You are not logged in.
Of course there's no proof the Form battery can be scaled up but equally there is nothing from a physical or pragmatic point of view that we can see at present that would appear to prevent the scaling up.
The technology's been around for 50 years now, so is known to work. The issue really has been cost but they seem to have bought in a cheap cathode technology and made other cost saving improvements that have in combination transformed the cost profile. This is a familiar tale! Fax technology was invented in the early 1900s but it didn't come into its own until the mid 1980s, some 70 years later.
As far as I know bulk thermal storage only works for a day or two and that just isn't good enough to make green energy a total solution.
Hunting is always the best option if you know what you are doing - like Elon in terms of rocketry.
Calliban,
I read about at least one new "revolutionary" battery technology per day that ultimately turns into a big nothing burger. After more than a decade of reading about such technologies, I want someone to either demonstrate their technology at scale, or admit that they can't, so we can move on to other options that at least have a chance to succeed. I do like the fact that Form's battery uses very cheap and recyclable materials, but the manufacturing side of this issue is where the technological innovation will come into play, assuming it's at all feasible. We still have zero data indicating that it will work at scale. If it doesn't work, then bulk thermal energy storage is our last desperate gambit at making energy storage affordable to the degree required for the technology to be an acceptable substitute for fossil fuels. I see all of the billions of dollars ultimately squandered on development of these new battery technologies as dead-end stalling tactics that have the net effect of siphon away investment dollars from solutions that truly could work, while simultaneously serving as a distraction for the clueless public, to avert attention away from the simple fact that the problem isn't going away and the solutions aren't materializing after decade after decade of messing around with solar panels and wind turbines.
We're throwing rubber dog turds (the least viable options) at a Teflon wall (basic physics), hoping that something will stick. It's an absurd survival strategy. It's like saying, "It takes 100 calories per day to sit around and trap animals, but 2,000 calories per day to go hunting. We're running really low on calories here, so let's go hunting and hope for the best." There may be some scenario where going hunting pays off, but under most scenarios everyone starves to death. How much more hunting do we allow the hunters to do before we tell them to stop running around in circles and start setting some traps before we all keel over? Humanity has always gone up the energy density ladder when searching for power generation and storage solutions, not down. There's no point to providing all the education in the world if nobody starts using it. We now have endless seas of information to throw at anyone with an internet connection, but precious few of them know how to use any of it to do something useful. I think that's a more profound problem than energy.
Nice timelapse vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG6CV3-LBCk
I find this so inspiring.
There is now the real hope humanity can escape Earth and start anew.
Given the dark, dystopian times we are living through, the promise of that seems to burn all the more brightly.
I think the UK used to have a rocket called Black Arrow.
So the booster doesn't need tiles because it will be a powered descent once it hits the atmosphere?
You had one thing to get right and you forgot the lifts, Elon!
Elon Musk, 11:39am Aug 06: "Minus the lifts"
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8HyI--UUAUctaZ?format=jpg&name=small
Overview of where we are on Artificial Photosynthesis, which seems focused on splitting water with sunlight and a chemical catalyst, to create green hydrogen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ4sa50H5V8
AP is a promising technology, and one that might be more relevant to Mars than iron-air batteries.
One gets the feeling AP is due a breakthrough. There doesn't seem to be any major roadblock in terms of physics.
Brilliant!
And this is a good video of the moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-uqwCTvGgA
Elon Musk, 9:56am Aug 06: "Starship Fully Stacked"
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8HaippVIAE … name=large
I haven't seen any reference from Form Energy to "liquid air".
https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
While discharging, the battery breathes in oxygen from the air and converts iron metal to rust.
To me that sounds like they are drawing in air from the environment, rather than tanks. I could be wrong of course!
This article seems to imply it's ordinary air as well:
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-tra … -1-1044174
Could be the air is pressurised to speed up the rusting process?
It terms of energy storage that can scale to TWh and is relatively cheap, this looks very promising to me. The larger the scale, the more efficient it becomes. Liquid air is stored in an underground tank.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogen … gy_storage
To get the best efficiency, it needs to make use of a source of waste heat. But that won't be a problem if we built a couple of CCGTs at the site. Cryogenic energy storage would reduce by half the amount of natural gas needed to produce each MWh. To increase storage capacity, you simply build a bigger tank. The bigger the tank, the less problem you have with heat gradients into the stored liquid. To store 1TWh (1000GWh) you would need a stainless steel lined concrete tank, some 200m in diameter and 200m tall. A storage capacity of 1TWh is about 1.2 days worth of UK electricity consumption. Maybe four such facilities would be needed in the UK and roughly 10 times more for the entire US.
Probably the best strategy would be to run the CCGTs, with liquid air energy recovery on a semi-continuous basis and allow the air liquefaction plant to run at maybe 60% capacity factor. The rest of the solution could focus on demand management, through control of thermal grid loads. Whilst a supply of natural gas is still needed, the quantity is much reduced.
It's naive to think bureaucrats don't respond to political direction.
From AIAA’s “Daily Launch” for 6 August 2021:
Starship SN20 Rolled Out In Boca Chica, Texas
The Daily Mail (UK) (8/5) reports that SpaceX has moved Starship Serial Number 20 to the testing facility in Boca Chica, Texas, one day after the Super Heavy booster was set up on the launch pad. SpaceX has not announced a date for the launch, but a Federal Communications Commission filing suggests a six-month period as of June 20. SpaceX is currently awaiting a FAA environmental review before Starship is permitted to launch.
