Lithium used for batteries

Spaniard · 2024-03-14 01:49:08

kbd512 wrote:

8,000,000,000,000kg of Copper * 12,000Wh/kg = 96,000,000,000,000,000Wh
96,000,000,000,000,000Wh = 96,000TWh
US annual electricity consumption: 4,000TWh

And again, your calculations has no sense. You don't explain where that copper amount come, but if it's about electric cars (as every electric car NOW has around 80 kg per car, 10 billion cars are
800,000,000,000kg

You missed a zero, so it's ten times lower.

AND, why compare the energy consumption of a construction over multiple years worldwide with the consumption of ONE year of ONE country?

Lets check against worldwide electricity.

25,500 twh worldwide 2022 * 30 year time frame

= 765,000 twh against 9,600 twh. Around 1,25%

That doesn't seems like a lot, considering that current PRIMARY energy consumption of the transport sector is around 25% of our total energy. Of course, passenger cars are just a fraction of that, but still.
We will need to raise electricity a lot more to feed that cars than the electricity used for mining materials. But of course, as a side effect, a lot of fossil fuel consumption will be reduced. While electricity will grow significantly, primary energy consumption will be reduced.

And by the way. I find a source that said that the consumption per ton is

https://www.ceecthefuture.org/resources … le&id=3701

24 GJ per ton, or 6,7 kwh per kg after conversion

Anyway. Not a great difference and we can add energy under the reasonable assumption that copper mining energy will rise over time, so I have no problem accepting your value. Even higher could be acceptable

Still, there is a great difference in numbers.

And of course, that electricity will come from renewables. The mix is changing already and it will continue to change. Yeah... 30 year timeframe is probably too optimistic for a COMPLETE replacement besides political claims, and I don't expect to be 100% by 2050-2060.
Still, a lot of less fossil fuel consumption, and even more oil reduction which is the most problematic resource in terms of exhaustion of the fossil fuels resources. Coal and natural gas are more abundant.

Spaniard · 2024-03-14 03:53:07

Ah. I also add that, of course, in the future, we will use a lot more aluminum than copper as you have guessed previously (I guess because it's a common argument against copper exhaustion)

How energy expensive is aluminum?

https://www.aluminium.fr/en/stake/energy/

13.5 MWh / t

So 13.5 kwh per kg. The previous numbers are not very different changing copper by aluminum.

The energy is not the most important criteria why we use copper today instead of aluminum. Copper is just has advantages in other aspects, so change will require new developments to mitigate the disadvantages of this material in certain usages.

The most important aspect is the greater oxidation of aluminum and sensibility to temperature changes vs cooper.
Solutions? How knows. New alloys? Better coatings? Sealed products?

I don't know about these things, but I know it's foolish to expect no changes and project linear numbers of consumption. It has no sense as exhaustion raises the prices, and higher prices stimulates solutions and changes.

It will be the same for PV panels, for example. They use around 20 grams of silver per kwh (although this number is changing quickly, the total power change even faster, so the consumption raise quickly).

For silver market is a great stress, so I expect that they will remove silver sooner than later. But panels with copper instead of silver has being developed already. It's just the price of silver is not important BY NOW, so there is no enough pressure to manufacturers to risk about fundamental changes in the panels that could bring new unknown problems. Until the price don't raise enough, they won't take the risk of that change.

With copper vs aluminum in things like wiring you can expect more or less the same evolution. First copper should raises significantly above aluminum alternative so it compensate the costs of the new problems. Then, as the market shift, there is a flux of money that helps in get better aluminum wiring and integration in products.

And to expect that humankind won't find solutions is the classical bet against humankind ingenuity and too much conservative considerations about the nonexistence solutions.

By the way, we have a MAYBE potential technology in the wiring area. Carbon nanotubes. Pretty much a lab curiosity by now. CN wiring already exists but it's not economical by far, so for now it's out of consideration.
Still, it's worth mentioning as the problem of CN is not the source material, but mainly manufacture. A breakthrough in this area could add a new contender to the wiring materials.

As I said... I don't bet against humankind ingenuity and non-existent solutions.

kbd512 · 2024-03-14 05:16:50

Spaniard,

This is not about "just the electric cars".

Making electric cars and plugging them into a coal-powered grid doesn't make any sense, does it?

You should know that after using the terms "all-electric" and "circular economy" at least a dozen times.

This is about all those photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and grid connected storage devices required.

We're going to make everything electric, remember?

Okay, bet.

How much Copper are you going to need?

Your energy figure for Aluminum represents just the minimum electrical energy required, not the total energy. Basically, your 13.5kWh/kg only applies to the electricity consumed by one part of the process.

Edit:
Since you're clearly not connecting all the dots here, the 8,000,000,000,000kg / 8,000,000,000t of Copper requirement comes from a calculation done by a PhD in mining engineering and geology on what the IEA's 70% renewable energy mix entails, which implies 70% of all energy comes from photovoltaics and wind turbines. It implies that a lot more batteries are required to store all that electrical power when, for example, Europe or America or any place in the northern or southern hemisphere has a little understood phenomenon known as "winter".

It comes from the average Copper consumption of all those devices, plus replacing 1.6 billion combustion engine passenger cars with electric vehicles. The EVs are a minor portion of the overall Copper consumption, as you noted.

Edit #2:
Energy Education - Aluminum

The extraction of aluminum is extremely energy intensive; it requires 190-230 megajoules of primary energy per kilogram of aluminum extracted and processed. This is known as aluminum's embodied energy.

1MJ (megajoule) = 0.277777778 kilowatt-hour

190MJ = 52.778kWh
230MJ = 63.889kWh

Edit #3:
You can substitute 8,000,000,000,000kg Copper with 4,000,000,000,000kg of Aluminum for equal ampacity.
4,000,000,000,000kg * 53,000Wh = 212,000,000,000,000,000 = 212,000TWh

212,000TWh / 4,000TWh = 53 years of America's total electric power consumption to get 4 billion tons of virgin Aluminum metal

There has not been 4 billion tons of Aluminum made since we started making Aluminum, so you're not recycling Aluminum that does not exist.

Making 1kg of CNT is more energy intensive than Aluminum BY A LOT!

CNT requires 36GJ/kg, or 36MJ/g

You need a lot less CNT for equal ampacity, but you still need a lot. You're not going to get wiring for lower energy input than Copper. That's really the bottom line.

Do you understand yet, why we use Copper?

Last edited by kbd512 (2024-03-14 05:53:42)

kbd512 · 2024-03-14 06:58:54

Spaniard,

If Lithium was the only metal we had to figure out how to get, I would say it's not a problem. We'll figure it out. That's not what we have going on here. We need Lithium, Copper, Aluminum, Silver, Silicon, rare Earths, CNT, and the list goes on. Then we have to transform all that metal into machines that make or store energy. Then we have to recycle all of it and make new machines from what we recycled. It's too much stuff, too many changes, and the overall complexity doesn't lend itself to sustainability. We need to be strategic about what we choose to change, because those changes must have maximum impact. EVs are symbolic. They don't make any sense, except in a symbolic way.

Spaniard · 2024-03-14 07:07:44

Again mixing countries and worldwide.

