OT: Batteries for the grid - cost

I'm just dividing two numbers. Perhaps you'd like to try.

They're not even my figures. They're from the Wikipedia article on the Aussie battery as I said.

Want to guarantee that?

Ever seen what happens when a pack of LIPO cells goes up in a box of LIPO cells?

You are right, I didn't read it. It was the trillion pound figure that got me. If you arrive at that figure something is adrift from reality. But maybe that was Tim's point.

We are approaching the point of diminishing returns on LIPOS. The prices are still dropping, but nowhere near as fast as they were a decade ago

In the end it takes a certain amount of ENERGY to refine lithium.

And the cost of THAT is rising on account of renewable s**te. Only massive use of fossil fuel, cheap labour, and lack of concern over pollution allows lithium to be as cheap as it is.

Yes. As an adjunct to this conversation I haver just looked up the price of battery grade lithium carbonate.

That was 2018. Today the LME is quoting about one third of that:

That actually surprises me, as it suggests that manufacturing costs and safety circuits comprise most of the cost..

In the model fraternity, we run with no safety on raw cells and the best prices are way higher than that. An 11 Wh pack is around £5.80 an weighs around about 87g, so that is an energy density of only 1/8th of a Wh per gram. And a cost of 2Wh/£. Which suggests either that these batteries have a lot more than lithium in them, or even these state of the art batteries are nowhere near the theoretical efficiency.

And yes, the manufacturers push out LIPO technology to modellers long before it hits the average consumer. We are the ones who push them hard, require high energy per kilogram, and don't expect them not to fail early and catch fire..

Oddly they haven?t got a whole lot lighter in the last ten years, but they can sustain higher discharge rates.

Able to match power to weight with racing two stroke methanol engines, but only for a few minutes.

My point really was along these lines. We hear a lot about renewable-only supply, about how we are just waiting for battery technology to improve. I've simply taken the only figures for a largish-scale battery that I have, and scaled that up to cover real-world outage times (for a renewable-only grid).

Now, Theo makes a valid (to me, anyway :-) criticism that for a grid-scale battery one would use a different technology (flow). Where we are with that and what the prospects are I don't know, but AFAIK the trillion quid is a correct figure if all we do (or all we can do) is scale up the Oz battery.

We are adrift from reality inasmuch as we can't afford a trillion quid - not to mention also Chris Hogg's point of a few days ago that such a device would then need to be charged up again, taking the whole grid capacity to do it. ISTM that any realistic future grid therefore has to have a large non-renewable component, and if you want zero-carbon then nuclear is the only game in town, and we'd better start adding massively to our capacity there.

And all this without any considerations, mentioned by others here, of matters such as grid stability - voltage and frequency. I was after getting some costs into the discussion, so I kicked off with a simplistic approach. If other figures are available for other battery technologies then it would be interesting to see them.

I think most of us here prefer nuclear, however offshore wind with generated hydrogen as a backup does seem feasible. We can argue safety and economics, but I've never seen anyone blow it out of the water theoretically.

Not saying it is a good idea, just that it is an idea. Cynically I think Boris' recent declaration, to expand wind power, is purely political rather than practical.

Yebbut, it's a straw man argument. I've not seen anyone suggest lithium ion battery for medium term energy storage, i.e. days long backup. In reality, I suspect they intend to go for Carbon Capture and Storage, for medium term lulls in wind. Obviously it could produce enough power even if the CO2 capture bit is lacking :-)

If we - say - went for 100GW of nukes, at £10bn a GW for arguments sake, that's a trillion as well. By instead of a flaky 30GW, we get a solid

And we didn't even cost the windmills for the renewable case.

offshore is similar in terms of *average* power delivered, at £10bn/GW So lets take 30GW as a base line.

Nukes, £400bn for 60 year lifetime, no grid upgrade needed. Low O & M cost Fuel cost insignificant. Low environmental impact, wont explode.

Wind and batteries, £1300bn, 12 year life span, 3 x grid upgrade needed* very high O & M cost, very high environmental impact, could explode.

Amortising over the lifetime, the cost of wind and batteries is just over £100 billion a year, plus O & M and grid upgrades whereas the nukes are £6bn a year.

If we now look at electricity costs assuming 30GW per year delivered by this system, which is 262.8 billion units...the ex works cost of nuclear ignoring O & M and interest on capital would be around 2.2p a unit. Currently the cost of nuclear power wholesale on existing units is around 4p a unit.

Lets look at wind costs WITH the battery balancing : We have about £100bn a year just on capital repayment, so the ex-works cost of wind before O & M and interest on the capital would be around *40p a unit!!!!*.

Some 20 times more expensive than nuclear...and that's before we add in grid upgrades and the inevitable high maintenance - the worse possible sort of rotating machinery reliability is outside being flexed and buffeted, in the presence of salt spray, miles away from the tools and equipment and personnel needed to fix it.

Going Green And going Woke Is being green and going broke.

And how does that store energy then? Its all fluff and bollocks

We are merely pointing out that the woo 'almost work' technologies - pumped storage and batteries, dont stand up cost wise.

Hydrogen is f****ng dangerous and has a rotten turn round efficiency, and I would not want to live within 50 miles of it

The reality is that done properly nuclear power is going to be the cheapest option and zero carbon, if you give a s*it about that. It would be cheaper than fossil fuel if they were sane with the regulations.

LOL!! Would we have enough materials to make all required and i suppose the rest of Europe might want some and all the leccy powered motors?..

Meltdowns are just that, a meltdown. Sometimes into a contained structure in the form of a glass. If properly designed of course.

Once one Li cell goes, it cannot be stopped and can affect those around it in a chain reaction.

Somebody in The Times pointed out this morning that all metal gas pipes would have to be replaced by plastic ones as hydrogen can diffuse more easily. I don't know how much that would cost.

Another Dave

Actually prompt critical meltdowns can involve explosions, it is the explosion that blasts the rest of the uranium away and stops the chain reaction. The explosions just aren't big, in nuclear terms, fizzles. They can be big in real life terms, i.e. tons of TNT.

How does this chain reaction work. Does a shockwave cause Li cells to explode?

Generate hydrogen at times of excess wind generation, Pump hydrogen into an empty gas well or salt cavern. It's pretty simple.

Pumped storage,batteries are for short term smoothing, only.

We have lived with hydrogen in town gas in the past. Its problems are not intractable.

Yes I believe nuclear would now be best/cheapest, and most open to future improvement, but one has to get one's arguments straight. I'm not sure wind is impossible. But we have had this argument before.

But I don't think it is true, town gas used to contain a high percentage hydrogen. Obviously a bit of real life testing would help settle the matter.

But in the days of coal gas, when every town had its own gas works and before North Sea gas became available, all the pipes were black iron, or whatever. Yet coal gas was approximately 50% hydrogen, and there were no special problems AFAIK. Does 100% hydrogen behave so very differently?

Again unlikely by design. The Chernobyl explosion was a superheated meltdown slag hitting water. Inexcusable there was a meltdown, and secondly where a meltdown could reach water.

Well, yes. One tends to be thermally and electrically connected to adjacent cells where fire can propagate. Again, like nuclear reactors, the effect can be minimised by design.

I also suspect that it's not true. In the distant past (when we were toying with the idea of replacing CO2 with Helium in some of our reactors to avoid oxidation problems) it was always trotted out that containment would be a problem because of the way helium was always used for leak detection. On investigation this turned out not to be true: helium is used for leak detection because there is normally none around to mask the signal. Of course the containment has to be good because of its cost.