Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

Found this article interesting and also fun, but mainly due to the side issue of what 'near firm' solar and wind was? So, it's when 4hrs of storage is included, and the suggested cost of this additional storage (in the late 2020's) is $5/MWh. Sounds good to me.

And just in case that sounds too low, I assume it's the additional cost of storage divided by all generation. Since most generation won't require storage, the additional cost isn't as much as many think. There may even be economic benefits from by time shifting some sales to higher demand / price periods.

Why Should We Pay Extra For Nuclear Power?

There were a couple of interesting developments in June in regards to electric power. One was that NextEra Energy issued its Investor Conference Report 2022 to its stockholders. Another was a paper from Stanford University, “Low-cost solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity for 145 countries,” (LCS study) by Mark Z. Jacobson, et al. Looking into them is rather interesting.

The first of these makes very clear that in the opinions of the people running NextEra Energy, combustion generating sources and nuclear power are getting too expensive. Furthermore, their opinion is that the most expensive of these, at least in the late 2020s, will be small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). The above chart, from their investor report, shows this.

Coastalwatch

Suspect this may have been mentioned before but it would appear to be a step closer with the funding arraged below. I did wonder if was a hoax as turning iron to rust and then back again to iron and controlling the process allows the battery to be chrged and dis-charged. Seems a bit far fetched to me but guess there must be something in it if the figure below has been raised to get it up and running.

Perhaps Mart and/or Zeupater could explain further!

Iron-air battery startup nets $450 million investment

Boston-based startup Form Energy has developed multi-day iron-air batteries to address this need. The company said its batteries can store renewables-sourced electricity for 100 hours at system costs that are competitive with conventional power plants. At full-scale production, Form Energy said the modules would deliver electricity at about one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/10/05/iron-air-battery-startup-nets-450-million-investment/

gefnew

We have a different slant on energy by using an old fossil fuel to reinvent itself.
Investor found to take forward Glenmuckloch hydro scheme - BBC News

Martyn1981

Coastalwatch said:

Perhaps Mart and/or Zeupater could explain further!

Hiya CW, obviously I could go into great detail explaining how all of this works .....    but probably better if we have a look at Matt Ferrell's Undecided Youtube channel (one of my favourites), and his vid gives a brief explanation from the 3min mark. The vid also runs through some of the longer duration battery developments/technologies.

The vid mentions a document suggesting that efficiency could reach 80% (50% to 80%) and undergo 3k to 5k cycles. So it could tick all the boxes, so long as it works as hoped.

Impossible to understate the importance of such storage. So long as it's cheap, to make up for lower efficiency, then storage of 100hrs(ish) pretty much completes RE (to miss-quote Jerry Maguire), when you assume some lower, rather than zero RE generation, a mix of sources, plus interconnectors etc etc.

Why Rust Batteries May Be the Future of Energy - Iron Air Battery Technology

Edit - Just realised I've been rude (by exclusion) to another great channel, so here's another vid, from the excellent channel 'Just Have a Think':

New Iron-Air Battery outperforms best Lithium Ion tech. Cheap. Abundant. Non-toxic & Carbon Free.

michaels

So as the duration of storage goes up the number of cycles goes down and capital cost rather than efficiency becomes the key factor even if it lasts a long time (not necessarily a lot of cycles as long term storage is about few cycles).

Suppose on average the long term storage was only used 4x per year and lasted 25 years, so 100 lifetime cycles.  Lithium batteries at £100 per kwh would cost £1 per kwh - actually that doesn't sound too bad as those 4 uses per year would be when power was at its most expensive.  Problem is add on finance costs at 10% and suddenly the economics is even worse as most of the gain on the difference between buy and sell prices of the stored energy goes to pay the finance rather than paying off the capital.

Have I got the maths wrong or is it really as cheap as that to use lithium batteries for long term storage?

michaels

Some more maths, lets assume UK electricity consumption is 30gwh on average. 
Lets assume that we sometimes have to run 100% from battery power for 10 day periods = 24 x 10 x 30gwh of battery storage at £100 per kwh
Lets assume this storage is used 4 times a year and lasts 25 years so each kwh of storage stores and discharges 100kwh
Excluding interest costs this means each kwh of energy supplied from storage costs £1
Assume we build out wind/solar to supply all our needs when we are not using the storage at current prices of 5p per kwh and that it can fill the storage basically for free from 'spill'

If the storage is used 4x per year (40 days out of 365) then basically about 90% of our power comes from wind at 5p per kwh and 10% from storage at £1 per kwh

Averaged out this is 15p per kwh which does not sound excessively expensive?