Let's take that 1 kg of aluminum cost 70 kwh.

Let's say that you use 100 kg (probably too much) to make a 60 kwh car. So 7 Mwh spent in aluminum

I gonna be conservative and I'm gonna say that we will retire the car after 500 cycles (it can support a lot more)
Did you notice that the car uses across it's life 60x500 = 30 Mwh of electricity just for moving?

The cost of fabrication is not the biggest part! It's just a fraction. Of course you need to add more, to the lithium and other elements, but there is a significant margin for that.

And if you compare that energy, with the energy used by a internal combustion car through, let's say, 200.000 km of life, let's be generous and said 5 liters per 100 km, that's 10.000 liters of gasoline, 342 GJ or 95 Mwh.

Of course to run an electricity based civilization we will need to multiply our electricity consumption. In exchange, we will reduce the rest of the primary energy by a lot.

And after the end of life of the car, that aluminum enter the circular economy.

Besides, you insist in linear projections. If you were done that to the PV industry 20 years ago you will be conclude that the industry had been collapsed years ago.

Why? Because the PV industry reduced the silver consumption per panel.
Even if the total has increased, and that's the reason I expect the industry will finally migrate from silver to copper, the thing is that the consumption hasn't been linear.

You are doing the same mistake here.

kbd512 · 2024-03-14 07:32:43

Spaniard,

I'm not "mixing" anything. I'm stating that to get the quantity of metal required for the IEA's 70% renewable energy mix and use of EVs, we need to add an electrical energy equivalent of the entire annual electrical energy consumption of the United States of America for the next 20 to 50 years, to make that happen. Mines use lots of electricity, but it's not generated by solar panels or wind turbines.

If you plug an EV into a grid powered by coal and gas, what did you accomplish, except for moving the sources of emissions around to EV production and electrical power generation?

Edit:
As we increase the amount of wind and solar power and EVs by orders of magnitude, do you also get an orders of magnitude decrease in the consumption of metals required by those energy generating or consuming machines?

Or do you need orders of magnitude more metal?

Efficiency can improve over time, but by how much? Electric motors are 96%+ efficient in EVs.

Do you think we can make them over 100% efficient?

This quote from a research paper on Aluminum production was from 10 years ago:

One billion tonnes of aluminum has been produced in history.

The machines you want will require 4 billion metric tons of Aluminum. Call me crazy, but I think you're going to burn coal like mad to make that much more Aluminum, so whatever emissions offset you think will be achieved will vanish over the period of time when this massive increase in metals demand takes place, and on the other end of it you're hoping that we can drastically reduce emissions and that we can implement a circular economy because everything is electrical.

I want to see how that math is supposed to work. All you've done thus far is make a bunch of vague assertions about the future.

I think we're greatly increasing both CO2 emissions and consumption of specialty metals to crazy high levels, that no emissions offset or circular economy will ever be achieved that way, and that you're using assertions about future energy efficiency increases or substitutions of metals, which simply don't exist at the present time. It's not a plan. It's a hope that something dramatic and fantastic improvement in efficiency and decrease in consumption happens in the future, without details about how that's going to happen.

Last edited by kbd512 (2024-03-14 08:11:29)

kbd512 · 2024-03-14 08:23:25

Me: Let's wave our magic wand here. Abracadabra!

POOF!

Me: All 1.6 billion motor vehicles just became EVs. Forget about how we got here. That doesn't matter, because magic just happened. We are here now. 8% of hydrocarbon energy consumption just disappeared.

Crowd: HOORAY!

Me: We can pat ourselves on the back for that. Go ahead, y'all, you deserve it. What about the other 92% of hydrocarbon energy consumption?

Crowd: ...crickets...

Me: Do we understand the scale of this problem yet? Why were we so fixated on that 8% solution?

Calliban · 2024-03-14 09:01:03

Lets look at the resource requirements involved in replacing the entire world car fleet with EVs. We can then compare these requirements with existing mining capacity. I will start with cars. As of 2024, there are 1.475 billion cars in the world. I will round it up to 1.5bn, as we should expect some growth from the 3rd world.
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2021/06/ … the-world/

How much of each type of material do we need to build a single electric car? The IEA provides some figures in the link below.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics … ional-cars

I will focus on 5 in particular, copper, nickel, lithium, manganese and cobalt. Below are my estimates from the graph:
Copper: 55kg
Lithium: 10kg
Nickel: 40kg
Manganese: 24kg
Cobalt: 14kg

For 1.5bn cars, the total requirements are:

Copper 82.5m tonnes.
Lithium: 15m tonnes.
Nickel: 60m tonnes.
Manganese: 36m tonnes.
Cobalt: 21m tonnes.

Global production of copper, lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt, were 21.55 million, 130 thousand, 3.3 million, 18 million and 170 thousand tonnes, respectively.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … production
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/lith … ?tab=chart
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … production
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … production
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coba … ?tab=chart

Producing 1.5bn EVs would consume 3.83 years of copper production, 115 years of lithium production, 18 years of nickel, 2 years of manganese and 124 years of cobalt.

This is just for the first generation of cars. It doesn't cover trucks, trains, planes or ships. It doesn't cover the minerals needed for the extra generating capacity, transmission infrastructure or charging equipment. I will attempt to cover those in a future post. But we can already see that replacing the global car fleet with EVs is going to require scaling up mining significantly. If the average EV lasts for 10 years, then global copper production must increase 40%, lithium, by 11.5x, nickel production must triple, manganese production must increase 20% and cobalt mining must increase by 12.4x. It isn't clear that this will be possible at all. It will certainly involve significant environmental impact and a sizable increase in energy consumption in mining, ore processing and reduction. And we are doing this for an end use that accounts for about 10% of global fossil fuel energy consumption and CO2 emissions.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/trans … s-and-vans

It doesn't look like a good strategy from where I sit. And this is only looking at the cars and ignoring the other supporting infrastructure.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-03-14 09:12:56)

kbd512 · 2024-03-14 10:19:54

1,600,000,000 motor vehicles
40kg of Lithium per 100kWh battery, per vehicle
Total battery storage capacity for all vehicles: 160TWh
Total Lithium metal required: 64,000,000,000kg / 64,000,000t

That is just the tip of the iceberg for this all-electric future circular reasoning economics silliness.

24,398TWh was the 2022 total global electrical energy consumption. Daily consumption was therefore 66.844TWh.

To store power for 24 hours, we need 26,737,600t of additional Lithium.

To store power for 60 days, which is equal to the global supply of oil energy reserves kept on-hand at any given time for on-demand energy, we now need 1,604,256,000t of Lithium.

What "magic" is there to 60 days?

We have this thing that happens every year that we call "winter". It's a period of about 3 months, but the cycle is actually 6 months. 50% of the time we're either above or below the average annual power output. When we're below, our options are storing power or increasing the size of the solar and wind turbine arrays. On a graph, ambient power from the Sun looks like a near-perfect sine wave, because it corresponds with the orbital periodicity of the Earth, around the Sun. During the winter, solar insolation drops by about half of the value we see during the thing we call "summer", so the ambient energy available for extraction and consumption or storage drops by at least half.

