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I was referring to Direct Air Capture, where companies like Oxy are building plants in west Texas to try to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and use it for enhanced oil recovery projects. On the larger scale, getting plant emissions is much easier, but more logistically challenging to get to storage. In the US, it takes a long time to get a Class IV permit (hopefully going down as there are more projects to make the EPA comfortable) and even then I'm not really sold on most projects being injection into saline aquifers.
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Apr 28, 2024 17:16
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IEA just released a report on batteries in the energy sector. Battery costs are down 90% in the last decade and there's significant investment in new plants which will reduce prices further and help meet demand. Forecasts are for solar+storage to be cheaper than new coal in China or gas in the US. https://www.iea.org/news/rapid-expansion-of-batteries-will-be-crucial-to-meet-climate-and-energy-security-goals-set-at-cop28
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Apr 28, 2024 22:34
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Hello everyone! Every year or so for the last half decade I bookmark this thread but stop following it when the rancor heats up again. This year might be different, there are some incredibly interesting things happening this spring so maybe there’ll be enough current news to keep the thread fresh and interesting! The biggest news for me has been the progress in California, I feel like we are finally seeing the fruits of some grueling decades-long policy and market building around CAISO:
Pardon all the wide-eyed optimism but I’ve been following this stuff since the California energy market was first created (and almost immediately brought the state to its knees by Enron loving with it), so seeing the turn this spring has been a long time coming for me. Cites for the above available on request, a lot of the trend claims can be verified by looking at GridStatus (create a free account to view older stats). The “Records” tab on that site is also a good way to see the inflection point in action. Ulf fucked around with this message at 20:44 on May 3, 2024 |
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May 3, 2024 20:42
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 that's impressive.
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May 3, 2024 21:05
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happen to have a good summary on the vendors and rates breakdown of that BESS market? it feels like remote places like hawaii and south australia went first, and now places with the slightest level of human decency (cali, eu) are going next, so we're clearly in the knee of the curve up as a couple hundred MW show up anywhere someone can scrounge up a connection (as you noted! i love that that came true!)
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May 3, 2024 23:53
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It would be interesting to see how much total capacity the batteries have and how deeply they're discharging each day. It's hard to tell if they're only discharging 20%, 50% or 90+%
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May 3, 2024 23:57
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Things are complicated by the fact that every article and press release are given in terms of power, rather than actual storage capacity. This article dated May 1st of this year says they just passed 10GW (10,379 MW). It looks like 5GW was crossed last July, so power doubled in about 10 months. These are currently often specced for 4 hours of power delivery, so the actual capacity is likely to be around 40GWh, give or take a healthy bit of wiggle room. Eyeballing the supply graph for Mon-Thur this week, it looks like they supplied ~20GWh on Wed/Thu and ~23GWh on Mon/Tue. I don't know typical charge+discharge efficiency, 80% sounds conservative but reasonable? (20*2+23*2)/4/.8 that and I'm coming up with ~26GWh as the active range. (I bet enough digging through CAISO stats would give me exact figures for all this, I'm just spitballing the above) That seems reasonable to me, 65% of the capacity being swung on a week of sunny spring days. The operators almost certainly have models to try and get the best return that take in predicted weather, strike price, wear on the batteries, chemistry characteristics, battery age, and so on. I'm also sure they're going to max these things out on some of the worst days in the coming summer.