So with suitable renewable and wind build out we could have 100% green electricity with current technology for 15p per kwh.

The advantage of building lots of storage is also that we need less spend on the grid as we can site the storage to avoid the bottleneck issues.

Martyn1981

Hiya. I don't think you've got the maths wrong, but you may have confused wholesale and retail prices. 15p/kWh wholesale isn't far off what we are seeing now, with gas generation at around £180/MWh or 18p/kWh. So once you add on all of the transmission and distribution costs you'd be getting close to 30p/kWh.

If you mean theoretically, v's current prices, then yes I think it works, but that's an enormous amount of Li-ion batts and power doing little most of the time. The savings with larger scale storage is that the expensive power part doesn't need to scale up with energy. For instance if you want 10x as much energy from Li-ion batts, then you need 10x as much batts, and therefore 10x as much power. Whereas with PHS, flow batts, LAES, CAES and so on, you can leave the power part the same, and only have to expand the cheap storage side, such as bigger tanks.

Also, and again I appreciate this is theory, so joining in with the fun, not knocking the concept, but if storage costs 10 to 20x the cost of RE generation, then the first step would be overcapacity with waste/spill/curtailment. This would massively impact that 10 days storage figure, since wind and solar would still be generating something, not zero, hydro though small, would be reliable, add in all forms of bio-energy, especially as they start to be used as demand followers, rather than generating all the time, and on top of that interconnectors.

I can definitely see a roll for widespread Li-ion batts (or whatever the cheapest tech is, possibly LFP), as just a minimal sized household battery of 2-3kWh, or similar sized batts at substations (3kWh x number of households), would eliminate the evening peak, and provide huge intraday balancing of RE. The cost of such a move could be spread across all beneficiaries, Gov, RE generators, supply companies, DNO's and households.

V2G might provide the intraday storage simply as a by-product of the electrification of transport, 500GWh+.

michaels

The point wasn't that this was the solution, more that even taking some pretty 'worse case' assumptions/solutions we could still have renewable plus storage for a not outrageous price using existing tech.

Entirety agree with all your other points.

zeupater

michaels said:

Some more maths, lets assume UK electricity consumption is 30gwh on average. 
Lets assume that we sometimes have to run 100% from battery power for 10 day periods = 24 x 10 x 30gwh of battery storage at £100 per kwh
Lets assume this storage is used 4 times a year and lasts 25 years so each kwh of storage stores and discharges 100kwh
Excluding interest costs this means each kwh of energy supplied from storage costs £1
Assume we build out wind/solar to supply all our needs when we are not using the storage at current prices of 5p per kwh and that it can fill the storage basically for free from 'spill'

If the storage is used 4x per year (40 days out of 365) then basically about 90% of our power comes from wind at 5p per kwh and 10% from storage at £1 per kwh

Averaged out this is 15p per kwh which does not sound excessively expensive?

So with suitable renewable and wind build out we could have 100% green electricity with current technology for 15p per kwh.

The advantage of building lots of storage is also that we need less spend on the grid as we can site the storage to avoid the bottleneck issues.

Hi

... gulp!! ...

... So, invest in 30 million kW of power provision and storage capacity to run for 10 days means (30millionx24x10) = 7200million kWh and buy that storage & generation at £100/kWh, you're talking around £720,000million .... and this keeps the lights on 4x per year on average?

... Okay, so let's assume that it's all possible, the money is available from immediate borrowing and look at it from a current cost finance viewpoint (ie inflation ignored .... risky in current climate!!)

Money borrowed from markets/bonds at ~5% ... total project financed cost is ~£2.5trillion

Operating costs (manning/maintenance/security/buildings etc) - allow 1% of investment/year (? - not a lot!) = £180billion (720*25*0.01)

Failure replacements, say 10% total investment (£72billion) financed over 12.5year average (half life)  @ 5% annual financing is ~£135billion

... so let's work on an all up basic plant & machinery cost for the 25years of £2815billion (2500+180+135) ... which, for scaling, is in the ballpark of the total UK annual economy ...

Now, the basis for costing/payback is 4 x 10 days outage per year, so what happens if there's an 11,12,13 ... day generation outage, which isn't particularly rare historically?. It's pretty unreasonable to assume that the storage capacity would be sized to cope with expected outages, so if 10 days was the maximum expectation, the costs/kWh of supply would need to be based on the average supply period, the alternative being that if 10 day average outages were expected, then the total capacity of the system would need to be increased, so what do we multiply the 2.815Trillion (£2,815,000,000,000) by to provide a reasonable safety margin - 1.5x, 2x ...?  