We will either go without power during the winter (seems like a bad idea), store power during the summer when power is available (seems like the best idea), or we will more than double the size of the wind turbine and photovoltaic farms to account for the effects of winter and summer (seems like we need to double the tonnage of conductor wire metal). If we don't store any power, then we're going to double the amount of Copper, Aluminum, Silicon, and other metals required to build out our solar and wind turbine farms.

If summer is 1000W/m^2, and you get 25%, that's 250W/m^2.

If winter is 500W/m^2, and you still get 25% (because of how solar arrays work, you won't), that's 125W/m^2.

If your society's power requirement is constant, meaning you require 250W from your solar array, regardless of the time of year, summer or winter, then your options are doubling the size of your solar array or storing half the power generated or going without power.

The 8 billion tons of Copper or 4 billion tons of Aluminum figure assumes we're going to store energy in batteries so we don't need to double the size of the solar array. If we don't store any energy on our grid, then we need 16 billion tons of Copper or 8 billion tons of Aluminum. If we're going to produce 8 billion tons of Aluminum, then we're going to consume the same amount of electricity that the entire United States of America consumed during the year 2023, for the next 106 years.

Since that power cannot come from photovoltaics or wind turbines that need the metal to make energy, it's going to come from burning coal and gas. Maybe some of it can come from nuclear reactors or geothermal power.

AFTER AND ONLY AFTER THE ARRAY HAS BEEN BUILT, if we double its size we will have a surplus of energy in the summer that we can do something with the surplus energy, like mining or smelting more metals.

If our society was counting on getting that 250W of power, there are only two ways of guaranteeing that they get their power:
1. Energy storage (batteries are the most electrically efficient by a lot, if we go this route)
2. Doubling the size of the installed electric generating capacity (doubling the metal required)

Per previous basic math, producing 4 billion tons of virgin Aluminum metal will require 212,000TWh of energy. Over 20 years, that would be 10,600TWh of additional electrical power demand / consumption per year. 24,398TWh was the total global electrical power consumption figure from 2022. Does anyone here think we're going to get to this all-electric circular economy without burning coal like it's going out of style, for at least the next 20 years.

What happens 20 years into the future, from the time we started?

The first year's production of solar panels and wind turbines starts to wear out and must be replaced, which means we need to replace them using more metal. Producing all that virgin metal, as opposed to recycling metal that didn't exist or was already in-use when we started, required an insane energy input. When we recycle the first metal from the old / worn out machines, we will, hopefully, consume a lot less energy. In aggregate, at the present time 75% of the Aluminum is recycled and about 25% is lost. We need to get that figure closer to 95%, considering the quantities of Aluminum involved. The problem, of course, is that the initial energy input was 43% of the present total global annual electrical energy consumption. Now we're going to attempt the same thing without using any coal or oil, or at least I hope that's the plan. Otherwise, this was just another excuse to burn more coal and oil without accomplishing anything. At the present time, renewable energy build-out is failing to keep up with the rate of energy demand increase. I expect that to change in the future due to demographics, but I would be as guilty of cherry-picking idealized operating scenarios as Spaniard if I was relying on that trend to hold forever.

Calliban · 2024-03-14 10:44:16

Unless there are *substantial* investments in grid energy storage, charging electric vehicles is going to play havoc with electricity grids. The problem isn't so much their total annual energy consumption, it is the power needed if people charge these devices at specific times. Fast charging infrastructure will make this worse. It is a problem because people tend to have similar daily cycles. They finish work at 5pm, drive home and many will put their cars on charge, there and then. If more than a small fraction of cars charge at the same time, the load on the grid will dwarf existing generating capacity.
*****************************************

The total number of cars on the road in the UK has hit 35 million, which amounts to more than 1 for every 2 people.
https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-news/ … in-the-uk/

Let us imagine that these were all replaced by EVs. What if 10% of these vehicles (3.5m) were to be charged simultaneously? How much power capacity would need to be added to the grid?

Tesla superchargers can charge at rates of 250kW. Destination chargers tend to charge at a more modest 22kW.
https://www.whatcar.com/news/tesla-supe … now/n26239

But they do this more slowly, making it likely that a greater percentage of cars will be charging at the same time. If 3.5m cars are charged at a rate of 250kW, then total load added to the grid will be 875GWe. After four decades of deindustrialisation, UK baseload power consumption is 30GWe. So fast EV charging woukd exceed UK baseload capacity by 29 times if 10% of vehicles charged simultaneously. Green tech enthusiasts like to point out that 1/3rd of the kWh provided to the UK grid are now provided by renewables. Fast charging exceeds the UKs renewable power production by a factor of 90.

If the majority of charges take place at the more modest 22kWe power level of a destination charger, the situation will be easier. Some 3.5m vehicles charging at 22kWe would add 77GWe to the grid. This would require us to triple the UKs generating capacity.

A Tesla 3 consumes about 1kWh for every 7km driven. The average UK car drives 6600 miles, or 10,619km per year. This would consume some 1517kWh of battery power, requiring about 1700kWh of charging energy. Some 35m cars would consume 59.5bn kWh per year, or 59.5TWh. This is about 20% of UK annual electrical energy consumption. This appears to make the task appear achievable, but it ignores the issue that charging can result in extreme power loads on the grid unless a way is found to store the huge quantities of electricity needed for charging.

'Storage' is the classic answer that gets thrown around when dealing with mismatch between grid supply and demand. But electricity storage would mean installing even more grid batteries close to charging points, or some other mechanism using flywheels, CAES, thermal energy storage, hydrogen, etc. The most affordable option for dealing with large changes in load is open-cycle gas turbines, consuming natural gas. If cost is any consideration, then this is how it will end up being done. But one does have to question the wisdom of replacing gasoline or diesel powered cars with electric cars and then producing the electricity using natural gas. It would reduce air pollution at street level, but doesn't really help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions of transportation.

Calliban · 2024-03-14 11:39:37

I have been doing similar calculations to KBD512 in parallel. But we seem to be getting about the same answers.

Below is a link to the 2015 Quadrennial energy review, produced by the US department of energy.
https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-tech … eview-2015

Go to Section 10, Table 10.4 for a summary of materials inputs into several different types of powerplant in ton/TWh. Here are some tallys per TWh:

Nuclear (PWR) = 760t concrete / cement; 3t copper; 0t glass; 160t steel; 0t aluminium.
Wind = 8000t concrete / cement; 23t copper; 92t glass; 1800t steel; 35t aluminium.
Solar PV = 4050t concrete / cement; 850t copper; 2700t glass; 7900t steel; 680t aluminium.

The world uses some 25,343TWh of electricity each year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … onsumption

Lets ignore resource requirements for storage. Lets further assume that electricity demand is stable, it is all somehow met by a 50/50 mix of wind and solar and we build new Solar PV and wind powerplants to replace the ones that fail. How much copper, aluminium and steel would be needed?