SPACE (8/5) reports Starship’s orbital flight plan “calls for Booster 4 to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) offshore, a few minutes after launch. SN20 will continue into orbit, make one circuit of Earth and then come down in the Pacific Ocean roughly 90 minutes after liftoff, near the Hawaiian island of Kauai.”
My take on it:
This pretty well confirms what I have said about the delay: the environmental impact statement update that EPA must approve before FAA can approve a license to fly. The words in the release “FAA environmental review” point to this, just in a misleadingly oversimplified wording. Do not expect quick approval, and do not blame FAA for the delay. Spacex has to satisfy the EPA about this, an agency notorious for its lack of flexibility on rules. This has nothing to do with politicians, and everything to do with bureaucrats.
I am surprised, but pleased, that Spacex thinks they are ready to make their first attempt at orbital flight with this vehicle. I would have flown a couple more fully-hypersonic suborbital missions with Starship-only first. I do think when this orbital mission does fly, that the vehicle will probably be lost. That would be consistent with the track record getting up to this point. It would also be consistent with Spacex’s “fly it, break it, build another” approach.
GW
I think this article is helpful.
https://www.anl.gov/article/reshaping-t … -batteries
JCESR solved the problem by addressing both the cost of the energy storing materials and the design of the battery, since both contribute to the cost of the final battery. Analysis by the JCESR team showed that for multi-day storage, the entire battery must have a cost less than that of the energy-storing electrodes alone in batteries such as today’s lithium ion. Therefore, the long-duration storage challenge requires new materials solutions.
So I think this is really saying that because with a long term storage battery you are not going to be discharging on a frequent basis, then the capital cost of the battery has to be much lower than an output management battery like lithium-ion operating on a daily cycle. The reason is that for the lithium battery there will be at least one charging cycle every day and so a minimum of 365 charges over the year or 3650 over a decade against which the capital cost can be spread. But for a long term storage battery you might discharge maybe only 50 times over the year or 500 times over the decade. That's why the battery's capital cost has to be much lower for long term storage because it is shared between far fewer charges.
So, I think this is the sort of thing referenced in other articles. I am not sure how sensible a way of looking at the costings it is.
Long term storage means you can store energy that would otherwise be earthed during surplus periods. That makes the whole system more efficient. I prefer to look at the whole system cost of delivering reliable non-intermittent energy.
Some of these articles omit the context - the context is that wind and solar energy in many parts of the world are now very cheap energy sources, so if you can stop them being intermittent, you have a real advance.
OK, point taken.
Louis,
The price listed appears to be for Iron Ore, not refined Iron suitable for making things. There are daily prices for Iron Ore, Pig Iron, and refined Iron suitable for machining (cast / wrought / plate / bar / etc ) into finished products.
Here's how you can tell:
From the link above:
Prices for iron ore cargoes with a 63.5% iron content for delivery into Tianjin fell to below $200 a tonne, the lowest since end-May on higher supply and as some Chinese steel producers were told to cut production. Imports of iron ore to China rebounded, with portside inventories up for the third week to 127.34 million tonnes as of July 18th. Meanwhile, steel producers in Anhui, Gansu, Fujian, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Shandong, and Yunnan provinces were told to limit their production to 2020 volumes amid China’s efforts to curb carbon emissions. Also, China is considering imposing export tariffs on steel rates ranging from 10% to 25% to tame prices.
I can guarantee that their battery doesn't use Iron Ore, because the battery turns Iron back into Iron Ore (discharge), and vice versa (charge).
That sounds like an odd way of saying "The capital cost of the storage is much lower than in conventional battery systems."
The way I have read their public statements suggests they are not looking to compete with lithium on short term day to day storage.
So it wouldn't be the "smoothing out" kind of storage, this would be the long term, emergency storage that comes into play when wind and solar simply aren't delivering.
louis wrote:"We expect to be competitive with lithium-ion on a dollar-per-kilowatt basis," Jaramillo said.
If that happens, it would mean that a customer could pay the same for the discharge capacity, but get 150 hours of that discharge with Form instead of four or six hours with conventional batteries.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles … r-duration
What does that mean?
I'm struggling to understand that.
Discharge capacity is almost certainly talking about power. A battery can have substantial storage capacity, but low discharge rate. Supercapacitors and flywheels have both been experimented with as braking energy recovery systems, because accelerating a vehicle requires a huge amount of power, but often modest total energy reserves. These systems have huge discharge rate. A flywheel can spin down in seconds. Think of it as kW/kWh.
For a battery unit supporting a wind or solar farm, discharge rate is more important than storage capacity, because the powerplant can drop off load suddenly and the battery needs to provide sufficient power to prevent grid frequency from crashing, long enough to bring CCGTs online. So the customers are likely to ask for sufficient discharge rate first and foremost. Storage capacity is a bonus for them.
If what they are saying is true, 150 hours of storage capacity for the same price as 4-6 hours of Li-ion, then the technology may very well be revolutionary. Will be interesting to see how this one works out.
It sounds to me like this battery has a naturally low discharge rate due to to the sluggish reaction kinetics of iron oxidation. That isn't necessarily a problem for what they plan to use it for, I.e stationary applications. But it will constrain other potential applications.
"We expect to be competitive with lithium-ion on a dollar-per-kilowatt basis," Jaramillo said.
If that happens, it would mean that a customer could pay the same for the discharge capacity, but get 150 hours of that discharge with Form instead of four or six hours with conventional batteries.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles … r-duration
What does that mean?
I'm struggling to understand that.
This link below gives a figure of $215 per ton for iron. I agree however that we need info on all three points.
https://www.metalary.com/iron-price/
I imagine that as with anything if you are going to be buying hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff, you will get a good price.