Remember, the batteries are particularly inefficient on a cycle to cycle basis, but reasonable for long term storage, so running costs would probably dictate that they'd only be utilised when absolutely necessary, when profit can be made by the operators, or if charging costs to the operators were essentially zero, which likely wouldn't be the case after a long outage when absolutely everyone with any form of storage is competing for electrons to recharge their own storage systems, cars etc ....

Anyway, cost ... that's it, there's no 'profit' in the above, so might as well round up to £3 Trillion (for ease) and assume that the operators are investing for essentially little/no return (as if!), and look at it another way ... because it's essentially a sunk cost which depreciates whether it's used or not, the capital & running costs might as well be classified as a supply fixed overhead and apportioned in a similar way to current grid distribution ... Around 40% (DUKES 2022 C5) of UK electricity demand is domestic, so 40% of £3Trillion should simply be allocated to the ~25million homes in the UK as an addition to the supply standing charge on a daily basis ... 3,000,000,000,000(£)/25(y)/365(d)/25,000,000(homes), so £13.15/day, of which 40% = £5.26 , taking a typical standing charge from ~£0.30 to ~£5.56 (18.5x!) and adding ~£160/month to the electricity bill (~£2000/year).... and that's before the unit cost (£/kWh) from storage hit's the bill at a £peak+++++ rate to discourage unnecessary use of a limited resource!

I'd consider a further £2000 increase in bills to be enough to create a political tsunami to signal an immediate dump of renewables and cause whichever party would be in power to embrace the slogan 'frack, frack, frack' and U-turn against all forms of renewables for a considerable period, which would be a really retrograde step.

The problem here is scaleability ... chemical battery storage of any kind for being used as a strategic  store is a sunk cost which is unlikely to be viable, whatever the cost/kWh of the storage, this being because it's a (mainly) unused costly asset sitting there, effectively as a strategic insurance policy with the addition of straight line depreciation .. chemical batteries are only a short term supply/demand balancing solution ...

Longer term strategic storage could be based on vast pumped hydro systems (largest UK reservoir size!) which would effectively trigger anyone who would oppose such things, but even then it's pretty hard to find sites which could accommodate the storage necessary for ~10days, so the basis for fixing the issue of intermittent wind with strategic storage doesn't stand up to any logical scrutiny ... the answer is all around us and is ~800x denser than air, has embedded energy, is easily managed & fully predictable and has plenty of suitable locations ready to be tapped, and could also be used to provide energy to 'charge' buffer reserves in various forms of pumped hydro systems  ... guessed yet ??  ... no not wave-power, because the sea has calm periods too!! ... the only logical, realistic & cost effective long-term (design life: decades, possibly centuries) strategic renewables solution for the UK is Tidal Flow, but you'd need to start building before the 'save the lesser spotted mud shrimp' brigade collect enough penny donations to buy an inflatable airbed & cardboard placard from some tourist shop in Swansea or Weston-Super-Mare!!     

HTH - Z (Bored today, can you tell!!) ..

shinytop

zeupater said:

michaels said:

Some more maths, lets assume UK electricity consumption is 30gwh on average. 
Lets assume that we sometimes have to run 100% from battery power for 10 day periods = 24 x 10 x 30gwh of battery storage at £100 per kwh
Lets assume this storage is used 4 times a year and lasts 25 years so each kwh of storage stores and discharges 100kwh
Excluding interest costs this means each kwh of energy supplied from storage costs £1
Assume we build out wind/solar to supply all our needs when we are not using the storage at current prices of 5p per kwh and that it can fill the storage basically for free from 'spill'

If the storage is used 4x per year (40 days out of 365) then basically about 90% of our power comes from wind at 5p per kwh and 10% from storage at £1 per kwh

Averaged out this is 15p per kwh which does not sound excessively expensive?

So with suitable renewable and wind build out we could have 100% green electricity with current technology for 15p per kwh.

The advantage of building lots of storage is also that we need less spend on the grid as we can site the storage to avoid the bottleneck issues.

Hi

... gulp!! ...

... So, invest in 30 million kW of power provision and storage capacity to run for 10 days means (30millionx24x10) = 7200million kWh and buy that storage & generation at £100/kWh, you're talking around £720,000million .... and this keeps the lights on 4x per year on average?