Assuming a 50/50 PV and wind electricity mix, the amount of materials needed per TWh would be: copper - 437te, aluminium - 358te, steel - 4850te. Multiplying by 25,343 gives:

copper - 11,074,891te = 0.51x existing global production
aluminium - 9,021,600te = 0.14x existing global production
steel - 122,220,000te = 0.066x existing global production

In other words, to produce existing global electricity demand from an equal mix of PV and wind, ignoring transmission and storage, we would need to increase copper production by 50%, aluminium production by 14% and increase steel production by 6.6%. All of this would somehow have to be done using renewable electricity if we are to actually reduce GHG emissions. These figures are for existing primary electricity demand. If we want things like energy storage to balance supply with demand, electric cars, electric trains and trucks and electric heat pump based heating, the required quantities increase substantially. I have already shown that replacing the existing car fleet with EVs, without anything else, requires a 40% increase in copper production.

The popular narrative is that the world is in the process of transitioning to an electrical energy base, with most of that electricity being provided by a mixture of solar and wind power. But this doesn't appear to be possible on the existing resource base of minerals, absent a dramatic change in technology. One option that I did consider was direct use of wind power with minimal storage. In some cases, wind could even provide direct mechanical power. As can be seen from the DOE figures referenced above, wind power is a more sustainable option than solar PV from a materials viewpoint. But it is highly variable, both regionally and temporally. It isn't a viable option for all localities and living on intermittent wind energy would present a very different way of life to what we are accustomed to.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-03-14 13:20:28)

Terraformer · 2024-03-14 11:59:17

What I'm getting from these sorts of discussions is that they're about driving.

We know how to electrify trains without using batteries, and we have plenty of options besides batteries (compressed/liquid air, pumped hydro, flywheels) for grid energy storage to at least give a couple days buffer when the wind dies down. Plus, of course, nearly all domestic energy use being for hot water, which is really not that hard to store either. But those options don't work for automobiles, hence the big push for batteries.

Spaniard · 2024-03-14 12:50:58

Calliban wrote:

In other words, to produce existing global electricity demand from an equal mix of PV and wind, ignoring transmission and storage, we would need to increase copper production by 50%, aluminium production by 14% and increase steel production by 6.6%. All of this would somehow have to be done using renewable electricity if we are to actually reduce GHG emissions. These figures are for existing primary electricity demand. If we want things like energy storage to balance supply with demand, electric cars, electric trains and trucks and electric heat pump based heating, the required quantities increase substantially. I have already shown that replacing the existing car fleet with EVs, without anything else, requires a 40% increase in copper production.

Of course we will need a lot more.

And?

You can multiple even by 4 the consumption. It's what will happen probably as a lot of primary energy shift from thermal into electricity.

Of course, with the scale, the numbers are not linear. Because it's very probable that copper will turn less competitive than aluminum in that context, so we will mine less than the linear projections, and more aluminum (it's a guess, but a reasonable one).

Aluminum is not even close to have a problem with reserves.

We will stop to spend energy and resources in some areas, like fossil fuel, and expend on another, in this case electrification.
Deploy renewables consume resources. Stop using fossil fuels save them. It's a trade off.

The difference is as we approach high levels of deployment, more and more circular economy gains weight. The numbers under the first deployment stage are different from a second time.
Also it's not a sudden transition from fossil fuels to renewables, but a gradual one, when some resources less weight and others gains in exchange.
And yes... Metals gain weight in a renewable scenario. A lot.

You are thinking in the extra energy invested in more mining, but you also must account the mining we won't do (like coal) as the emissions associated with that, including the direct consumption of that resource.
Replace coal for renewable SAVE a lot of GHG, no matter you add more emissions in the mining stage.

If you only adds the new consumption but doesn't remove the old one, of course you will obtain that the transition has no sense.

But that's not how it works.

kbd512 · 2024-03-14 13:22:18

Spaniard,

Nobody here said getting Aluminum was a problem. This is another straw man argument. I said getting Copper and Lithium was a problem.

I told you to look at the energy input required to smelt enough Aluminum to make everything electric, because that's what this is really about.

You seem to think if we make everything electric, then magic will happen and we'll quit burning coal, oil, and gas.

Q: Where does the energy to make Aluminum come from?
A: Coal and gas. All of it. None of it comes from renewable energy.

Q: Why does it come from coal and gas?
A: If the Aluminum ever solidifies after the plant starts operations, then that smelter is a write-off. It will not be economical to restart operations because a lot of the equipment will be ruined. You're not going to run that on intermittent power. You're going to run it on coal and gas, which is exactly what we are doing right now.

Q: If you're going to run an Aluminum smelter off of renewable / intermittent energy, what does that imply?
A: It implies a huge amount of electrical energy storage to keep the Aluminum liquid.

Q: How are we going to get to this scenario where we stop burning coal when the plan involves burning as much coal, just to make Aluminum, as the entire rest of the world consumes?
A: That's what I'd love to know!

If you only adds the new consumption but doesn't remove the old one, of course you will obtain that the transition has no sense.
But that's not how it works.

That's exactly how it works, Spaniard!

Look at a silly energy consumption chart already. Nothing has ever been replaced. It's all additive over time. We used to burn dung for energy. Guess what? WE'RE STILL BURNING DUNG FOR ENERGY! Nothing has actually changed. We have coal, oil, gas, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal... and we're burning more dung today than we ever did in the past. It's a smaller percentage of the energy mix, but it never went away. Everything is additive over time. Nothing is being replaced. The demand just keeps going up. What you want to attempt will make sure demand for energy goes way up, up, and away!

I want to know what fantasy world you live in where this is not happening. You've at least seen the CO2 emission chart, right?

That's never gone down, has it?

I wonder why.

kbd512 · 2024-03-14 13:32:31

What does the chart show us?

Is it going down or up over time?

Spaniard · 2024-03-14 15:21:24

kbd512 wrote:

Spaniard,
Nobody here said getting Aluminum was a problem. This is another straw man argument. I said getting Copper and Lithium was a problem.

But you did a linear projection like no copper could be replaced what it's wrong.

kbd512 wrote:

Q: Where does the energy to make Aluminum come from?
A: Coal and gas. All of it. None of it comes from renewable energy.

Aluminum is down throw ELECTRICITY (well... almost).

And electricity come from a mix, so your argument is FALSE.

Not only false, but even if you claim that the renewables are a low fraction of the mix, while globally is true, it's not a fixed thing. Renewable are growing a lot faster than other energy sources for electricity.

kbd512 wrote:

A: If the Aluminum ever solidifies after the plant starts operations, then that smelter is a write-off. It will not be economical to restart operations because a lot of the equipment will be ruined. You're not going to run that on intermittent power. You're going to run it on coal and gas, which is exactly what we are doing right now.

Sorry but no. You don't need coal for that. You need HEAT.

And heat can be easily stored in a time scale of hours, even maybe week assuming a slightly lose.
Not only that but you are arguing that engineers can't design a plant that can stop safely. What a joke.
Of course you need to design a plant that work on some way if you want to take advantage of cheaper energy.
And yes... Even if it's designed for allowing stopping and starting from time to time, I DON'T expect this kind of plants stops every night. They will integrate opportunistic energy (like heat storage), production regulation (faster or slower) and the rest of the storage will be provided by external services, whatever they were.
It doesn't need to be batteries. Batteries are economical in some scenarios, like hour storage and frequency control. I don't expect to be the technology to store days. And things like seasons, HERE is were industry demand will work best.
Of course, very electric intensive on winter can stop, in numbers make sense. But it's not the same to stop once in a while that EVERY day.

kbd512 wrote:

Q: If you're going to run an Aluminum smelter off of renewable / intermittent energy, what does that imply?
A: It implies a huge amount of electrical energy storage to keep the Aluminum liquid.