Form have claimed that they can get below $20 per KwH and have claimed that they can deliver their system at 10% of the cost of lithium based storage. If they are basing their 10% figure on $137 than that would be $13, about a third lower than the best price (excluding Tesla) but of course we don't know what figure they were taking. It must have been lower than $200 in order to come in at below $20 per KwH.
I am not sure what is meant by "capacity costs" in this context - do they just mean storage? The article doesn't seem very well written. For one thing, surely you have to look at the prce of the electricity going into the battery as well and one thing we know about wind and solar is that there have been significant and continuing reductions in the cost of green energy electricity, year by year.
From the article:
BloombergNEF found that lithium-ion battery pack prices fell to $137/kWh in 2020, with projected costs close to $100/kWh by 2023, and manufacturers like Tesla and CATL have dropped prices as low as $80/kWh. A March study published in Nature Energy found that the energy capacity cost of long-duration storage technology must fall below $20/kWh in order to reduce total carbon-free electricity system costs by at least 10%. Capacity costs would have to drop even lower to displace nuclear and natural gas plants, the study found.
So, even at $20/kWh, it still doesn't beat nuclear or natural gas.
From the article:
The researchers used an advanced model of a simulated electric system to evaluate different LDES technologies based on power capacity cost, energy capacity cost and efficiency. The technologies — covering a range of solutions including hydropower, aqueous sulfur flow batteries, hydrogen storage and compressed air — were considered relative to existing energy sources, rather than being assessed as standalone tools. The study found that the energy capacity cost for an LDES solution would have to drop to roughly $10 per kWh to fully displace nuclear power on the grid, and would have to fall to $1 per kWh to displace natural gas power plants with carbon capture and sequestration. The current storage energy capacity cost of batteries is around $200 per kWh.
Now we know why batteries haven't displaced nuclear and gas energy.
Here's what we still don't know about Form Energy's battery:
1. Useful cycle life
2. How many tons of Iron are required to make each battery
3. Future prices for Cast Iron with coal / oil / gas- it's currently around $1,525 per ton
FFS! Comparing the Little Ice Age - when steam power had hardly been invented - with now, when we have so many technologies at our disposal. It doesn't even begin to make sense. One observation I would make is that the Little Ice Age did not impede in any way Europe's cultural, economic and social development.
For SpaceNut .... there are numerous topics that contain the word "climate".
However, all I found seem to be focused on a particular aspect of the subject.
This new topic is offered for those who may wish to contribute to an accumulation of knowledge about the subject.
I am not looking for opinion in this topic. We have a great number of topics where opinion is welcome and encouraged.
The opening post here is from an article by a historian who studied the Little Ice Age. The purpose of the study was:
1) to see what happened (with focus on local variation around the planet)
2) to see how humans coped (many did NOT survive)
The author appears to be publishing in hopes citizens living today might be able to glean some insight from the past.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/small-climat … 45154.html
Nations and communities might learn from some of the success stories of the Little Ice Age: Populations that prospered were often those that provided for their poor, established diverse trade networks, migrated from vulnerable environments, and above all adapted proactively to new environmental realities.
People who lived through the Little Ice Age lacked perhaps the most important resource available today: the ability to learn from the long global history of human responses to climate change.
[Get our best science and technology stories. Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter.]
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown University.
There's another difference between the Little Ice Age and now ... at the time, it was impossible for humans to comprehend the big picture (ie, the global system taken as an interrelated whole).
***
Reminder ... for those who would want to post an opinion please chose another topic about climate. This is not the place for it.(th)
I hear thunder coming!
Wow! What phenomenal photos!
This is quite an emotional moment, the culmination of a lot of thinking and dreaming for people here.
Will Kamala let the thing fly? We will see.
Once we have a successful orbital flight we are already half way to Mars! More than that really - we are 99% of the way to Mars since a little rocket fire will get you there once refuelled.
We are really on the threshold of that new period in history when humanity is no longer a single planet species. It's a long way from the struggle for survival on the Savannah to Sagan City but I think we are almost there.
louis wrote:Yes it's not unusual for wind speeds to drop to low for days but weeks? There is no evidence from the charts in that link for that claim.
The whole point of the Form Energy battery system is that you can store several days' worth of output in batteries. What we need to find is a realistic worst case scenario and then see what a hypothetical response based on Form Energy batteries would look like.
A battery based on common materials is certainly a positive development. Until it is commercialised and mass produced, one should be cautious about assuming what it's cost and performance will be.
But my point is that the cost of storing 1kWh in a battery is not a constant. It depends upon the capital and maintenance costs of the battery and also the utilisation factor. If you are fully charging and discharging a battery each day, you are storing a lot more kWh than a battery than is charged and then discharged only once per month. The levelised cost of storage is calculated assuming a specified charge-discharge cycle length, either 12 or 24 hours. To put it another way, a 1000kWh battery that is charged and discharged once every day, will store 1000kWh per day, or 365,000kWh per year. If it is only discharged once per month, the same battery will store 12,000kWh per year. A factor 30 difference. And it means the same battery will be 30 times more expensive per kWh stored. This is before any consideration of other complications, like self-discharge rate of batteries. It is primarily for this reason (utilisation factor), that batteries are not used for long term energy storage.