... Okay, so let's assume that it's all possible, the money is available from immediate borrowing and look at it from a current cost finance viewpoint (ie inflation ignored .... risky in current climate!!)

Money borrowed from markets/bonds at ~5% ... total project financed cost is ~£2.5trillion

Operating costs (manning/maintenance/security/buildings etc) - allow 1% of investment/year (? - not a lot!) = £180billion (720*25*0.01)

Failure replacements, say 10% total investment (£72billion) financed over 12.5year average (half life)  @ 5% annual financing is ~£135billion

... so let's work on an all up basic plant & machinery cost for the 25years of £2815billion (2500+180+135) ... which, for scaling, is in the ballpark of the total UK annual economy ...

Now, the basis for costing/payback is 4 x 10 days outage per year, so what happens if there's an 11,12,13 ... day generation outage, which isn't particularly rare historically?. It's pretty unreasonable to assume that the storage capacity would be sized to cope with expected outages, so if 10 days was the maximum expectation, the costs/kWh of supply would need to be based on the average supply period, the alternative being that if 10 day average outages were expected, then the total capacity of the system would need to be increased, so what do we multiply the 2.815Trillion (£2,815,000,000,000) by to provide a reasonable safety margin - 1.5x, 2x ...?  

Remember, the batteries are particularly inefficient on a cycle to cycle basis, but reasonable for long term storage, so running costs would probably dictate that they'd only be utilised when absolutely necessary, when profit can be made by the operators, or if charging costs to the operators were essentially zero, which likely wouldn't be the case after a long outage when absolutely everyone with any form of storage is competing for electrons to recharge their own storage systems, cars etc ....

Anyway, cost ... that's it, there's no 'profit' in the above, so might as well round up to £3 Trillion (for ease) and assume that the operators are investing for essentially little/no return (as if!), and look at it another way ... because it's essentially a sunk cost which depreciates whether it's used or not, the capital & running costs might as well be classified as a supply fixed overhead and apportioned in a similar way to current grid distribution ... Around 40% (DUKES 2022 C5) of UK electricity demand is domestic, so 40% of £3Trillion should simply be allocated to the ~25million homes in the UK as an addition to the supply standing charge on a daily basis ... 3,000,000,000,000(£)/25(y)/365(d)/25,000,000(homes), so £13.15/day, of which 40% = £5.26 , taking a typical standing charge from ~£0.30 to ~£5.56 (18.5x!) and adding ~£160/month to the electricity bill (~£2000/year).... and that's before the unit cost (£/kWh) from storage hit's the bill at a £peak+++++ rate to discourage unnecessary use of a limited resource!

I'd consider a further £2000 increase in bills to be enough to create a political tsunami to signal an immediate dump of renewables and cause whichever party would be in power to embrace the slogan 'frack, frack, frack' and U-turn against all forms of renewables for a considerable period, which would be a really retrograde step.

The problem here is scaleability ... chemical battery storage of any kind for being used as a strategic  store is a sunk cost which is unlikely to be viable, whatever the cost/kWh of the storage, this being because it's a (mainly) unused costly asset sitting there, effectively as a strategic insurance policy with the addition of straight line depreciation .. chemical batteries are only a short term supply/demand balancing solution ...

Longer term strategic storage could be based on vast pumped hydro systems (largest UK reservoir size!) which would effectively trigger anyone who would oppose such things, but even then it's pretty hard to find sites which could accommodate the storage necessary for ~10days, so the basis for fixing the issue of intermittent wind with strategic storage doesn't stand up to any logical scrutiny ... the answer is all around us and is ~800x denser than air, has embedded energy, is easily managed & fully predictable and has plenty of suitable locations ready to be tapped, and could also be used to provide energy to 'charge' buffer reserves in various forms of pumped hydro systems  ... guessed yet ??  ... no not wave-power, because the sea has calm periods too!! ... the only logical, realistic & cost effective long-term (design life: decades, possibly centuries) strategic renewables solution for the UK is Tidal Flow, but you'd need to start building before the 'save the lesser spotted mud shrimp' brigade collect enough penny donations to buy an inflatable airbed & cardboard placard from some tourist shop in Swansea or Weston-Super-Mare!!     

HTH - Z (Bored today, can you tell!!) ..

Just use gas for the small delta required.  Or even coal.  We wouldn't need that much.  100% renewables is about as realistic as being 100% vegan.