As I said, thermal storage. Something like having another metal with a higher melting point that it has no problem to go through intermittent solid-liquid phase change and use that as a constant source of heat as a thermal buffer.
Maybe Iron? I don't know about this. But I can say that you lack imagination to don't be able to see a possible solution.

kbd512 wrote:

Q: How are we going to get to this scenario where we stop burning coal when the plan involves burning as much coal, just to make Aluminum, as the entire rest of the world consumes?
A: That's what I'd love to know!

Pretty much because aluminum is mainly processed with electricity, so, what's the problem about running aluminum plants with renewable electricity? There is none.
Of course there are a lot of machines like in the mining phase that STILL run on fossil fuels. It's a gradual thing. I said before.

But I don't see anything that can't be replaced by an electricity alternative. Some are more easy of replacement than another. Other requires a lot of work yet.
For example we practically just made first pilot plant of non-coal steel. IT will take time before the firsts real plants start to run significant quantities and even more to make competitive steel.
But everything starts the same way. Some things are faster than others.

kbd512 wrote:

That's exactly how it works, Spaniard!

No. It's not. You are clearly doing bad numbers and claiming that the people that does the numbers are in the wrong.

kbd512 wrote:

Look at a silly energy consumption chart already. Nothing has ever been replaced.

Of course it does. It's just if EVERYTHING is growing at the same time, the total numbers can still growing. It doesn't mean that in you lack renewables the consumption were the same. That's just FALSE.

Until now, the renewable were a fraction so small of the consumption that it has no impact in the global consumption.

kbd512 wrote:

Guess what? WE'RE STILL BURNING DUNG FOR ENERGY! Nothing has actually changed. We have coal, oil, gas, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal... and we're burning more dung today than we ever did in the past. It's a smaller percentage of the energy mix, but it never went away. Everything is additive over time. Nothing is being replaced. The demand just keeps going up. What you want to attempt will make sure demand for energy goes way up, up, and away!

We are just starting!
And population is still growing!

What do you expect? I doesn't matter if renewable accounts 7% and total energy grows 7%. In that scenario fossil fuels don't decrease.

But... what will happen when renewables grow faster than the consumption? Of course fossil fuels will decrease.
We aren't in that point already, but renewable growing is exponential, and the share is growing, so it's matter of time, not a fixed thing as you expose.

Look at the share.

kbd512 · 2024-03-14 16:39:42

Spaniard,

But you did a linear projection like no copper could be replaced what it's wrong.

No, I did not. Respond to an argument I actually made. You keep interjecting your beliefs about what I said as a substitute for what was actually said.

And electricity come from a mix, so your argument is FALSE.

Where is the energy to make Aluminum actually coming from?

Show me an Aluminum smelter that's not using coal and gas for nearly all of its energy input.

Not only false, but even if you claim that the renewables are a low fraction of the mix, while globally is true, it's not a fixed thing. Renewable are growing a lot faster than other energy sources for electricity.

Again, I never said or implied any such thing. What I did imply, was that since 95% of the input energy is coming from coal, oil, and gas, that is the energy source that will be used to make these incredible quantities of metal that don't presently exist.

Sorry but no. You don't need coal for that. You need HEAT.

As of right now, in the real world, all of the HEAT is coming from burning coal, oil, and gas.

And heat can be easily stored in a time scale of hours, even maybe week assuming a slightly lose.

Yes, heat can be stored. You need energy to make the materials to store that heat energy. Since we can already see that 95% of the heat energy is coming from burning something, that is where it will come from to make this new heat energy storage facility.

Of course, very electric intensive on winter can stop, in numbers make sense. But it's not the same to stop once in a while that EVERY day.

You actually think a metal smelter is going to stop making metal and lay everyone off, and then they'll magically start making metal again in the summer with brand new employees?

As I said, thermal storage. Something like having another metal with a higher melting point that it has no problem to go through intermittent solid-liquid phase change and use that as a constant source of heat as a thermal buffer.

Ah, yes, more metal. The answer to the problem of needing an enormous quantity of metal, all of which is presently produced by burning something, is to simply make even more metal.

Pretty much because aluminum is mainly processed with electricity, so, what's the problem about running aluminum plants with renewable electricity? There is none.

If you think you're going to start and stop an Aluminum smelter whenever the weather cooperates, then you're pretty much the only person who thinks that. Nobody who actually runs a metal smelter does that. This is not a home blacksmithing shop. It's a major industrial operation that has machines covering multiple football fields.

But I don't see anything that can't be replaced by an electricity alternative. Some are more easy of replacement than another. Other requires a lot of work yet.

Again, I didn't say it couldn't be replaced. I said nothing is actually being replaced. We're just consuming more and more energy from all sources, but most of it is coal, oil, and gas, not renewable energy.

For example we practically just made first pilot plant of non-coal steel. IT will take time before the firsts real plants start to run significant quantities and even more to make competitive steel.

How is the vast overwhelming majority of steel made on planet Earth?

No. It's not. You are clearly doing bad numbers and claiming that the people that does the numbers are in the wrong.

If showing you a chart of actual global energy consumption is your definition of "doing bad numbers", then guilty as charged. I'm going to remember that one. Don't show me ugly reality, because I'm living my best life in "future land".

Of course it does. It's just if EVERYTHING is growing at the same time, the total numbers can still growing. It doesn't mean that in you lack renewables the consumption were the same. That's just FALSE.

Everything is growing because we're burning more fuel. Not just a little bit more, a lot more.

What do you expect? I doesn't matter if renewable accounts 7% and total energy grows 7%. In that scenario fossil fuels don't decrease.

I expected that at some point you'd get the idea that the one and only reason that green energy is growing is because hydrocarbon fuel energy consumption is providing 100% of that growth.

But... what will happen when renewables grow faster than the consumption? Of course fossil fuels will decrease.

Renewables depend upon an absurd amount of consumption, Spaniard. They don't grow without consumption. Do you really not understand that?

Hydrocarbon fuels are providing all of the energy input to make the metals for renewables and to power the factories that make these green energy machines.

We aren't in that point already, but renewable growing is exponential, and the share is growing, so it's matter of time, not a fixed thing as you expose.

Take away all the coal, oil, and gas if you really believe that renewables are capable of growing exponentially on their own. When you don't get any new green energy machines after the coal / oil / gas are cut off, come talk to me after you figure out why.

Yes, please look at the share. Tell me if you can find it on the chart.

Calliban · 2024-03-14 17:57:29

So far, intermittent renewables have generated small quantities of expensive electricity. The concept of the RE transition falls to pieces if it has to do the heavy lifting for the global economy. That is to say, producing the energy needed for things like mining, ore smelting, industrial high heat, synthesising organic feedstocks for plastics, global transportation of goods and people, provision of space heating and hot water, manufacturing of concrete and tar feedstocks for roads, etc.

