Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

70sbudgie said:

ABrass said:

The only possible use for the UK is thermal mass in timber framed buildings. And I doubt anyone would bother.

Which is exactly what the US market will be.

Would it work on the inside of insulation?

I would have thought so. It's a way of adding a lot of thermal storage, with a small amount of material. Z has championed the use of thermal mass for at least a decade.

Sorry for any digression, but there are many ways, some fun, some decorative. A large fish tank (unheated) can work to slow down tempertaure changes up or down. On a larger scale I watched a vid (possibly 5yrs+ ago) where an American had perspex tubes manufactured for his house, they were (sticking with imperial) about one foot in diameter, about 8-10ft tall, and I think he had 6 or 8. He filled these with water, some different colour dyes, and those bubble blowers (for fish tanks), and they formed an attractive decorative wall. They helped to reduce/slow down temperature changes.

There's even an idea of adding features in houses using gabions filled with rocks, which can actually look pretty nice, but a bit extreme as features go, unless you have a large properties with large rooms.

zeupater

Martyn1981 said:

70sbudgie said:

ABrass said:

The only possible use for the UK is thermal mass in timber framed buildings. And I doubt anyone would bother.

Which is exactly what the US market will be.

Would it work on the inside of insulation?

I would have thought so. It's a way of adding a lot of thermal storage, with a small amount of material. Z has championed the use of thermal mass for at least a decade ...

Hi

That's effectively why I took a tongue-in-cheek approach in the previous post .... effectively we're not considering an insulation product but rather a source of energy storage with a form of time delay offered by the chemical phase change ... the real issue is how cost effective that would be against simply adding thermal mass at a level offered by (say) replacing some internal stud walls with stone/bricks etc .... okay, there's not the level of controllability offered by some form of phase change, but simple dense building materials can store & release a lot of heat over pretty long periods ... add plenty of insulation to keep the stored heat in and the simple solution likely wins out every time ...

HTH - Z

EricMears

zeupater said:

Martyn1981 said:

70sbudgie said:

ABrass said:

The only possible use for the UK is thermal mass in timber framed buildings. And I doubt anyone would bother.

Which is exactly what the US market will be.

Would it work on the inside of insulation?

I would have thought so. It's a way of adding a lot of thermal storage, with a small amount of material. Z has championed the use of thermal mass for at least a decade ...

Hi

That's effectively why I took a tongue-in-cheek approach in the previous post .... effectively we're not considering an insulation product but rather a source of energy storage with a form of time delay offered by the chemical phase change ... the real issue is how cost effective that would be against simply adding thermal mass at a level offered by (say) replacing some internal stud walls with stone/bricks etc .... okay, there's not the level of controllability offered by some form of phase change, but simple dense building materials can store & release a lot of heat over pretty long periods ... add plenty of insulation to keep the stored heat in and the simple solution likely wins out every time ...

HTH - Z

That's basically why I ignored the trend to timber frame when we built this house and chose block & brick with beam & block floors and block internal walls.  With UFH,  our house is always warm and has been for last 22 years.  Alas,  with oil heating bills can't be described as economical but we've not been bankrupted (yet).

Martyn1981

Sorry, couldn't resist it, plus the 'that's not a knife ...' reference needs a rest.

GE is developing a massive 18 MW offshore wind turbine

GE Vernova is developing a 17-18 megawatt (MW) Haliade-X offshore wind turbine, CEO Scott Strazik confirmed during the company’s investor conference late last week.

Haizhuang’s H260-18MW will have a rotor diameter of 853 feet (260 meters). To put that in perspective, that rotor diameter is as long as the height of the Haliade-X, which has a rotor diameter of 722 feet (220 meters). The H260-18MW turbine will have 420-feet-long (128-meter-long) blades with a sweep area of 570,487 square feet (53,000 square meters).

Wind turbine manufacturers keep building larger turbines because the more power a turbine captures, the more the cost of electricity is reduced.

Martyn1981

Martyn1981 said:

Coastalwatch said:

On the positive side, at least production at scale must be taking place and while costs for this will be reducing I suspect the bigger players will already have gobbled up the lion's share leaving other markets to negotiate their own deals regarding any excess.

But I'm merely "shooting from the hip" so happy to be proved otherwise!

Hiya CW. Also shooting from the hip, but if I tell you what I'm basing my guesses on, then you can also 'play along at home'.

So, you've probably noticed that lots of the storage deployments in the news now mention Tesla Megapacks, so you can actually view the ordering page:

Order Megapack

Last time I looked, they were sold out till 2024 Q3, but now it's Q4. Also, and whilst I forget the exact price, the cost per Megapack (leaving defaults alone), was a little under $2m for the 4hr model, and a little over $2m for the 2hr version.

