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Lithium is ubiquitous. It can be extracted from sea water if necessary. The only issue is the cost. Cheap lithium sources aren't common, but the element itself is fairly easy to find.
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May 13, 2024 20:27
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Near lithium equivalent batteries also exist and are currently in scaled up mass production. They are already pretty widespread and often just get referred to as “lithium“ even if they aren’t lithium. They’re also getting shipped under the lithium UN numbers because regulation is lagging the technology. Edit: And there are a bunch of lithium batteries types that’s all get called Li-ion that use more or less lithium with other metals. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 20:43 on May 13, 2024 |
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May 13, 2024 20:41
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Hadlock posted:What is the, uh, recyclability, or uh, lithium reclaim rate of recycled batteries Edit: looking at it a bit more, the recovery rate for Lithium is currently around 90%. DTurtle fucked around with this message at 21:04 on May 13, 2024 |
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May 13, 2024 20:52
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Hadlock posted:don't need to worry about global politics and alignment etc uhhh
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May 13, 2024 21:26
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Near lithium equivalent batteries also exist and are currently in scaled up mass production. They are already pretty widespread and often just get referred to as “lithium“ even if they aren’t lithium. They’re also getting shipped under the lithium UN numbers because regulation is lagging the technology. Ah, yes fair point, sodium ion batteries have started going in to some EV cars where absolute performance isn't needed. And yeah sodium makes up a very measurable fraction of sea water
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May 13, 2024 21:28
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For applications where weight and volume aren't a big concern, you can get stable Fe-based batteries that don't like to fail spectacularly the way other chemistry does. Bunch of startups working on the tech from different angles. And they're real cheap apparently. So if lithium gets expensive at some point, it'll definitely be outcompeted in certain applications using just stuff we have today.
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May 14, 2024 03:50
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GridStatus has a blog post talking about this year's changes in CAISO (California), some of the info is a re-hash of what we've talked about recently but a few items were new to me. https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/ I'm going to be summarizing pretty heavily and shamelessly as always: First of all the April YoY storage history graph, showing 2024 has doubled 2023 with this anti-duck curve:  Here's the corresponding NG graph, showing the duck head gone this April:  (I'm sure it'll reappear in coming months, there isn't enough BESS yet to carry a summer afternoon, and summer heat lowers solar production) Since evenings are no longer an all-hands-on-deck scramble, more NG producers are able to go offline instead of selling into negative pricing and just participate in the cold-capacity market: quote:Because gas is no longer needed as much in the mornings/evenings, the amount held online during uneconomic midday conditions in preparation for evening solar down ramps can be reduced. Here's where things started getting interesting to me. They stacked the last seven years of solar, showing two historical plateaus of growth and now a new plateau we've broken into, presumably due to BESS soaking up power that is no longer curtailed:  They also did a YoY comparison of solar, storage, and NG, showing that the storage gains are mirroring NG losses:  (note that NG fuel prices are more than halved this year compared to last, so that ain’t it) Moving to hydropower, the glut of negative pricing in mid-day is moving dams to be more complementary to solar, as they drop their mid-day output more than before:  (an aside: last year was incredibly wet, at least from my view on top of the Divide, and I wonder if 2023 output wasn't more about keeping res levels down) Finally moving to interchange, one outlier with the narrative above is that imports are up, and exports are down. The latter is due to storage soaking up excess solar, but the former is surprising:  The blog author thinks it's probably due to NG producers going fully cold since they're not needed for afternoon peaks: quote:This suggests that the overall shift down in natural gas generators held online in CAISO to deal with ramping issues may have contributed to an increase in off-peak imports. Lastly, behind-the-meter solar growth is down in California, which shouldn't surprise anyone following NEM 3.0. Ulf fucked around with this message at 16:19 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 16:16
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California exceeds 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 30 days https://electrek.co/2024/05/21/renewables-met-100-percent-california-energy-demand-30-days/ In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California’s main grid for 69 of the past 75 days. https://x.com/mzjacobson/status/1792929817576325470
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May 22, 2024 17:36
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My whole life I've been told "we will always need baseload" and welp EDIT: vvv I took "baseload" to mean continuous (maybe even constant) power production. I'm not sure if it's a term that's formally defined anywhere, but if you sub "full-capacity power production" or something like that in my post you see what I'm getting at. CAISO is starting to have trouble with inflexible power producers. Ulf fucked around with this message at 20:30 on May 22, 2024 |
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May 22, 2024 20:03
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Ulf posted:My whole life I've been told "we will always need baseload" and welp And it is still accurate. That demand line isn't being met outside of peak solar hours, and battery capacity isn't shifting the excess capacity to cover that demand.
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May 22, 2024 20:23
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:And it is still accurate. That demand line isn't being met outside of peak solar hours, and battery capacity isn't shifting the excess capacity to cover that demand. Am I reading that right that mid day electricity demand is the daily minimum?
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May 22, 2024 20:32
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karthun posted:Am I reading that right that mid day electricity demand is the daily minimum? Yeah that's how I read it, which isn't exactly a huge achievement.
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May 22, 2024 20:39
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Ulf posted:My whole life I've been told "we will always need baseload" and welp Are you German or some nonsense? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 22, 2024 20:46
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Ulf posted:My whole life I've been told "we will always need baseload" and welp its one of those words like "literally" where over time it got used wrong by so many more people who didn't know what it meant that popularity won and now the wrong definition is the colloquially used one to wit: Heck Yes! Loam! posted:And it is still accurate. That demand line isn't being met outside of peak solar hours, and battery capacity isn't shifting the excess capacity to cover that demand.
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May 23, 2024 02:38
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MightyBigMinus posted:its one of those words like "literally" where over time it got used wrong by so many more people who didn't know what it meant that popularity won and now the wrong definition is the colloquially used one Are you saying that poster is wrong, if so, how so, what is wrong with their definition?
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May 23, 2024 02:41
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karthun posted:Am I reading that right that mid day electricity demand is the daily minimum? Yes, it’s been the case for a few months in the CAISO (California) market. On a typical day this month at mid-day the spot price for electricity goes negative, renewable generation is curtailed, and as much as 30% of the state’s generation is exported to the PNW, Nevada, Arizona, Utah. This isn’t expected to continue through summer/winter, at least not yet. It’s being seen in spring due to abundant sunshine, low temps (increases PV yields), and low A/C demands. Groda posted:Are you German or some nonsense? No, I just didn’t do a great job of researching or expressing my thoughts. There are two definitions of “base load”. One is the minimum load on a grid (it’s contextual whether that is daily, seasonally, yearly, …). The other is as a colloquialism for “base load producer” which is a power plant with low costs, and almost necessarily inflexible power output. For the last century we’ve designed power production around both of these concepts. With CAISO renewables exceeding grid demand almost daily, I’d argue both are becoming outdated in regards to energy policy. That’s all that I meant by my flippant remark (though specifically I was referring to base load power plants). Ulf fucked around with this message at 05:35 on May 23, 2024 |
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May 23, 2024 04:52
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To put it another way, here's the spot prices for electricity in NorCal last Sunday (SoCal and ZP were almost identical, as well): This is a cherry-picked example, in that it's the most negatively priced day in the past week. I could see this being a typical day next spring, though. I’m not some bright-eyed zealot who thinks we can do everything with renewables and storage (…yet?). I just think that the California market is going to price out fuel-based producers that can’t ramp output to meet demand. Ulf fucked around with this message at 05:36 on May 23, 2024 |
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May 23, 2024 05:05
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