Wind and solar combined, constituted 11.7% of global electricity production in 2022.
https://www.worldenergydata.org/world-e … eneration/

But electricity is only about 20% of delivered energy. The remainder is fuels, used for transportation, heating (including industrial high heat) and direct chemical feedstocks. So far, wind and solar power constitute 2.3% of delivered energy worldwide.
https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-e … onsumption

But even as a minor contributor to electricity production, intermittent renewables have not reduced installed fossil fuelled generating capacity at all. Why is that? Because wind and solar power are not reliable. To function in a grid that requires continuous balance between supply and demand, they must be backed up by fossil fuelled generating capacity that can be brought online when windspeed drops or the sun is obscured. This means that the capital and operating costs of intermittent renewable electricity sources are in addition to those of the fossil fuelled electricity system. The only thing that the RE can do, is to save a modest amount of fuel consumed in the fossil power station. That saves some cost, but it means investing in two sets of generating infrastructure, to do the job that one did in the past. It also requires additional investments in transmission infrastructure and frequency control, due to the dispersed nature of renewables and their rapid variability. These costs greatly outweigh the money saved by modestly reducing fuel consumption.

This is why every country that has invested heavily in intermittent renewables has seen rapidly increasing electricity costs. And even places where intermittent RE has made the greatest inroads, like Germany, Denmark and UK, it contributes no more than 30% of electricity consumed, and has barely scratched the surface of the other 80% of delivered energy end uses. The Germans now claim that 17% of their total energy consumption is met by renewables and 42% electricity. But even this modest achievement is misleading. The Germans dump huge amounts of excess energy onto the the European electrical grid in times of plenty and become Europe's biggest electricity importer when wind and solar fall short. They count this dumped electricity in their production figures. When the war with Russia cut off Germany's access to cheap natural gas, their manufacturing sector folded like a house of cards. RE has proven capable of substituting a small proportion of the 20% of energy that is consumed as electricity. But its inroads elsewhere have been pitiful.

In space heating, one unit of electricity can provide 3 or more units of heat, i.e. using a heat pump. This is an example of how electricity might reduce our delivered energy consumption. But to do this, we need a much more expensive heating system. In most cases, if we want electricity to do what FF do now, it will take at least 1kWh of electricity to substitute 1kWh of fossil fuel. If you need high heat 100°C>, you must use a resistance heater, induction heater or a synthesised fuel like hydrogen. An electric car replaces the mechanical work done by an engine with the work of an electric motor. But the work energy required remains the same and the EV has huge embodied energy in its manufacture, equivelent to several years of fuel consumption in a standard car. Imagine if all of that mining and ore processing had to be done with renewable electricity. Could we even afford the EV? Imagine the cost of having to provide the high heat needed to make concrete (1500°C), will hydrogen derived from renewable electricity? Electricity is 20% of world delivered energy consumption today. To meet all energy needs using RE, that proportion needs to triple or quadruple.

To produce 4x as much electricity as we use today using an equal mix of wind and solar, will require global copper production to triple. If we replace ICE cars with EVs, then copper production must be about 7x what we have today. These are just maintenance levels of copper production. For a rapid energy transition, production must increase even more. How realistic is that, in a world where copper ore grades are declining and the energy needed to produce each kg of copper is increasing? We can repeat this example for each of the resources involved.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-03-14 18:42:13)

Terraformer · 2024-03-15 02:32:31

Re. grid stability, flywheels are making inroads; there are a few projects ongoing in Britain. Very good for frequency response, and efficient enough in the short term. I think for peak shaving and stabilising the grid they're a good option. Still leaves us with the low wind winter weeks to deal with, but at least the grid won't *crash*. I suspect the reason they aren't used a lot more is that Li-ion has the advantages of being scaled for the automotive industry. If we were setting out to develop specifically grid storage we wouldn't pick Li-ion, its being used for that purpose because a lot of money has already gone into them for electric vehicle production.

The Status and Future of Flywheel Energy Storage

Spaniard · 2024-03-15 10:07:29

Calliban wrote:

But even as a minor contributor to electricity production, intermittent renewables have not reduced installed fossil fuelled generating capacity at all. Why is that? Because wind and solar power are not reliable.

No. It's not.

It's because solar and wind deployment started to accelerate almost just two decades ago, and the total renewable was too small to hit over the growth of total consumption.
Because world population is still growing and developed countries are still growing energy per capita. It has a top, as children per woman has already peaked and developed countries has stabilized their energy per capita time ago. But that scenario is at least half century, probable one, to reach a worldwide peak of consumption.

In other words... We need time to escalate production every year to start to add quantities enough big to grow faster than the global demand. That point will mark the moment in that fossil fuels will decrease every year.

But as renewable grows exponential, it can go from insignificant to minor player, to major player in few years. We are in the minor player stage, while just ten years ago where in the "insignificant" category.

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

That time when fossil fuels won't need to grow more will come very soon.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/15/busi … index.html

You can find a variety of forecasts, but most expect coal to peak at less than one decade. From this year up to 2032 in worse case scenario (of serious studies, not propaganda), just because the assume different scenarios like the renewable growth or the economic growth that change the numbers.

Not even one considers than renewable doesn't reduce fossil fuel consumption. And intermittency only has serious consideration when networks has beyond certain levels of renewable. Definitely is not a problem for a network with 10 or 20% renewable.
There are multiple strategies to that scenarios, but we aren't there yet, so as an argument about why now.

But take notice that:
- Renewable impacts more over coal (electricity production competition)
- EV impacts over oil (fuel competition)
- Stationary storage will impact over natural gas (electricity on demand competition)

Different technologies, different stage of development, different effects. That's the reason because we shouldn't expect natural gas to slow down in short term, while oil it's quickly entering in the doubt phase as BEV are growing faster than previous predictions.

That doesn't mean that coal, oil and natural gas is only used in the sectors where there is this competition. It's just that sectors (electricity, mobility and electricity power management) has a significant consumption of these resources so the removal of that will push further reductions. Besides that other sectors has their own battles. Just they are less known and more specific.

There is no need to repeat ourselves. It's enough short term to just wait some years to see. Of course we will need to wait at least other two or three years to confirm the new trend, but... close enough I guess.

Calliban wrote:

To function in a grid that requires continuous balance between supply and demand, they must be backed up by fossil fuelled generating capacity that can be brought online when windspeed drops or the sun is obscured.
This means that the capital and operating costs of intermittent renewable electricity sources are in addition to those of the fossil fuelled electricity system.

Or storage.
Or management on the demand side.

Calliban wrote:

The only thing that the RE can do, is to save a modest amount of fuel consumed in the fossil power station.

Not necessary modest in the electricity mix. And with electrification, at the whole consumption.

Calliban wrote:

That saves some cost, but it means investing in two sets of generating infrastructure, to do the job that one did in the past. It also requires additional investments in transmission infrastructure and frequency control, due to the dispersed nature of renewables and their rapid variability.

That's true, up to certain point. It require some investment but...

Calliban wrote:

These costs greatly outweigh the money saved by modestly reducing fuel consumption.