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May 4, 2024 00:28
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MightyBigMinus posted:happen to have a good summary on the vendors and rates breakdown of that BESS market? I'm interested in the vendors myself, and after digging around a bit I'm starting to wonder if CAISO even has this information at all. CAISO doesn't operate the storage directly, they operate an energy (electricity) market full of quasi-independent operators. They have some explicit controls on these operators, for example part of the agreement to participate in the storage market is agreeing to maintain a particular state-of-charge during declared energy emergencies. However most of the control the ISO has are via market incentives. The first incentive is automatic via the electricity market: storage operators buy when price is low (often negative on sunny non-winter days), then sell when the price is high (during the evening and morning peaks). A second incentive is via participating in the ancillary services market: storage operators are incentivized to help maintain the grid frequency, and to inject synthetic inertia into the grid (i.e. simulating the ability of a large spinning generator to smooth out demand spikes). A tertiary incentive seems to be a secondary market for storage operations. I'm fuzzy on this but it looks like there's a market price for storing and supplying stored energy, which the operators bid on. I read this as a means to subsidize storage at the cost of the rest of the market operators. What I'm getting at is that the ISO doesn't need much info from the storage operators other than capacity, SoC reporting, and the various market operations that the operators perform. So it's possible they don't have details on storage vendors or chemistries. Or maybe they just haven't put it in a PDF for me yet. I can dig up individual press releases from energy companies about how they won the contract for this or that installation; Tesla is good about getting their name out there, and I know they use LiFePo as the chemistry in their MegaPacks. It looks like Terra-Gen uses LG batteries with NMC chemistry, they have a big presence in San Diego. Vistra has a big chunk of storage up in Moss Landing but I can't figure out their battery vendor or chemistry with quick googling. (EDIT: It's LG) Ulf fucked around with this message at 01:26 on May 4, 2024 |
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May 4, 2024 01:23
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It looks like Moss Landing is using LG "lithium-ion battery energy storage system" and phase 2 uses LG "utility-grade lithium-ion batteries" which, I'm guessing, are very similar to laptop batteries and what Tesla is using in their power packs
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May 4, 2024 01:30
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appreciate the digging. i know megapacks are lfp now but they weren't for some time, so i'm curious how much of the market is what now. it just seems amazing that anyone was ever able to make nmc economics work with thousands fewer cycles. like it seems like the math stands to reason that if nmc worked *even a little bit at the margin* then lfp being able to amortize over a near order of magnitude longer lifecycle would therefore be an utterly on fire with demand market. that said after 8 years and 20x returns I finally gave up and sold my last tesla last week. I know they've been killing it in this market but I just can't with temper tantrum poo poo anymore. so whats ticker #2 and 3 for megapack-competitors. last i looked into it part of the problem was it was like a couple german or korean mega-coglomerates where batteries were 0.2% of their business so you're not really investing in them.
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May 4, 2024 01:42
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A relative has a tesla, its pretty cool; but weird that apparently to open the glove compartment you need to press a button on the touch screen.
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May 4, 2024 03:19
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I mean, the moss landing facility just opened last fall. LG and Tesla have huge capacity to build automotive grade cells for very cheap, it seems like lithium ion will continue to be in the mix for some years to come, especially if the slump in EV sales continues
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May 4, 2024 06:42
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Here’s a positive update from the British grid: https://www.carbonbrief.org/chart-how-british-electricity-supplies-are-shifting-decisively-away-from-fossil-fuels/ The tl;dr is this Joy Division infographic: https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-1-1536x1501.png It graphs each year in 30-minute chunks and plots them by percent renewable electricity. The Brits still haven’t crossed the 100% renewable threshold but they just hit a 2% period so they’re about to. Ulf fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 4, 2024 |
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May 4, 2024 19:03
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Here is a challenge for the thread. Currently our grid power provider is putting us on day shift only until at least August. We are not convinced it will not repeat next year. We got a guote from Agrekko to hire 14 Antonov loads of gensets to bring in country @$1.7M each plus 10% handling charge and $600/MW/hr dry hire. We would probably go ahead with that except it is 12 weeks lead time (when the govt assures us that the grid will return to normal). Assuming we could smash through ESIA's etc, how fast do you think we could install a solar plant and BESS for ~18 MW continuous load? We are building a solar+BESS (37 MW solar, 20 MWhr BESS) at another place but it is 18 months build time. Is that about as fast as it could be done? Any you guys in the business of rapid de-carbonization/solar plant buildout?
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May 7, 2024 12:37
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Any you guys in the business of rapid de-carbonization/solar plant buildout? I'm not, I'm just some idiot on the internet, but that hasn't stopped me from making GBS threads up a thread before. Until a few months ago Tesla was giving lead times of ~2 years for megapacks, but it recently dropped to ~8 months: https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1759300484035141910 (this account is a $TSLA shill but has a history of posting megapack delivery quote screenshots so I don't mind using him as a data point with caveats). I'd reserve some skepticism as to whether these dates are realistic or are "Elon time". I don't have insight into what quotes you'd get from an LG-backed supplier, I'm just using Tesla as an example since they've got more data out there. As for the solar build, the same naïve searching you've probably already done gives results from 8-18 months. Depends on how much hand-waving we're talking. I imagine it helps if you already have the land zoned, and don't need to export the power.