I can't prove it because I don't think the detail is there but I think the $20 per KwH storage claimed by Form Energy covers the number of cycles - the number of cycles is part of the package (in other words, I think that's what "storage" means). What the operation and maintenance costs are - the land, the buildings, the repairs and replacements, health and safety etc - I don't think we know yet but the capital cost for Form's battery is about 17% of the lowest battery storage cost I have seen mentioned. Actually Form I see claim that it will be less than 10% the cost of current battery storage:
https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
I think that would only be possible if it can handle thousands of cycles. Of course not every battery needs to be used on a daily basis. If the Form system was providing on average say 15% of the total energy needs in a year that would equate to about 55 days' storage. If that were achieved in 5 day batches, that would be one charge every 10 weeks. Of course, there is the issue of diurnal storage. That might be dealt more through lithium batteries and hyrdogen. We don't know yet. Form looks like it might be the back up for the periods of GED - green energy dipping.
louis wrote:In doing so, you need to factor in the following:
1. Under any green energy plan not all energy will be produced by wind turbines. Your comments seem to imply that we might depend soley on wind.
Wind energy, is by far the best performing renewable energy source under UK conditions and the one most capable of scaling to the 100GW power generation levels that would be needed to support the UK grid under a high renewable scenario. You can expect it to account for 80% of renewable electricity production in any affordable strategy. Biomass burned in steam raising plants is also useful, but realistic capacity is very limited. Biomass is capable of provided a small but reliable baseload as things stand (2-3 GW). Substantial biomass is imported from Canada. Whether that will be sustainable in the future is an open question. Growing sufficient biomass on UK soil to support GW scale power generation is problematic at best, as using arable land for this purpose means diverting some of the best cropland in the world away from cereal production. Biogas from digestible wastes is already deployed at sewage works and there is scope for scaling biogas production to GW scale in the UK. But resources are ultimately limited, carbon-nitrogen ratio needs to be carefully balanced to get it to work well; it is relatively labour intensive and production would be seasonal.
Both wave power and tidal stream turbines have been experimented with on a small scale, but are some way away from large scale commercial development. Tidal stream is the closest prospect of the two. Tidal stream has been deployed at single MW scale of electricity generation at selected locations in Scotland and Northern Ireland and could be scaled further in the not too distant future. But it is a very limited resource. It will not scale to more than a few GW peak capacity at the best sites. Large tidal barrages on UK estuaries have been discussed in the past, but are not a popular option because of the scale of ecological damage that they would inflict. Wave power presents significant engineering challenges that will be difficult to overcome. It means deploying floating steel structures, with significant moving parts, in deep and stormy waters. Maintenance is a lot more difficult than is the case for Offshore wind, because these are structures that float on the edge of the continental shelf in dangerous waters. They will need to be engineered to withstand storms with wavefront energy reaching MW per metre and to survive for decades in turbulent, saline water. That is a tall order. And it won't be cheap.
We have discussed solar power at length before. It has been heavily subsidised by past UK governments and there is now tens of GW of solar capacity on the UK grid. But the UK is one the least favorable climates in the world for solar PV deployment. We receive less direct sunlight than the high Arctic. Whether solar power can continue to expand without subsidies is doubtful. Under UK conditions, its EROI is extremely weak. This is a good indication that it will not be sustainable in the long term.
Hydropower is a small but useful resource to the UK grid. It is close to being fully developed at large scale, though microhydro could still add some capacity on smaller rivers, though development may be limited due to the capital cost and environmental impact. Hydropower' ability to function as backup power is already exploited. The practicality of doing so will be limited by the ratio of dam capacity to river flow rate and the design of turbines to provide excess power above their typical ratings. Pumped storage has been deployed at a few sites in the UK, most famously at Dinorwig in North Wales. Its contributions are important but limited. The storage time that it provides faces the same problems as you see in batteries. Increasing storage capacity will increase capital cost proportionately. But as utilisation rate drops, the cost of storage per kWh increases rapidly. This is why pumped storage tends to be a useful in storing excess nighttime power from baseloads, and meeting peak demands during daytime. Using it to store energy for longer periods would be a poor utilisation of the capital asset.
We are certainly blessed with wind resources in the UK but having looked into this before I think asking wind to provide 80% of generation would be pushing it when you also factor in increased demand for both EVs and electric powered heating.
Wave power does not necessarily involve floating structures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutriku_B … Wave_Plant
But I think it is still solar power where we will still see the greatest growth. The UK may not have the best solar resources but, as ever,
this is really a question of price per unit and that in turn depends on technological solutions to reduce labour input. We cannot tell yet what these will be. Void referenced Novasolix who think they can get to 45% efficient and cheap solar power devices (using rolled film). Who knows how this sort of technology will be used...perhaps we will send out ships to harvest solar energy in the high insolation areas of the South Atlantic using barrage balloons covered in solar film which will charge up 500,000 tons of onboard iron-air batteries. Impossible? Why not? That will free us of dependence on UK insolation. But if the solar power film is cheap enough, well we may find it easy to apply to roofs or hang it from wire (obviating the need for rigid structures) - as long as it can be automatically rolled up in the event of a storm, that won't be a big issue, if we have long term storage via form.
So, yes, for many reasons I think the future is bright for solar even in the temperate zone.
louis wrote:2. An iron-air battery system would allow for heavy investment in solar power.
Not a good idea, as we have discussed many times already.
See above. Ultimately this will be decided by price. In many parts of the world solar power is already incredibly cheap with 15% efficiency PV rigid panels. The technology has a long way to go. With the advent of iron-air battery systems lots more becomes possible.
louis wrote:3. Generally there is a high correlation between low wind (a high in terms of atmospheric pressure) and elevated solar power (thanks to clear, cloudless skies). So for most of the days showing low wind generation in the graphs you would have correspondingly high solar power.
