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Re:A molten salt storage solution using sodium hydroxide by ggm on Thursday December 09, 2021 @05:09PM (#29503653)
I think you're right to the losses, but didn't consider the surplus energy side of things. We now have an oversupply/underdemand problem for sufficiently periods of the day that time shifting motives by the energy producer outweigh the otherwise brutal economics: they can't send the energy anywhere else because of transmission system constraints. Then need cheap ways to store the energy and loss is probably acceptable for the right outcome: better if you can avoid it, but acceptable.

Arguably batteries are ideal for the problem. However thermal storage systems like this one have good scaling to storage side of things: insulation is cheap, adding tanks is cheap. The basic turbine cost can supply wallplate stated power, the tankage gives duration and you can add as many tanks as you have room for.

Alongside simply supplying the energy, batteries are great for maintenance of supply frequency but I don't understand how they do reactive power. Turbine based systems do reactive power really well because of the rotational torque (I think) so represent a distinct role in electricity supply stability. (Its entirely possible batteries can do this too)

Finally, repurposing of steam turbine based generation sites means they have transmission systems, turbines on site and to hand: the capex component can be less.

Re:A molten salt storage solution using sodium hydroxide by ok_dad on Thursday December 09, 2021 @05:38PM (#29503992)
You can do reactive power with some batteries since they are all behind inverters that can be designed to do that. The Tesla grid batteries (the big ones, don't know about power walls) can certainly do it via API commands (you can specify real and reactive power components, and frequency control, I'm not sure if they can all 3 be run at once though). I'm not sure if all battery companies have this feature though. I used to control several dozen sites with Tesla batteries via their battery control API, though we never used reactive power or frequency control.

We still need storage solutions like this for long term storage, though, as batteries are mainly used for load shifting and short term arbitrage right now, at 6 hours of discharge and less.

Re:A molten salt storage solution using sodium hydroxide by ggm on Thursday December 09, 2021 @06:03PM (#29504291)
That's good. Condensers and like appeal to my steampunk sensibility but they aren't magic or instant. If batteries can do reactive quickly and as well as they do FCAS then it's a huge plus. Getting more than 6 hours is a good point too. I'm sure battery tech is going to include scaling to meet that, this kind of heat storage might just be about time to market.
Re:A molten salt storage solution using sodium hydroxide by namibj on Friday December 10, 2021 @01:31AM (#29507023)
Inverters are far better than anything rotating-mass-based for control over waveform. At least if you want to, that is. You just take a (possibly GPS-disciplined) quartz oscillator and have no issues hitting 50ppm frequency stability at lower phase noise than can get through the system at 50/60Hz.

They can essentially do this instantly, i.e., substantially sub-wavelength of your line frequency (a PWM of 10 kHz isn't even high for an inverter, and 100 kHz is well within what's feasible for large systems operating at a couple hundred volts; 10 kHz would equate a light-speed delay of 30km, 100 kHz of just 3km, which gets into the territory of relativistic w.r.t. medium voltage rings in cities).

Re:A molten salt storage solution using sodium hydroxide by credit_guy on Thursday December 09, 2021 @07:26PM (#29505004)
> periods of the day

The issue with solar is not the storage from day to night, but the storage from summer to winter.

Re:A molten salt storage solution using sodium hydroxide by ggm on Thursday December 09, 2021 @07:51PM (#29505171)
Generally solved by mixing sources, wind, transmission and storage. People freak at the overcapacity build cost a bit.

Hydro systems and pumped storage look useful in this but the extent of summer winter variance is very specific to latitude and much of the planet isn't as badly affected. Wear transmission losses, buy power from lower lattitudes

Re:A molten salt storage solution using sodium hydroxide by pjc50 on Friday December 10, 2021 @04:24AM (#29508027)
> batteries are great for maintenance of supply frequency but I don't understand how they do reactive power.

Batteries output DC. They need an inverter to be connected to the grid. The inverter needs to choose a phase angle at which to output current and voltage, through something that looks suspiciously like a boost converter. This doesn't have to be quite the same phase as the line, it can "lead" or "lag" in an attempt to push the line phase angle back to what it's supposed to be.