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May 7, 2024 17:00
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Sorry for the double-post, I actually came here to paste this article: Greece suspends electricity imports until May 7 to protect system quote:The Independent Power Transmission Operator (IPTO or Admie) of Greece has announced the suspension of all electricity imports in the hours around noon through May 7. I've read this article a few times and am not completely sure I understand the situation. The country's transmission authority bans imports because prices are expected to be negative, do you think the import/export agreements aren't already price-based, or maybe aren't sufficiently incentivized to keep imports from blowing out the grid? Do you suppose they have a price cap applied for negative pricing? The line about local renewables makes me wonder if this isn't protectionism to keep local solar providers afloat, though only keeping foreign power out for four days doesn't seem like it'd add up to much. EDIT: I don't want to triple-post, so I'll add today's NYT article here. Sorry for monopolizing the thread in the last few days, but I really find this stuff fascinating: Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity quote:... big snips ...   The article goes on to talk about Texas: quote:... snip ... It's weird to see Enron's hokum about energy trading become day-to-day reality. Ulf fucked around with this message at 17:58 on May 7, 2024 |
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May 7, 2024 17:13
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very interesting, thanks for sharing
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May 8, 2024 01:15
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Ulf posted:Sorry for the double-post, I actually came here to paste this article: My favorite part of the Times article is the big spike in their daily graph for the eclipse.
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May 8, 2024 01:19
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Tough year for the coal mines up north of me: Wyoming coal production nosedives, with more trouble ahead quote:... snip ... I like to excerpt heavily instead of pasting a wall of text, let me know if that breaks D&D rules or norms. Two big takeaways from the above: (a) drat that graph looks rough for coal, and (b) I guess the threat of regulation is enough to kill coal. The article blames it on long planning cycles but I wonder if it isn't also the fact that a lot of coal plants are becoming stranded assets... something which I wouldn't expect that site to talk about (it's a very pro-coal site, like most Wyoming media orgs). Ulf fucked around with this message at 20:04 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 20:02
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Good. Coal employs like less than 50,000 people nation wide; it needs to die so the US switches to something better.
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May 10, 2024 21:15
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Raenir Salazar posted:Good. Coal employs like less than 50,000 people nation wide; it needs to die so the US switches to something better. About that, what the US has been switching to is natural gas, and it's entirely unclear if gas might actually be worse than coal. Burning gas on its own gives you 50% less emissions, but methane is an extremely potent ghg, and it seems we have way more leaks than we expected
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May 10, 2024 21:50
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Raenir Salazar posted:Good. Coal employs like less than 50,000 people nation wide; it needs to die so the US switches to something better. It's been a while since I looked it up, coal employs about 30,000 people in West Virginia; of those due to automation like 23,000 are in middle management Protecting coal at this point is almost exclusively protecting management jobs There still exist the necessary truck drivers and maintenance folks, but like, it's not the blue collar steady job meca it was 70 years ago The average coal worker has an MBA, drives a BMW 3 series and wears a $1000 wrist watch and sends their kids to private school
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May 10, 2024 22:28
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tractor fanatic posted:About that, what the US has been switching to is natural gas, and it's entirely unclear if gas might actually be worse than coal. Burning gas on its own gives you 50% less emissions, but methane is an extremely potent ghg, and it seems we have way more leaks than we expected did you bother to click your link, or was the headline confirming your opinion enough?
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May 10, 2024 22:30
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Hadlock posted:It's been a while since I looked it up, coal employs about 30,000 people in West Virginia; of those due to automation like 23,000 are in middle management isnt the boots on the ground job also mostly college degree job? you have a geologist survey the site, a explosive expert takes their input and they minmax the explosives to break up the landmass into small enough boulder to process into machines. like yeah lol at the pop culture idea thinks its still dudes with hand tools.
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May 10, 2024 22:57
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MightyBigMinus posted:did you bother to click your link, or was the headline confirming your opinion enough? Which one?
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May 10, 2024 22:57
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tractor fanatic posted:About that, what the US has been switching to is natural gas, and it's entirely unclear if gas might actually be worse than coal. Burning gas on its own gives you 50% less emissions, but methane is an extremely potent ghg, and it seems we have way more leaks than we expected There are more problems with coal than GHG emissions. The improved scrubbers have improved things but they still have the ash to dispose of, poorly. It should have been replaced in the 60s as a fuel source.
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May 11, 2024 12:47
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The mercury alone is enough to willingly trade coal for gas.
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May 11, 2024 12:58
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Gas is strictly better, no buts or ifs. The problem is that gas being built now is not going away...any time soon. And, it has to.
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May 11, 2024 13:02
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Does the abiotic oil theory have anything to it? That is, the idea (or conspiracy) I’ve read that oil and other hydrocarbons are actually produced in the earth’s mantle, and are thusly not fossil fuels?
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May 11, 2024 17:11
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Does the abiotic oil theory have anything to it? That is, the idea (or conspiracy) I’ve read that oil and other hydrocarbons are actually produced in the earth’s mantle, and are thusly not fossil fuels? It's a crank theory that is theoretically possible but extremely unlikely. There's no real evidence to support it, it's just postulated. Its origin doesn't have any impact on anything else. It's oil in the ground regardless of how it got there.
