"On Friday, Southern California utility San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) held a small press conference in Escondido to show off its brand new energy storage facility, a 30MW battery system capable of storing 120MWh of energy, which can serve 20,000 customers for four hours"
You have to wonder how they come up with the "x,000 customers" line and who it's meant to impress.
Good question. It's 1.5kW per customer, or 13,140kWh over a year.
In the UK, Ofgen quotes a figure of 3,300kWh per year for typical domestic electricity consumption.
The ignorami, which is almost everybody in that context, including decision makers, and especially 'greens'.
It will be interesting to see the lifetime of the modules and how soon they start having to be replaced. Must have been expensive to install.
On the subject of batteries, I saw an item on BBC Teletext yesterday (yes I know it's not called that any more, BYKWIM) saying that lithium battery development might be limited not so much by supplies of lithium, but by supplies of cobalt, which apparently is used for the other electrode in many Li-batteries.
Chances are they're using ONLY electricity. If you factor in our gas/oil consumption, would our energy consumptions be that different?
Tim
Same as the meja here measuring things in terms of football fields or height in double decker buses?
And any new generating plant is always said to be capable of supplying a town the size of **** which might mean something if you live there.
Air conditioning?
Ah, I think you may have got it there. According to Ofgen, the average combined gas and electricity consumption for domestic UK properties is
19,800kWh/yr, some 1.5 times the electricity consumption suggested above. We're a touch colder than Southern California, so perhaps that's not surprising.Does seem to me that we simply are not ready to store electricity efficiently yet after all these years. If you could come up with a really efficient cheap store it would make renewables actually worth having, as the main problem with all of them is that you do not get the conditions for generation when you actually need the power and pumping water up hills is not very efficient either. Brian
Depends what you mean by 'really efficient'. Pumped storage is in the range 70-80%, batteries 50 - 85%
ISTM that there are several problems with batteries: capacity, discharge rate, lifetime, cost, raw material availability, to mention a few.
No. Lithium cobalt oxide is a typical anode material. On alumnium.
Or lithium manganese oxide. Whatever.
The point stands though. there may not be enough chemistry to do the job we want done.
As there wasn't enough land area with biofuels.
On 25/02/17 17:30, Brian Gaff burbled:
Well really! You don't say? After a couple of hunrdred years of bateries they are still crap?
No, it wouldn't, Bryan.
It would make nuclear worth having as we could just use them for reliable baseload and the batteries for peaking
Since renewables without batteries are already more expensive and less reliable than nuclear there is no point in having renewables at all ever.
Let me say that again:
There is no point in having renewables, at all, ever.
batteries much better than that if charged and discharged slowly
En el artículo , Chris Hogg escribió:
Water and cooking is almost exclusively heated by electric in Merkia. That might be a part of it.
And we've seen, by example of harry, how true that is...
That's interesting. Thanks. I'll have a little google.
En el artículo , Mike Tomlinson escribió:
and, of course, they use air conditioning far more than we do.
There are in some places, but not generally where we use them in the UK.
I would like to see some numbers about using unreliable renewables for generating hydrogen fuel - that would be a good way to store energy. Sadly, it's probably still not economically viable compared with generating hydrogen from hydrocarbons (oil and gas). Hydrogen production by electrolysis is only viable today with large almost free sources of electrocity such as hydro, and solar and wind are nowhere near that.
ogg
pointless using expensive lithium. Cheaper (and heavier/bigger) batteries can be made using other materials.
No, actually there are not. You *always* use more materials and space because the energy density is so low. And its intermittent, so you have to build something else to accomodate that.
The overall cost is always higher than fossil or nuclear.
The subsidies were granted on the fraudulent claim that one day the technology would be able to strand on its own two feet.
30 years on it still can't.No renewable energy is 'almost free'
If the numbers for hydrogen were in any way feasible, don't you think that after 20 years of people nattering about 'the hydrogen economy' it would actually have arrived?
I'm surprised in the case of certain sites - say the Three Gorges Dam, desert-located solar, off-grid settlements and so on.
Yes, of course. Doesn't mean you shouldn't consider RE as part of the solution.
Again, I doubt that. And are you counting cost in financial terms, or
*all* costs and benefits?
Much more to it than that. And at least part of the take-up inertia can be levelled at fossil fuel lobbying. And of course it works the other way.
If there was an accepted need (ACC, air pollution, unavailability of fossil fuels say), maybe it might have arrived. Who knows.
Wiki has quite a lot to say about hydrogen storage. Many possible storage media are available.
I came across this article, which looks reasonably authoritative, in which hydrogen is produced by electrolysis and converted back to electricity in a fuel cell. Round-trip efficiencies of 30% are suggested.
The Danish island of Lolland uses a hydrogen storage system to store and recover excess wind-generated electricity, but it's on a tiny scale ATM, 8.5kW in total, although in fairness they do say it's experimental implying bigger things if it turns out successful, but no efficiencies are given.
Probably. Domestic aircon is commonplace in the USA. And in some places, they need it. My Mother lives in Northern Pennsylvania and it is not unusual for the temperature not to fall below 35deg C *at* *all* (not even at night) for days, and sometimes weeks at a time in the summer. (Of course, they also get feet of snow every winter. The township where she lives ran out of places to store the snow ploughed off the roads, last winter ...) We only visit her in the spring or autumn.
Most of the Americans I know are hideously profligate with energy. They leave lights and everything else electrical on all the time, they heat their houses to sauna-like temperatures in the winter and cool them to the point you need to put on a sweater in the summer. Some of my American friends have expressed surprise at room thermostats, TRVs and timers on boilers (US: furnaces) and horror at the idea of running out of hot water. I've seen people arrive at corner shops, climb out of their gigantic 4x4 pickup trucks and leave them running, merely because they can't be arsed to stop and restart them. (And no, it isn't to leave the heat/air running.)
Still, higher energy prices will eventually break them of all these habits.
The storage is important, but renewable hydrogen fails before you even get that far at the moment - it's much cheaper to make it from hydrocarbons than it is to make it by electrolysis. It was the manufacture of it I was more interested in.
OK, that's going to be way too low to be viable unless you are near an almost free source of electricity.
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