Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Cardew

Dolor said:

I haven’t read all 611 posts of this thread but what worries me is that the most ardent advocates of RE try to sell it as if it was ‘The Holy Grail’. 

611 posts?  611 pages!

Holy Grail is appropriate; together with Nuclear bashing!

Martyn1981

Preachy bit, I'm afraid, but I think it's really important to be reminded every so often, that the 'cost' of our energy isn't increasing, it's just that we're not used to paying the full price for it in our bills:

Fossil fuel industry gets subsidies of $11m a minute, IMF finds

The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply and environmental costs. Experts said the subsidies were “adding fuel to the fire” of the climate crisis, at a time when rapid reductions in carbon emissions were urgently needed.
Explicit subsidies that cut fuel prices accounted for 8% of the total and tax breaks another 6%. The biggest factors were failing to make polluters pay for the deaths and poor health caused by air pollution (42%) and for the heatwaves and other impacts of global heating (29%).

Setting fossil fuel prices that reflect their true cost would cut global CO2 emissions by over a third, the IMF analysts said.

This would be a big step towards meeting the internationally agreed 1.5C target. Keeping this target within reach is a key goal of the UN Cop26 climate summit in November.

Martyn1981

Yet another Aussie battery article, but I still find these interesting as they develop the RE + storage 'story' for all of us (other nations) to learn from.

Genex Power Will Use 40 Tesla Megapacks For Bouldercombe Battery Project

Genex Power, which is focused on developing a portfolio of renewable energy generation and storage projects across Australia, has announced the execution of a supply agreement contract with Tesla for its Bouldercombe Battery Project in Queensland.

A total of 40 Tesla Megapacks will be delivered by Tesla under the supply agreement. This will create a battery energy storage system (BESS) with a capacity of 50 MW (power)/100 MWh (energy). It’s slated to be fully operational in the first half of 2023.

Martyn1981

I thought this was a great read, looking at a report from the University of Oxford. To overly summarise it - the faster we deploy renewables, the greater the savings will be.

It also points out what I think many of us have been saying for years, and that's how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, since more RE means cheaper leccy, more BEV's means more leccy demand, supporting more RE, supporting cheaper transport costs, cheaper leccy means cheaper H2 production which lowers the cost of storage (and fertilizer), and so on, and so on. All the pieces are starting to fit nicely together ......... and will of course reduce our dependence on FF's, and their fluctuating prices!

The Cost Of Renewables Continues To Plummet

According to a new report from the Institute of New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford, previous estimates about how quickly the price of renewables will fall have consistently underestimated reality (We think they are pointing their fingers at the International Energy Agency here.)

Here’s the first few paragraphs of the report:

“Rapidly decarbonizing the global energy system is critical for addressing climate change, but concerns about costs have been a barrier to implementation. Most energy economy models have historically underestimated deployment rates for renewable energy technologies and overestimated their costs. The problems with these models have stimulated calls for better approaches and recent reports have made progress in this direction.

“It’s not just good news for renewables. It’s good news for the planet,” co-author Matthew Ives, a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin Post-Carbon Transition Program, tells ArsTechnica. “The energy transition is also going to save us money. We should be doing it anyway.”

Martyn1981

Perhaps I'm being too overoptimistic (me, shirley not!), but maybe the current gas crunch will finally get politicians to take RE more seriously, perhaps this is even part of Boris' sudden conversion from science denier? Just like with BEV's and the charging infrastructure, we need to get slightly ahead of the RE revolution, not slightly behind, otherwise things will remain messy, at best.

[The comment section does partly explain the choice of map colour and age, with tongue in cheek remarks about licensing costs and colour blindness.]

Europe’s Current Energy Crisis Was Predictable — And Was Predicted

Headlines are highlighting Europe’s energy challenges at present, with extremely high natural gas prices shocking consumers and corporations. But this was entirely predictable, and in fact was predicted. The real problem was the pivot to natural gas as a bridge fuel, and too much focus on building efficiency instead of fuel switching.

The answer to these challenges are clear as well. Governments focused on natural gas as a bridge fuel and building efficiency programs should have been focused on renewables and fuel-switching to a much greater degree. Wind and solar have no seasonal spikes in price, and managing intermittency is a matter of overbuilding cheap renewables, more transmission, and grid storage, all of which are clearly understood and modeled.