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May 11, 2024 17:21
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In other news...when CATL announces something like this, you have to turn your head. They are not known for hyping up things out of reach, or things with a low TRL years away from the market.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o8MDaqM0RU
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May 11, 2024 17:49
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Does the abiotic oil theory have anything to it? That is, the idea (or conspiracy) I’ve read that oil and other hydrocarbons are actually produced in the earth’s mantle, and are thusly not fossil fuels? It's just bullshit. While it is possible for long hydrocarbons to form abiotically, when we drill/dig down, we don't just find oil. We find the sedimentary layers which are absolutely full of all the other remains of the organisms that were converted to oil. And we use our knowledge of geology and the geological history of the area to find oil, and we do this by finding sedimentary layers formed in shallow seas and then capped by non-permeable layer. Because we know what kind of biological material forms into oil and under what conditions the oil is preserved.
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May 11, 2024 17:54
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Dante80 posted:In other news...when CATL announces something like this, you have to turn your head. Maybe not, but a Youtuber claiming 500 Wh/kg out of a battery technology whose theoretical maximum is about 120 Wh/kg less than that is not to be trusted.
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May 11, 2024 19:39
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Phanatic posted:Maybe not, but a Youtuber claiming 500 Wh/kg out of a battery technology whose theoretical maximum is about 120 Wh/kg less than that is not to be trusted. To be fair, it's CATL that's claiming 500 Wh/kg. Youtuber is just repeating it.
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May 11, 2024 19:41
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Phanatic posted:Maybe not, but a Youtuber claiming 500 Wh/kg out of a battery technology whose theoretical maximum is about 120 Wh/kg less than that is not to be trusted. CATL is publicly announcing it on their website. https://www.catl.com/en/news/6015.html
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May 11, 2024 19:42
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Phanatic posted:Maybe not, but a Youtuber claiming 500 Wh/kg out of a battery technology whose theoretical maximum is about 120 Wh/kg less than that is not to be trusted. This is a CATL claim, not a Youtuber one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhMOhrXm4n4 You might want to call them and tell them that the theoretical maximum of the battery they already made is smaller than what they have already made. Dante80 fucked around with this message at 19:47 on May 11, 2024 |
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May 11, 2024 19:43
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Dante80 posted:This is a CATL claim, not a Youtuber one. Okay, I'm gonna blame how he describes things. Because when he says "CATL, they just sent me an email," at the very beginning of his video, this is what's in the email they sent him:  That specifically gives a figure for its Shenxing PLUS LFP battery of an energy density of 205 Wh/Kg. He then goes on to say: "I thought that these batteries were years away but CHL is saying no no no no. For one they told me I was wrong on something I said about their battery, the new Shenxing battery, not really wrong but the details weren't quite correct, I'll tell you what those details were. Two, though, they said to me that their new battery is the highest energy density battery in the world and it's already in semi trucks in China." He's conflating two batteries here. He makes it sound like he's talking about one battery, but he's referring to two: the new Shenxing battery, which is the first one CATL talks about in the email; and the new condensed battery, which is the last one in the email and which CATL says exists in "a ton-class prototype," specifically an airliner, and there's nothing in the video about this battery already being used in semi trucks in China (maybe it is, but neither video supports that claim and the CATL video doesn't even make that claim. Or for that matter, that it's powering the test aircraft; not that they say the aircraft is equipped with the battery, not that it is being powered by the battery.)
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May 11, 2024 20:46
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Does the abiotic oil theory have anything to it? That is, the idea (or conspiracy) I’ve read that oil and other hydrocarbons are actually produced in the earth’s mantle, and are thusly not fossil fuels? I read a paper published in a petroleum engineering journal from the 1920s going in to a long discussion about the origin of oil coming from igneous rocks. There was a reply letter that got dangerously close to plate tectonics decades before it was formally described. It also was mostly correct on how the oil probably came from organic matter that was buried at a much greater depth. Oil is almost entirely from algae buried in an anoxic environment that breaks down into oil at high pressure and temperature over geologic time frames. Organic material more substantial than algae generally only generates has, as does anytime else if the rock gets too hot and larger carbon molecules break down into smaller ones.
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May 11, 2024 20:58
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I had a cousin-in-law, MIT graduate and everything, try to smugly sell me on this idea like 20 years ago. Why yes he was an engineer (electrical).
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May 11, 2024 21:46
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