That's depend of the cost of renewable and difference between renewable and fossil fuels, that bets bigger over time. That's the reason why now renewables are being installed a lot more, besides it depends on the mix and percentages among other things. The savings are significant and growing with the new prices. And there are other considerations, as geopolitics.

About that...

Calliban wrote:

This is why every country that has invested heavily in intermittent renewables has seen rapidly increasing electricity costs. And even places where intermittent RE has made the greatest inroads, like Germany, Denmark and UK, it contributes no more than 30% of electricity consumed, and has barely scratched the surface of the other 80% of delivered energy end uses. The Germans now claim that 17% of their total energy consumption is met by renewables and 42% electricity. But even this modest achievement is misleading. The Germans dump huge amounts of excess energy onto the the European electrical grid in times of plenty and become Europe's biggest electricity importer when wind and solar fall short. They count this dumped electricity in their production figures. When the war with Russia cut off Germany's access to cheap natural gas, their manufacturing sector folded like a house of cards. RE has proven capable of substituting a small proportion of the 20% of energy that is consumed as electricity. But its inroads elsewhere have been pitiful.

Europe electricity market works as a marginal market where the most expensive technology it produces, pushes the prices up.
When the conflict raised, the marginal market model did that natural gas raised the prices way beyond the real costs to pay the gas.
A marginal cost market overreacts under a fuel problem, while on the other side, stimulate faster replacement of the problematic source.
There is discussion about the convenience or not of that model.

Anyway, what it exposed the problem was that we need to remove natural gas as fast as possible. As I said before, that role should be provided by batteries (at least in the electricity market. In industry sometimes is electrification, other is hydrogen if it's for some roles in industry).

At the end, the conclusion in Europe is just the opposite of you said. We need to reduce the dependence from fossil fuels even faster than previous considered if we want to reduce our exposure to volatile fossil fuel prices.
The high prices came from natural gas, not from the renewables.

Calliban wrote:

In space heating, one unit of electricity can provide 3 or more units of heat, i.e. using a heat pump. This is an example of how electricity might reduce our delivered energy consumption. But to do this, we need a much more expensive heating system.

More expensive infrastructure, cheaper energy. Long term investment.

Calliban wrote:

In most cases, if we want electricity to do what FF do now, it will take at least 1kWh of electricity to substitute 1kWh of fossil fuel. If you need high heat 100°C>, you must use a resistance heater, induction heater or a synthesised fuel like hydrogen.

Hydrogen? Definitely not. Electric heating yes. The use of hydrogen would be used for things like reduction (for steel as an example) or just as a source material, as it's already used, like in the fertilizer field.

Calliban wrote:

An electric car replaces the mechanical work done by an engine with the work of an electric motor. But the work energy required remains the same and the EV has huge embodied energy in its manufacture, equivelent to several years of fuel consumption in a standard car. Imagine if all of that mining and ore processing had to be done with renewable electricity.

And that has being replied before. The numbers are under discussion, but it doesn't matter, as from a long term perspective, all of this enter into the circular economy and next time mining would be a lot lower than the first time.
With fossil fuel, you are just spending time in a dead end way of doing things, doomed to be abandoned after the lacking of fossil fuels and doomed if they aren't replaced on time.
And that's the reason because we are doing this now, and not when the fossil fuel reach prohibitive prices.

Calliban wrote:

Could we even afford the EV? Imagine the cost of having to provide the high heat needed to make concrete (1500°C), will hydrogen derived from renewable electricity? Electricity is 20% of world delivered energy consumption today. To meet all energy needs using RE, that proportion needs to triple or quadruple.

Not hydrogen. But just 1:1 electricity-heat.
And even with that, the total primary energy per capita will be lower than nowadays. So... Yeah. That's the plan.
A lot more electricity, a lot less thermal energy (fossil fuels = 0... that's the goal, but still biofuels and biomass in small scale).

Calliban wrote:

To produce 4x as much electricity as we use today using an equal mix of wind and solar, will require global copper production to triple.

Under a linear projection of consumption, which will be only true if the copper reserves works well and prices don't rise up like crazy.
If that's not the case, or if investors considered that a significant risk in the time of the investment, they will push for adoption of a different level of usage, so linear projections of copper usage won't apply.

Calliban wrote:

If we replace ICE cars with EVs, then copper production must be about 7x what we have today. These are just maintenance levels of copper production. For a rapid energy transition, production must increase even more. How realistic is that, in a world where copper ore grades are declining and the energy needed to produce each kg of copper is increasing? We can repeat this example for each of the resources involved.

You are insisting in a linear projection of consumption, where a car or renewable has the same amount of copper per car or per power unit of generation.

Ah.... I feel I repeating the same again and again. I think I'm gonna stop here, because it's the same over and over.

Just, as I said, in just some years, we will be able to see a clear peak on some fossil fuel sources, like coal.

Then, will you recognize at least than renewables reduces the consumption?

You should... but I guess you won't.

kbd512 · 2024-03-15 13:16:05

Spaniard,

You are insisting in a linear projection of consumption, where a car or renewable has the same amount of copper per car or per power unit of generation.

Saying the words "linear projection" doesn't mean anything in this context. What you call "linear projection", is simple counting. Anyone who acts as if counting is no longer a valid way to determine how much you have and how much you need, is no longer talking about valid science and engineering, they're talking about beliefs or desires or emotions or religion.

I don't care about how these numbers make you feel. A bridge doesn't care about how you "feel" about its ability to support a load placed upon it. Your structure is either strong and stiff enough to support all loads it's subjected to, or it collapses. That's how real engineering works. There are all manner of potentially clever things you may do to make the bridge lighter or stronger for a given weight, but all bridges built in the real world, which are also capable of withstanding very large applied loads over significant periods of time, are made of metal and concrete with finite material properties.

The ampacity of wiring is a fixed value for a given type, mass, and volume / geometry of an electrical conductor. There are limits to the voltages and amperages that any given mass / weight of electrical wiring can support for a given resistance or loss of electrical conduction. You can decrease the mass of the conductor if you can tolerate a given amount of electrical efficiency loss (resistance), which converts into heat, but at a certain point, you're losing enough power that it becomes a serious problem. You go too high on the voltage, and your power cable or motor suffers from arcing and sparking. Shortly after that, you have damage to electrical or electronic components, especially to electronic sensors. You go too high on amperage, and you start heating up the wiring real fast.

You sound a lot like some of these people who think they can simply "declare" a weight increase by stuffing a bigger / more powerful engine into an aircraft. Aerospace engineering doesn't work that way, at least not the survivable kind.

If you double the weight of the engine on an airplane that was never designed to accept such a heavy engine, then even if the new engine makes 4X as much power as the lighter engine you just removed, that doesn't make the existing engine mount or airframe or landing gear any stronger. The CG of the aircraft may and probably will shift dramatically. The much heavier aircraft, with its new center-of-gravity completely out-of-limits, won't handle the same way. It may be very difficult to handle or it may become so unstable that it becomes uncontrollable. Stability doesn't care if you can't count. The wing doesn't get any larger, either, so it no longer stalls or maneuvers best at the same speeds that it did before, so much of the hard-won and expensive accumulated data on how that aircraft performs goes right out the window.