Now I see that the prices (like the waiting time) have risen to $2.1m and $2.6m (for the 4hr and 2hr respectively). Prices reduce as you order more. For huge installs of 1,000 units (3.9GWh), they 'only' cost $1.7m / $1.9m each. 

Obviously this may mean nothing, but given that they seem to be the largest supplier now, following their prices and delivery times may give some indication of supply and demand for such storage.

Hi CW (and all), assuming price changes are a guage as I suggested (but may be wrong), then demand is perhaps rising fast, as a quick check on prices today are roughly $2.4m & £2.7m respectively.

Ouch!

Exiled_Tyke

I'm looking forward to the day when we need an 'Energy storage in the news' thread or even a 'pumped energy in the news thread'.   It's all far too slow and government is stil dragging its feet but there is at least some movement.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-65015217

Martyn1981

Exiled_Tyke said:

I'm looking forward to the day when we need an 'Energy storage in the news' thread or even a 'pumped energy in the news thread'.   It's all far too slow and government is stil dragging its feet but there is at least some movement.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-65015217

Hiya ET, been wondering the same, but I always worry that I'm posting boring carp. There's a great site I lean on heavily for storage news called, ..... wait for it ...... Energy Storage News, who'd have thunk. I think it's interesting, but your head starts to spin after a while, as you lose track of all the schemes around the world.

Looks like multiple areas of the UK / RE generation are reaching levels of excess (scale and regularity) to make storage ever more viable. Then rinse and repeat, hopefully.


Back to your great news story, I thought they'd buried the lede by mentioning the power (1.5GW) but not the energy, but there is a bit about running at lower levels for 24hrs. So for comparison, Dinorwig, built to support the rollout of nuclear, and our largest PHS facility is 1.8GW (6 x 300MW turbines), and 9.1GWh of energy. Coire Glas is 1.5GW (5 x 300MW turbines) and a mighty 30GWh of storage.

Coastalwatch

Thanks ET & Mart for posting. I share your frustrations on the topic for storage, as it is a vital requirement in the transition to a cleaner grid based upon renewable energy generation, if we are to achieve the carbon reduction necessary to avoid the worst effects of GW..

Having invested in the Red John Hydro scheme(450MW) via Abundance to assist in getting it through the planning stage, it would then be a travesty of justice if it couldn't progress further simply because of a lack of transparency of how the investment required to build it would be returned.

It also rather highlights the massive overbuild of renewable generation required in order to cover the increasing demand from heating and EV's not to mention the lulls in generation that storage will help mitigate.Presumably there would be quite some demand if charging Pumped Hydro Scheme's, together with the nations EV's, both commercial and private were to occur in the same "cheap" overnight slot.

We appear to be crawling at snails pace in our efforts at avoiding the worst effects of climate change when in reality we should be sprinting.

Not too disimilar to Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

 

michaels

Coastalwatch said:

Thanks ET & Mart for posting. I share your frustrations on the topic for storage, as it is a vital requirement in the transition to a cleaner grid based upon renewable energy generation, if we are to achieve the carbon reduction necessary to avoid the worst effects of GW..

Having invested in the Red John Hydro scheme(450MW) via Abundance to assist in getting it through the planning stage, it would then be a travesty of justice if it couldn't progress further simply because of a lack of transparency of how the investment required to build it would be returned.

It also rather highlights the massive overbuild of renewable generation required in order to cover the increasing demand from heating and EV's not to mention the lulls in generation that storage will help mitigate.Presumably there would be quite some demand if charging Pumped Hydro Scheme's, together with the nations EV's, both commercial and private were to occur in the same "cheap" overnight slot.

We appear to be crawling at snails pace in our efforts at avoiding the worst effects of climate change when in reality we should be sprinting.

Not too disimilar to Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

 

In theory intraday storage would seem like a no brainier.  However the recent fall in gas prices may have suddenly changed the economics again which suggests that the govt would need to step in with a CfD type mechanism to make the finances add up, especially as by smoothing out day peaks and night troughs the system would 'eat its own lunch' by evening out the price differentials.

Longer term storage the jury is still out as basically it does many fewer cycles to spread the capital cost over.  I still think H2 for combustion in CCGTs may be the answer with such green H2 stations running for more of the time than we might expect (eg wind produces 150% of energy requirement but only 50% is used directly and the other 100% goes vis H2 at 50% efficiency) so green H2 thermal supplies 50% of our electricity altogether making it worthwhile to have a large enough fleet of CCGTs to supply 75% of our peak need without them being idle 95% of the time.

2nd_time_buyer

Apologies, if already posted. But it looks like VAT free batteries for retrofit might be in the pipeline 

https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/solar_energy_uk_celebrates_lobbying_success_as_battery_storage_vat_examined