Re:Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas ...
by macspoofing on Monday April 08, 2019 @03:14PM
(#19608172)
>This is simply untrue.
No. That's the entire problem. There are no batteries that can scale to city needs.
What you're citing is a completely different use case. There is very good case to be made that battery farms can replace gas-burning power ONLY when they are used as a way to quickly scale power production. Battery farms also make sense to even out supply and demand (i.e. serve as a place to dump excess power, or provide stored energy when supply temporarily drops).
ALL new battery projects are around those two use cases. And that's great!! It isn't nothing, and it's a great technology solution for a very real need.
HOWEVER, it's one thing for a battery farm to supply power for seconds or minutes in specific cases, it's another for a battery farm to provide hours or days of constant supply ... every day. Not only is it expensive because you need to over-provision your generation and storage capacity (i.e. in order to provide power for 1 hour at night, you actually need solar to produce 1.5-2 hours of surplus energy). Worse, because wind/solar power generation output is affected by seasons, you'll actually have to over-provision just to match peak seasonal output, meaning that in-season, you invested in infrastructure that's sitting around doing nothing. Then there are also major durability issues. Current battery tech is simply not durable enough and will never be durable enough to solely backup wind and solar in a cost effective way. We're talking about batteries needing to operate for days and weeks when wind and solar output dips (or drops to nothing) at huge scale.
This is why no nation is actually replacing any nuclear or fossil-fuel-based power with SOLELY wind/solar+battery solution.
There are other issues that are typically glossed over, such as the fact that solar, wind and battery tech are typically environmentally destructive to make (requiring mining, and complex refining processes), and are very hard and expensive to recycle.
It's possible that some battery-tech breakthrough occurs and changes this (and the article references tech like using surplus power to create molten-salt to use as a storage medium), but the reality is that today, we don't have the technology that is anywhere close to cost-effective, and it isn't clear if there will be one in the next X years.
No. That's the entire problem. There are no batteries that can scale to city needs.
What you're citing is a completely different use case. There is very good case to be made that battery farms can replace gas-burning power ONLY when they are used as a way to quickly scale power production. Battery farms also make sense to even out supply and demand (i.e. serve as a place to dump excess power, or provide stored energy when supply temporarily drops).
ALL new battery projects are around those two use cases. And that's great!! It isn't nothing, and it's a great technology solution for a very real need.
HOWEVER, it's one thing for a battery farm to supply power for seconds or minutes in specific cases, it's another for a battery farm to provide hours or days of constant supply ... every day. Not only is it expensive because you need to over-provision your generation and storage capacity (i.e. in order to provide power for 1 hour at night, you actually need solar to produce 1.5-2 hours of surplus energy). Worse, because wind/solar power generation output is affected by seasons, you'll actually have to over-provision just to match peak seasonal output, meaning that in-season, you invested in infrastructure that's sitting around doing nothing. Then there are also major durability issues. Current battery tech is simply not durable enough and will never be durable enough to solely backup wind and solar in a cost effective way. We're talking about batteries needing to operate for days and weeks when wind and solar output dips (or drops to nothing) at huge scale.
This article goes into some details:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-re...
This is why no nation is actually replacing any nuclear or fossil-fuel-based power with SOLELY wind/solar+battery solution.
There are other issues that are typically glossed over, such as the fact that solar, wind and battery tech are typically environmentally destructive to make (requiring mining, and complex refining processes), and are very hard and expensive to recycle.
It's possible that some battery-tech breakthrough occurs and changes this (and the article references tech like using surplus power to create molten-salt to use as a storage medium), but the reality is that today, we don't have the technology that is anywhere close to cost-effective, and it isn't clear if there will be one in the next X years.