Building efficiency is good, but fuel-switching to eliminate gas furnaces and leaky high-GWP air conditioners by replacing them with modern heat pumps with low-GWP refrigerants with COPs of 3-4 avoids a lot more of the root causes of the problems we are facing. Low cost variance wind and solar supplying high-efficiency electric heat pumps is a long overdue policy.

But the usual suspects are blaming renewables for Europe’s current problems, just as they falsely blamed renewables for Texas’ problems earlier this year. Those voices are being amplified by the usual suspects, and policymakers are susceptible to hearing what they want to hear just as much as anyone. It’s a fight for reality, and sadly, the truth travels much more slowly than lies.
The lessons of 2021 are deep, rich, and far-reaching. But the pockets of the fossil fuel companies fighting for their lives, if not the lives of their children or their employees’ children, or the children of the world, are deep, rich, and far-reaching as well. As I’ve been writing about hydrogen regularly for the past years, pointing out the failures of assumptions about demand and supply, a regular refrain has been that while I’m clearly correct in what I’m saying, my analysis and the points of others such as Paul Martin, Mark Jacobson, and Robert Howarth, among many others, will be drowned in a flood of oil-soaked lobbying.

Martyn1981

Nice to see some progress with flow batteries. As the article points out they have a lot of advantages, especially regarding cost, and can serve the intraday storage needs like Li-ion, but targeted more at the upto 12hr(ish) market, than the 2-4hr period. Flow batts can manage that since the energy 'part' can be increased cheaply by using larger storage tanks, without the need and cost of increasing the power 'part'. Horses for courses.

First ESS Iron Flow Battery To Go Online This Month

ESS is a manufacturer of iron flow batteries in the state of Oregon. At the present time, lithium-ion batteries account for about 85% of grid-scale energy storage. That technology is time-tested and reliable. Prices continue to fall, but lithium-ion batteries have some issues.

They use materials like lithium, cobalt, manganese, aluminum, and nickel that can be expensive, especially if they are in short supply. They can also catch fire and begin to degrade after thousands of charge/discharge cycles. But the biggest issue with lithium-ion batteries is they can only put stored electricity back into the grid for 2 to 4 hours.

Iron flow batteries use three of the most abundant elements on Earth — iron, salt, and water. They consist of two storage tanks with a membrane between them. The membrane allows electrons to flow back and forth between the tanks while keeping the liquids separate.

ESS claims its flow batteries last for more than 20,000 charge/discharge cycles and can provide energy for up to 12 hours. In addition, they have a life expectancy of 25 years and are easily recyclable when their useful life is over. The company says it uses the same electrolyte on both the negative and positive sides of the equation,which eliminates the cross-contamination and degradation that shortens the life of other flow batteries.

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

Nice to see some progress with flow batteries. As the article points out they have a lot of advantages, especially regarding cost, and can serve the intraday storage needs like Li-ion, but targeted more at the upto 12hr(ish) market, than the 2-4hr period. Flow batts can manage that since the energy 'part' can be increased cheaply by using larger storage tanks, without the need and cost of increasing the power 'part'. Horses for courses.

First ESS Iron Flow Battery To Go Online This Month

ESS is a manufacturer of iron flow batteries in the state of Oregon. At the present time, lithium-ion batteries account for about 85% of grid-scale energy storage. That technology is time-tested and reliable. Prices continue to fall, but lithium-ion batteries have some issues.

They use materials like lithium, cobalt, manganese, aluminum, and nickel that can be expensive, especially if they are in short supply. They can also catch fire and begin to degrade after thousands of charge/discharge cycles. But the biggest issue with lithium-ion batteries is they can only put stored electricity back into the grid for 2 to 4 hours.

Iron flow batteries use three of the most abundant elements on Earth — iron, salt, and water. They consist of two storage tanks with a membrane between them. The membrane allows electrons to flow back and forth between the tanks while keeping the liquids separate.