All you've done thus far is assert that things will get better or become easier in the future. In some ways, that could be true. For material requirements, all available historical data says your assertion is objectively false. Energy consumption only goes up with increasing technological sophistication, not down. There are no counterfactual examples to negate that simple statement of truth. None. Even computers only serve to prove that point. Increasing sophistication while decreasing energy consumption simply doesn't happen in the natural world. Moore's Law applies to computational capability, not energy generation and storage. Human beings, even with all of our marvelous technology, are still a part of nature, whether we like it or not.

Imagine if I told someone their car's gas mileage was around 20mpg. They then ask me how much gas to drive 200 miles, so I tell them it'll take about 10 gallons. Instead of accepting that it takes 10 gallons, they incessantly argue with me about how much less gas they think it might take in the future, using an engine that's never been built. The person doing the arguing won't accept that I'm talking about the car they're sitting in, not their futurism fantasy car that doesn't exist.

In the future this, in the future that. This is the constant refrain I hear from all our pseudo-environmentalists who "trust the science" or "believe the science", but apparently don't "believe the math", especially whenever "the math" doesn't support their belief-based religious movement. It's scientology, a mixture of science and religion that is not a good proxy for either.

You're "doing bad numbers", you're using linear projection, you support big oil, you hate the environment, you're wrong because I said so, and at some point in the nebulous future you might be wrong. I'm betting that the ampacity of Copper wiring doesn't change from now until the end of time. We could come up with some sort of room temperature superconductor between now and then, but Copper is Copper is Copper, forever. This all boils down to, "Don't subject my mind to ugly basic math reality, because I can't handle anyone telling me that what I want won't work the way I want it to." This is what children do. They argue endlessly about doing their homework, but as an adult, I will still tell them that they need to do it. Arguing over basic counting is not what adults should do.

Back in the real world, if you want to actually build something, you use math and counting to figure out how much of what you need. The civilization we have today wasn't built by people who couldn't count. If they wanted to create a new building, they did some math to figure out how much weight it had to hold up, what forces it would be subjected to, and then they purchased enough steel, concrete, and glass to make the building to the design specifications. The construction men built the structure to the blueprints. They didn't argue with the engineers about how they were going to have much stronger steel or concrete at some point in time in the future, because they had enough intelligence to know that if they did that, then the building was never going to get built. This is why you build things using what you have and what you know, not what you might have or know in the future.

Terraformer · 2024-03-15 14:16:15

If we're talking about grid storage, compressed air seems to beat out everything else, with pumped storage coming in second... and batteries trailing quite a way behind.

Energy Storage Cost and Performance Database

Source is the US Department Of Energy, 2021 figures. I'm still pretty surprised to see $18/kWh in there for CAES; I've seen those sorts of figures suggested for underwater CAES, but I'm only aware of one such facility, in Lake Ontario, and it's only 4MWh. Idk where they're getting their figures from.

I do not think that anyone would be considering Lithium Ion for grid storage if we were starting from 2010 position and deciding where to focus investment and research. Li-ion expansion was funded by batteries for cars, not grids. I don't think any other energy storage system has recieved anywhere near as much money as batteries have over the last decade and a half? Perhaps if flywheels (very short duration, really more about frequency control than storage, pretty good on a scale of minutes) and CAES had received more... I do think that CAES can indeed reach $10-20/kWh.

Britain probably can sustain it's electrical grid at some level with wind and flywheels and underwater CAES, as well as backup fossil/bio fuelled generators for when the calm weeks come, though if everyone tries charging their cars it will crash. Also we'll have to sort out heating so we're not drawing a massive load; one advantage there is that hot water is pretty straightforward to store. It is not unlikely we'll get the first three things (wind, flywheels, storage) without the fourth (backup), which in practice will probably mean we get distributed backup (businesses and homes installing generators they can get ready when the blackout warnings come)...

One thing that's very appealing about the diving bell type underwater CAES is that we'll be creating artificial reefs in the process. We get storage AND the rest of the planet benefits too (depending on how shallow the water we place them in is). I'm all about infrastructure that contributes positively ecologically

Calliban · 2024-03-15 15:00:13

Terraformer, I agree that underwater CAES appears to be the most practical grid energy storage to apply at scale. Any nation with a coast or even a decent sized lake can deploy it. The technology appears to be something that can be built once and used practically forever. A ballasted concrete tank that sits on the sea bed. Assuming corrosion resistant reinforcing is used, it cannot wear out because it has no moving parts. If offshore wind power is used to charge it, we can forego the generation of electricity and fit turbines with hydraulic pumps. These can be made using steel, cast iron and polymers.

1m3 of compressed air at 10bar(a) pressure, will release 2.3MJ (0.64kWh) if expanded isothermally. It can be stored at a water depth of 90m.
https://tribology-abc.com/abc/thermodynamics.htm

The UK uses about 800GWh of electrical energy per day. This amounts to 1.25 billion m3 of air. If the tanks are 10m tall, they will cover 125km2 of sea bed. That is a tiny proportion of north sea bed area. Whilst this doesn't do anything to improve the power density of wind, it does allow the use of systems based on abundant and low embodied energy materials.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-03-15 15:15:34)

Terraformer · 2024-03-15 15:09:19

Hmm. The five deepest lochs in Scotland have max depths >100m.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … ed_Kingdom

And Scotland has plentiful wind power...

I'm hesitant to use shallows, not just because we don't get much pressurisation, also because those are the most ecologically productive. But beyond 20m, you can still see but there's very little light for photosynthesis. In which case certain CAES systems may improve the situation for life, if it creates a rise for seaweed to anchor to. Which of course also makes things better for fishing.

SpaceNut · 2024-03-15 17:35:28

No matter what method or type the issue is we are not reducing what is wasting the energy by improving efficiency. Also, when we do no one is forced to achieve the same level for all of that type of use.

The final thing is the rise of use is due to our own desire to not put in human energy into what we would have done a century ago as it's so easy now to just use the machines that take less labor to for fill the same desire.

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#76 2024-03-14 01:49:08

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#77 2024-03-14 03:53:07

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#78 2024-03-14 05:16:50

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#79 2024-03-14 06:58:54

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#80 2024-03-14 07:07:44

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#81 2024-03-14 07:32:43

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#82 2024-03-14 08:23:25

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#83 2024-03-14 09:01:03

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#84 2024-03-14 10:19:54

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#85 2024-03-14 10:44:16

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#86 2024-03-14 11:39:37

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#87 2024-03-14 11:59:17

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#88 2024-03-14 12:50:58

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#89 2024-03-14 13:22:18

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#90 2024-03-14 13:32:31

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#91 2024-03-14 15:21:24

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#92 2024-03-14 16:39:42

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#93 2024-03-14 17:57:29

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#94 2024-03-15 02:32:31

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#95 2024-03-15 10:07:29

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#96 2024-03-15 13:16:05

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#97 2024-03-15 14:16:15

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#98 2024-03-15 15:00:13

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#99 2024-03-15 15:09:19

Re: Lithium used for batteries

#100 2024-03-15 17:35:28

Re: Lithium used for batteries

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