To a limited extent. Wind speeds do tend to be lower in summer generally, as high pressure conditions tend to dominate. But you cannot design a electricity grid based on what happens 'generally'. There needs to be high reliability in electricity supply. Anti-cyclone conditions can occur in winter as well, when daily insolation is 10% its peak summer values. Low wind conditions typically last for around 1 week. When this happens in winter, there may be clear skies and low temperatures. But it can also lead to anticyclone gloom, with persistent fog, low lying clouds and drizzle. There have been occasions where anti-cyclone conditions have lasted for months (1976, most notably).
https://www.futurelearn.com/info/course … teps/15229There needs to be backup power supply to produce power during anti-cyclone conditions, which may last a week or longer and for which it is not realistic for any battery system to be viable (I explained why above).
Well this is the whole point of the iron-air battery storage system. As I said we need an examination of "worst case scenarios". I don't think the worst case scenarios are as bad as you are suggesting. I don't believe there are periods when wind is absolutely minimal for over a week.
louis wrote:4. Under an iron-air battery system, the need to use hydro for baseload would disappear. Hydro can then be used as an additional emergency reserve (ie reservoirs would be kept topped up for such occasions). Hydro (including pumped storage) supplies about 2.5% of UK's electricity demand. There's no reason why that couldn't be raised to maybe 5% during a period of energy requirement.
You don't appear to understand how a hydropower plant works. You have a river running into a tail lake and that same water flows out either through the turbines or over the penstocks, either directly down the river or into a bottom lake first. The storage capacity is whatever volume of water you can store behind the dam, multiplied by average head height, both of which are basic design features than are limited by local topography. You would have to demolish the dam and rebuild it to change that, assuming topography makes it possible at all.
You seem to be asserting that hydroplants operate at maximum capacity all the time. I find that very difficult to believe. I did research this online but couldn't find any figures for what % capacity hydro operates at but, as I say I can't believe it is 100%. Do you know what the figure is? If, let's say, the average was 50% then what I am suggesting is that during these periods of demand requirement you operate at 100% - effectively doubling the amount of hydropower.
louis wrote:5. A green energy system will also include provision for energy from waste, biofuels, tidal. sea current and wave power. Some of these (waste and biofuels) can be stored to a certain extent. So again, we can imagine these could be boosted to supply perhaps 10% of requirements. In addition there will be lithium ion storage being used for diurnal control and short term ouput management and I would also expect there to be a fair amount of hydrogen storage.
Have discussed some of this previously. Biomass can be stored in limited quantities, but not as easily as coal. It has roughly half of the energy density. It is typically delivered as chips and is stored in bunkers in an attempt to keep it dry. Storage is more expensive than for coal and biomass powerplants therefore rely more heavily on regular fuel delivery. It is vulnerable to getting damp, as well as bacterial and fungal action. It is prone to catching fire if not kept dry. As thermal steam raising plants, rather like coal burning powerplants, biomass boilers are most suitable as baseload power plants. Running them as backup powerplants is not a good use of this type of equipment. It introduces thermal cycles that limit the life of the plant and increase maintenance costs.
Hydrogen is a diffuse gas. It can be stored at low pressure in limited quantities, with energy recovered using gas turbines. But its nature makes it more suitable for covering short term shortfalls in generating capacity. There may be some options for compression and storage underground in salt caves and the like. But these opportunities are dependent on local geology.
Every additional piece of equipment that needs to be built to deal with intermittent power generation, it something that has to be paid for and maintained and is something that reduces surplus energy from the overall system.
Well you seem to accept these other technologies can make a contribution and I accept that there is a price to pay for that. My point would be that as green energy gets to the 2 cents per KwHe price point or lower, that gives you a lot of flexibility. The advantage of some of these technologies is that they can help balance out supply over an extended period (e.g. winter) and take up less land area than an iron-air battery system.
louis wrote:6. In addition to domestic supply, you would expect a green energy system to draw on a continental grid. The UK is already linked up to Norway, France and the Netherlands I believe. A connection to Iceland is under active consideration.
Yes. The UK imports substantial electric power from France and Netherlands. Imports seem to be increasing as the domestic power supply has atrophied.
Continental grid systems are going to make an important contribution to overall reliability and stability. Again this is an area where technological development can deliver, if we can have efficient transmission over thousands of miles. But even if you lost 80% of your power, it might still make sense to import from the Sahara if solar power is very cheap. The alternative of sending 500,000 ton iron-air battery vessels to charge up in somewhere like Morocco would be another approach.
louis wrote:7. EV batteries could be used as an energy storage system.
This isn't going to work for very obvious reasons. Imagine this scenario: You are charging your car ready for a long drive to a site for an important meeting the next morning. You need to drive 100 miles in a few hours, to get there in time. No problem. Your battery is 80% full and only needs an hour to reach capacity. You wake up in the morning to find your car battery almost empty, because a wind farm fell off load during the night and the grid operators used your battery as backup. How pissed off would you be?
This would be a voluntary scheme with a financial incentive. This is where you need to look at marginal pricing and so on. It might make sense to say to a driver "If you give us 20 KwHe tonight you can have a free 100 KwHe this summer". That might seem crazy economics. But there will be times when there is a huge energy surplus coming from wind and solar and effectively you give this free charging when those conditions occur." Also energy providers can effectively charge the non-helpful customers for subsidising the helpful ones. People's use of vehicles is more flexible than you might suppose, especially in an era of working from home and home delivery of food. Also many EVs will only need to be charged up every few days, because people use them for very local commutes. EV power return isn't a big part of the solution but it will be a useful contribution once you have a pool of perhaps 1000 GwHes of electricity sitting in EVs.
louis wrote:Putting all the above in the mix, it's likely a Form Energy system would only have to cover 60% of output, and not for more than 3 or 4 days.