ESS claims its flow batteries last for more than 20,000 charge/discharge cycles and can provide energy for up to 12 hours. In addition, they have a life expectancy of 25 years and are easily recyclable when their useful life is over. The company says it uses the same electrolyte on both the negative and positive sides of the equation,which eliminates the cross-contamination and degradation that shortens the life of other flow batteries.

I'm not sure that it is true that Lithium batteries can only supply power for 2-4 hours - more likely is that it becomes cost prohibitive for using them for longer periods as that would mean part of their capacity was probably only rarely used (generally the grid probably mostly requires 'peaker' support for 2-4 hours per day) making it very expensive per kwh stored for capacity beyond the 2-4 hour window.

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

Nice to see some progress with flow batteries. As the article points out they have a lot of advantages, especially regarding cost, and can serve the intraday storage needs like Li-ion, but targeted more at the upto 12hr(ish) market, than the 2-4hr period. Flow batts can manage that since the energy 'part' can be increased cheaply by using larger storage tanks, without the need and cost of increasing the power 'part'. Horses for courses.

First ESS Iron Flow Battery To Go Online This Month

ESS is a manufacturer of iron flow batteries in the state of Oregon. At the present time, lithium-ion batteries account for about 85% of grid-scale energy storage. That technology is time-tested and reliable. Prices continue to fall, but lithium-ion batteries have some issues.

They use materials like lithium, cobalt, manganese, aluminum, and nickel that can be expensive, especially if they are in short supply. They can also catch fire and begin to degrade after thousands of charge/discharge cycles. But the biggest issue with lithium-ion batteries is they can only put stored electricity back into the grid for 2 to 4 hours.

Iron flow batteries use three of the most abundant elements on Earth — iron, salt, and water. They consist of two storage tanks with a membrane between them. The membrane allows electrons to flow back and forth between the tanks while keeping the liquids separate.

ESS claims its flow batteries last for more than 20,000 charge/discharge cycles and can provide energy for up to 12 hours. In addition, they have a life expectancy of 25 years and are easily recyclable when their useful life is over. The company says it uses the same electrolyte on both the negative and positive sides of the equation,which eliminates the cross-contamination and degradation that shortens the life of other flow batteries.

I'm not sure that it is true that Lithium batteries can only supply power for 2-4 hours - more likely is that it becomes cost prohibitive for using them for longer periods as that would mean part of their capacity was probably only rarely used (generally the grid probably mostly requires 'peaker' support for 2-4 hours per day) making it very expensive per kwh stored for capacity beyond the 2-4 hour window.

It's relative to their power output. A 100MW Li-ion batt will typically be 200-400MWh*. If you wanted more energy, say 800MWh, then you'd need to double up the power too, so say 200MW, so whilst you could run it at 100MW for 8hrs, you still have the expense of the increased power.

*In the case of fast frequency response, you may even see batts with little more than 1hr of storage. Or flywheels that have very small amount of energy, but can provide massive power for seconds/mins eg 1MW/0.02MWh (20kWh).

That's what H2, LAES, flow batts etc bring to the party, their energy storage isn't proportional to their power, since you can simply add more storage, be it H2, liquid air or electrolyte tanks. The storage part is cheap, or at least cheaper, so doubling the energy doesn't double the costs.

Martyn1981

I don't think we've mentioned energy islands for a while, and whilst this article just talks about the possibility, it's a nice refresher:

National Grid in talks over plan for energy island in North Sea

The prospect of an energy island in the North Sea surrounded by windfarms with the ability to power British homes has taken a step closer after National Grid, the UK energy company, revealed that it is in talks about helping to build the project – and claimed it could be done before 2030.

“We are in tripartite discussions over an energy island that the UK would likely connect to,” Nicola Medalova, the company’s managing director of interconnectors, told New Scientist. She declined to name the two other parties in the talks.

The scheme would involve significantly larger offshore windfarms than existing ones, which would be connected to underwater cables that would direct the energy to participating countries.

QrizB

Various people (not many in this thread, admittedly) have a bit of a downer on solar PV and heatpumps (etc) because the payback period is so long.

Here's the cheapest of two current fixed tariffs from BG Evolve. If these tariffs are the future (and not just BG trying to dissuade switchers and/or make a fast buck) then maybe the economics will change.