population rapidly develops and so dramatically increases its electricity demands over a short period, it will have a shortfall unless a large amount of extra generating capacity is installed? How is this is a failure of RE? It's a situation that requires huge investment in generating capacity *of any type*. Nuclear certainly won't save the day in the timescale you're suggesting: If they started planning it now, the first reactor might be online in 20 years... India is also making a big push on solar because it's cheap, simple to build (would you trust an Indian designed/built nuclear reactor?) and they have lots of sunshine.

Frankly, if I lived in rural India and was going to get a basic electricity supply for the first time, it would most likely be a solar panel on my roof and a battery. They want to charge a cell phone, number a few LED lights at night and (maybe) run a small TV. This basic system could easily be grown as affluence and demand increases. Installing a grid to reach all these areas would be a gargantuan task by comparison to distributed solar.
 
sendler2112 said:
What will make up the 3X deficit if fossil fuel is to be reduced?
More renewables plus storage, used to build out microgrids. India is already building millions of solar lighting and cooking systems for rural Indians. That's easier to build out than the infrastructure for a big coal plant with big transmission lines to rural areas. (And will kill a lot fewer people.)
 
"...A new report by Indian solar market analysts Bridge to India has projected that the country’s solar sector will grow by 9.4 GW in 2017, making it the third-largest solar market in the world behind China and the U.S., overtaking Japan to claim third spot..."

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/08/14/india-in-line-for-9-4-gw-solar-additions-in-2017-says-bridge-to-india/
 
sendler2112 said:
The projected maximum possible renewable build out over 10 years to 240GW is already quoted on the chart. What else?
Every such estimate here in the US has been dramatically and woefully wrong; they always underestimate. So the answer is to just do it, and ignore the people who say it can't be done.
 
sendler2112 said:
The projected maximum possible renewable build out over 10 years to 240GW is already quoted on the chart. What else?

It's a shame we can't convert negativity and pessimism to electrical energy...
 
sendler2112 said:
Punx0r said:
It's a shame we can't convert negativity and pessimism to electrical energy...
Or Wishful thinking. Or objectivity and pragmatism.
Fortunately we don't have to; we are currently converting tens of gigawatts of solar energy into electricity.
 
Cephalotus said:
liveforphysics said:
it will likely be possible to achieve over 90% light conversion efficiency,...


unlikely because of Shockley Queisser limit, but 20" efficiency is very fine for solar power plants (photosyntheses usually is around 0.1% to 1%)

No disagreement that 20% is already plenty, but FYI:

"Germany remains a global leader in research and plant construction for photovoltaics, and Fraunhofer ISE has recently set several records for solar cell efficiencies: the world record for multicrystalline silicon solar cells at 22.3 percent efficiency, a 25.8 percent efficiency rate for a monocrystalline cell based on TOPCon technology, and – exceeding the limits of silicon as a material – 31.3 percent efficiency for a tandem solar cell comprising a III-V multi-junction solar cell on a silicon cell. With its III-V multi-junction concentrator solar cell, the institute also achieved the overall world record for photovoltaic efficiency at 46.1 percent."


Thats a lab concentrated solar cell and it's likely cooled on LN2 to set that 46.1%, so totally impractical today to use in a panel, but it is an indicator the physics work out to convert at least 46.1% in some conditions with some structures humans were able to construct today with our caveman mfg capabilities.

When we can mfg atom perfect cells, the 33% Shockley-limit becomes utterly irrelevant as it applies to a single junction cell alone. With atom perfect mfg, we have however many junctions it takes, each optimized for harvesting the wavelengths the other junctions ahead missed.

While it doesn't really matter for this conversation, you may also want to re-check plant efficiency, a handful do +10%-13% at the full plant surface area level, and incredibly >95% in quantum yield for photons that land in the chlorophyll receptor locations.

When we impose limits on what's possible today, it's like a caveman chipping away some rock to make a spear and you tell him he has all the capabilities and materials needed to make a smart phone. Even after you show him the smart phone he still may not believe it's possible for a man to make. Yet still today we enjoy ubiquitous smart phone use, despite coming from a lineage of no-vision fools who think chipping away at rocks or burning things is the limit of mans capabilities and resources.
 
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