Well that's me convinced. Seriously, that determination needs to rest on computer modelling that should be based on historical weather patterns. Required reliability will be one of the inputs into the model. The optimum strategy is the one that achieves lowest whole system costs across design life for the specified required reliability. Maybe your pet battery technology will find a big role in an optimised solution. Maybe, something else. Most likely, a combination of technologies.
Well I don't disagree with that need for computer modelling but over the years I have become familiar with a lot of this data so I feel my figure can be supported. The figure cannot realistically be 100%. Once you start factoring in all the other energy technologies available and drawing on a continental grid, the figure goes down and down. I feel that over an extended period of say 5 days when wind and solar combined are always going to be producing a significant amount of energy, never 0%, a figure of 60% is very reasonable.
louis wrote:You seem to be living in the past. Yes this is how things have been done, but they won't be done that way if iron-air batteries live up to their promise.
I often feel like the middle aged man having to explain the facts of life to one of his kids :-) There is refusal to accept reality, stamping of feet, fascination with something new and misplaced enthusiasm, etc. Overcoming intermittency is inherently very difficult and expensive, because it is a form of entropy. Intermittent energy has higher entropy than controllable energy and additional energy and complexity is needed to overcome this. Doing so at a minimum cost is very challenging, because one way or another, we must either control demand or activate another powerplant to cover the lull. All of the options have capital costs and operating costs. So the question is, what is the easiest and cheapest way of making supply and demand match? There are many options, each with their own benefits and limitations.
Green energy versus nuclear/fossil fuels has been debated here for a long time now. I think I can honestly say that everything has been moving green energy's way. I can't see us ending up anywhere else but with a fully green energy system - not for reasons of sentiment but because it will be the cheapest and most reliable system.
Iron-air batteries are an interesting concept. But remember there have been other touted low cost energy storage options in the past. Hydrogen energy storage is not new technology. It is older than electricity. You see those huge gasometre tanks outside of most UK towns? That was hydrogen energy storage. Those tanks allowed daily variations in gas demand to match the varting batch output of coal gas retorts. They worked, but they were huge and ugly structures. As soon as natural gas came along, the UK dumped its coal-hydrogen economy. Sodium sulphur batteries have been around since the 70s. Lithium ion batteries, flow batteries, CAES. Each of these things have been around for a while and have found some applications. But I would be wary of assurances that any single technology is going to sweep the world. I have explained why it will be difficult for any battery technology, no matter how good it seems on paper, to provide energy storage for days on end. It is a solution requiring very cheap bulk energy storage at high energy density.
Well you learn something every day...the gasometers were hydrogen storage? I never knew that! Yes, I know of one in South London which was still in use in the natural gas era - it certainly went up and down during the day!
But of course I think everyone accepts that utility scale hydrogen will be under pressure.
Hydrogen will have a big role to play in the green energy economy, particularly in northern Europe in terms of levelling out winter and summer supply.
louis wrote:See my post above. My guesstimate is that the cost of iron-air battery output could be 2.5 cents per KwHe
For what utilisation factor? This is not a fixed value. You need to work out capital remuneration costs and operating and maintenance costs over 1 year, and divide it by the number of kWh stored and released. You will find that the longer and less frequent the lull, the higher the marginal cost of each kWh.
I did say "guesstimate"! Yes, you need to factor in all those things. But I suspect with battery technology the capital cost is key.
louis wrote:All the schemes involving molten salt and the like seem to have been big failures.
The best way to fill the troughs is with what is currently "surplus" wind and solar energy which is being earthed and costs effectively nothing at present. And if my calculation re iron-air batteries is correct, then it is a highly affordable system.
Maybe. But the longer that energy must be stored and the lower the effective utilisation rate, the cheaper the storage medium needs to be. There are few things cheaper than hot water stored in an insulated tank. Likewise, a tank of LPG is very cheap for the amount of energy it contains. It stores 30GJ of chemical energy per cubic metre and has no internal structure, just a carbon steel shell with enough strength to withstand hydrostatic pressure. Gas turbines are cheap to build and operate, but the fuel is relatively expensive. So it is suitable only for periodic operation, but it can meet power requirements for weeks if necessary, because that steel tank can store huge amounts of chemical energy very cheaply. So long as total fuel consumption over a year remains small, total operating cost will be low and capital costs are only $300/kWe. We can keep fuel consumption low, by controlling the demand side as much as possible. Install several days of thermal energy storage by making water tanks bigger. Battery systems and hydrogen could allow short term load balancing as well. This makes effective lulls less frequent and shorter. But there still has to be planning for long-term lulls associated with anti-cyclones.
What I have presented may not be an optimal solution, very likely there are problems that I have not foreseen and technologies that I have underestimated. I spend a lot of time reading about local power system solutions, because it is something that interests me and it is closely associated with my job. After a while, you developed what is known as 'engineering judgement'. In terms of reliably meeting consumer demand at minimum cost using mostly renewable energy, nothing is cheaper at present than wind power, backed up by GTs, using thermal demand management to reduce GT fuel consumption.
Well time will tell. I think we are about to enter a very exciting phase of green energy development, a bit like when Space X first came on the scene. No doubt there will be the equivalents of the FH9 detours but I think eventually a viable system will emerge.
Apologies, that was an error on my part. I meant to write $20, not cents, per KwH (storage, not output). Form Energy claim they can get the storage cost down to $20 per KwH - in other words a small fraction of existing battery storage costs. I haven't seen any estimates for output cost, but in another post I guesstimated on the basis of cheapest current battery storage output cost (around 10 cents per KwHe), they might be able to have an output price around 2.5 cents per KwHe.
I would like to see some detailed calculations on output price. As yet, no one I know of has attempted that but the capital cost of battery storage appears to be the main cost element in battery storage output price.
Louis,
If they “get the cost down to 20 cents per kWh”, then the cost of their battery storage is still double that of a nuclear power plant. On top of that, we must add wind and solar and gas energy. It’s not hard to understand why power in Germany is three times as expensive as it is here in America. If this, if that, if the other, if if if... If you simply implement a technology that’s already half the cost of notional futuristic technologies that runs 24/7/365 for 2 to 3 times as long as any battery or wind turbine or photovoltaic panel in existence, requires 1 to 3 orders of magnitude less material and therefore energy input, and is a million times more energy dense than fossil fuels, but without the CO2 emissions, then you pay less money, no ifs or ands or buts about it.
That (photoshopped) image has me scratching my head even more! I thought the idea of the tower was you had arms that reached across and stabilised the rocket on the launch platform as per Saturn V launches.
louis wrote:Is it just me or does the orbital launch platform look too far distant from the launch tower? Can the tower be moved? Or am I just being stupid/taken in by an optical illusion?
https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/07/E5ZcuHcXEAYqIwI.jpeg?resize=768,574
Photoshopped image of Starship SN20 & Super Heavy on SpaceX’s Orbital Launch Mount. RGV Aerial Photography/Twitter
I think there was a big error in kbd's calculation but not sure if kbd accepts that...(see post above).
Anyway we are seeing very interesting developments all round. Void posted a link to http://www.novasolix.com/
What I particularly like about their presentation video is that, although they have a very good story to tell about efficiency, they realise it means nothing unless you can drive down price and destroy the competition. Essentially they are saying the same that I am - it's not EROI that is crucial, it's price and price reflects the amount of labour coming together in a product.
Whether novasolix has what it takes to make the grade we will see, but I like the concept and it's one that will work well on Mars.
I like the fact it's roll to roll - a printing process in effect.
With 90% efficiency rooftop solar could probably generate all your electricity.
Thanks Void, I will certainly be keeping an eye on this one! Of course, it's true they do have a long way to go but combine it with iron-air batteries and we probably have the final Holy Grail of green energy.
I believe that I posted this on the forum some other place but could not find it.
NovaSolixhttp://www.novasolix.com/
Quote:NovaSolix is developing the technology that will generate the cleanest and cheapest form of energy on Earth: rectifying antennas that convert light to electricity from the entire solar spectrum.
NANOSCALE ANTENNAS
NovaSolix’s carbon nanotube (CNT) antennas are small enough to match the nano-scale wavelengths of sunlight. Antennas can convert electromagnetic spectrum much more efficiently than photovoltaic (PV) cells. When perfected, NovaSolix antennas will capture far more energy from the sun, and far more efficiently, achieving near 90% efficiency (versus ~20% for PV).NANOSCALE DIODES
NovaSolix has successfully manufactured the world's fastest diode – a critical component for energy conversion.NANOSCALE MANUFACTURING
From the beginning, NovaSolix engineers have developed our products so that they can be manufactured using roll-to-roll advanced manufacturing techniques. At scale, these techniques ensure that NovaSolix’s products will be the cheapest form of energy on Earth.WORLD'S MOST EFFICIENT SOLAR ENERGY
Our solution, manufactured at scale, will enable solar energy to be produced at a cost per kWh less than fossil fuels.What I have read and listened to indicates that their devices will be non-toxic,
will cost 10% of what existing solar panels cost, and will be 45% efficient, and
then later 90% efficient.Of course they will need to actually do it.
So, if they achieve the 90% efficiency goal, is my mind correct to think that
some of the 10% will be reflected off, and some converted to heat?If this topic has been followed by the reader, you know that I am interested in
shading soils, and also cooling the sky.Solar panels are inclined to heat up, I presume, because they are so inefficient.
A Heliostat mirror should not heat up too much, if it is of high quality.So, on small installations, it does seem to me that these new devices could be
good in gardens.Might large installations create country "Cold Islands", and city "Heat Islands"?
Well my computer is bogging down.
Done
More good news - from Sweden which avoided a damaging lockdown, never made masks mandatory and followed sensible precautions without annihilating their economy. Covid deaths almost at zero.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl … eaths.html
Read and absorb and don't be taken in by the BS.
To understand why it will be next to impossible for a battery based solution to form the backbone of grid energy storage, take a look at historical records for wind electricity production in the UK.
These are hourly or daily averages. As the UK is a small land mass at the junction of three different weather systems, climate can be chaotic and unpredictable more than a day or two into the future. But it is not uncommon for wind speeds in the UK to drop very low for weeks at time and for wind electricity generation to drop to very low levels for days or weeks. What this means is that effective energy storage will need to store weeks worth of power. The problem this raises for batteries is that the economics of a battery improve the more intensely it is used. A battery that is charged and discharged regularly, several times a day, will store and discharge far more kWh than a battery that is only called upon once a year, say. This has a big effect on the marginal cost of storage of a unit of electricity. To put it another way, as battery size increases, so does its capital cost. But its utilisation rate plummets. A battery that is sized to store weeks worth of electric power, will be very costly to buy and it may only discharge a large part of its capacity a dozen or so times each year. This means that doubling battery capacity will not simply double the cost of storing an average kWh, it will square it.
Yes it's not unusual for wind speeds to drop to low for days but weeks? There is no evidence from the charts in that link for that claim.
The whole point of the Form Energy battery system is that you can store several days' worth of output in batteries. What we need to find is a realistic worst case scenario and then see what a hypothetical response based on Form Energy batteries would look like.
In doing so, you need to factor in the following:
1. Under any green energy plan not all energy will be produced by wind turbines. Your comments seem to imply that we might depend soley on wind.
2. An iron-air battery system would allow for heavy investment in solar power.
3. Generally there is a high correlation between low wind (a high in terms of atmospheric pressure) and elevated solar power (thanks to clear, cloudless skies). So for most of the days showing low wind generation in the graphs you would have correspondingly high solar power.
4. Under an iron-air battery system, the need to use hydro for baseload would disappear. Hydro can then be used as an additional emergency reserve (ie reservoirs would be kept topped up for such occasions). Hydro (including pumped storage) supplies about 2.5% of UK's electricity demand. There's no reason why that couldn't be raised to maybe 5% during a period of energy requirement.
5. A green energy system will also include provision for energy from waste, biofuels, tidal. sea current and wave power. Some of these (waste and biofuels) can be stored to a certain extent. So again, we can imagine these could be boosted to supply perhaps 10% of requirements. In addition there will be lithium ion storage being used for diurnal control and short term ouput management and I would also expect there to be a fair amount of hydrogen storage.
6. In addition to domestic supply, you would expect a green energy system to draw on a continental grid. The UK is already linked up to Norway, France and the Netherlands I believe. A connection to Iceland is under active consideration.
7. EV batteries could be used as an energy storage system.
Putting all the above in the mix, it's likely a Form Energy system would only have to cover 60% of output, and not for more than 3 or 4 days.
This is why in the real world, batteries are used for frequency control on grids and backup powerplants running on natural gas provide backup power. The battery serves the essential role of reducing the slew rate of a wind farm, allowing combined cycle gas turbines to be brought on line. These provide power during the long lull periods in wind power generation. These powerplants have relatively low capital cost and draw gas from huge million cubic metre LNG tanks that can store weeks worth of electricity demand at a relatively low price.
You seem to be living in the past. Yes this is how things have been done, but they won't be done that way if iron-air batteries live up to their promise.
The lesson is that for long-term energy storage, the storage medium itself must be very cheap and low in embodied energy, at least energy that humans have to invest. There are few things cheaper than a tank, filled with high energy density, rotten dinosaur juice that you didn't have to pay for and can just pump out of the ground. That is why we do things this way. But there are other options as well. One of the most promising options is thermal energy storage. People use a lot of heat, both for space heating, hot water and industrial processes. Heat is quite cheap to store. A tank of hot water, molten salt or lump of rock, is a very cheap way of storing energy and a lot can get stored in a small volume. Cold as well, is easy to store, in insulated refrigerators filled with phase change materials. These things will always be cheaper storage mediums than batteries. A large part of an energy storage solution is to be able to grid control demand for thermal services and to put in place thermal storage as a buffer between supply and demand.
See my post above. My guesstimate is that the cost of iron-air battery output could be 2.5 cents per KwHe
Having done that, about half to two-thirds of the area under that wind electricity chart can be stored cheaply as heat. If we draw a line along the chart at about 20% of peak capacity, we see that under that line, the number of lulls that we need to fill are much fewer and they are shorter. But these also are unsuitable for meeting with battery energy storage, because they are shortfalls lasting up to a few days and only occurring once or twice a month, on average. So you need to use something low cost to fill those troughs. This is where gas turbines (without waste heat boilers) come in. Modern stationary gas turbines are over 40% efficient and have very low capital cost and low operating cost, apart from fuel. That's good, because we only want to use them occasionally, but sometimes, for periods up to a week. A GT combined with an LNG or LPG tank meets this requirement. The total natural gas used over a whole year could be small. But it provides that cheap backup function needed to meet occasional lulls in supply, lasting days.
This combination: Offshore and onshore wind, grid controlled end use thermal energy storage, and LNG fuelled open cycle gas turbines, could provide a lot of useful electricity to the UK and other North Sea bordering countries at an affordable cost. It isn't a solution that would work worldwide and there are limits to what it can provide. But whole system EROI is respectable and total greenhouse gas emissions might be 10% of a coal based energy solution. Batteries would have a modest role in smoothing lull rates to a figure that grid operators and GT plants can tolerate. Batteries would also be useful in supplying short term peak loads, associated with specific events and smoothing short term peaks and troughs in demand and supply. A small but important role to play in overall storage strategy, with most longer term storage carried out either by liquefied natural gas storage or thermal energy storage, both of which can store energy for long periods very cheaply.
All the schemes involving molten salt and the like seem to have been big failures.
The best way to fill the troughs is with what is currently "surplus" wind and solar energy which is being earthed and costs effectively nothing at present. And if my calculation re iron-air batteries is correct, then it is a highly affordable system.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09988-z
This paper gives a figure of 10 cents per KwHe in 2019 for lithium ion batteries. That's pretty good in itself.
Clearly the iron-air batteries are going to be substantially cheaper than that. Given the capital cost of the I-A battery is something like
1/6th that of lithium ion my ball park estimate for the operational cost of the IA storage would be perhaps 2.5 cents per KwHe.
Remember, new nuclear is clocking in at something like 10 cents per KwHe.
Great news!
As an afterthought: my wife just got the news from her oncologist. They got it all. She's clean, no signs of spread. No need for further treatment other than a CAT scan every few years to monitor.
She is not on pain meds from the surgery. It will take time to recover her stamina. But she's doing fine.
GW