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And to just highlight it: The major reason big windmills are better is not just that are more efficient, but that their output is less unpredictable. Wind power is already amazingly cheap, when it is available. The only reason it's not displacing everything is that it's not always windy, and that unpredictability forces you to do a whole bunch of different expensive mitigations around it. As a rule, the higher off the ground you are, the less local weather impacts wind speeds. The economic output of a bigger windmill that on average makes twice the power than a smaller one is a lot higher than twice that of the small one, because averages are worth a lot less than minimums, and the minimums of big windmills go up faster than the averages. And a fancy track system doesn't help with this, at all.
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Nov 11, 2023 01:32
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The Energy Generation Megathread: Heated Exchanges ?
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Dec 20, 2023 20:16
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DTurtle posted:I will never understand the hostility to energy trade within the EU + periphery in this thread. Because we have now seen twice within 5 years that in a crisis situation it's every country for themselves, with everyone passing (often actually illegal by EU law, but no-one cared) special laws that gently caress over their neighbours a lot just to help themselves a little. And energy is not just an economic thing, here in the frozen north we are going to start loving dying if the power is off for too long. So there must be sufficient capacity to keep the heating on, and it has to come from a place that we can actually trust won't cut it off to help themselves. Which means from within our own borders.
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Jan 17, 2024 11:31
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cat botherer posted:Yeah, large-scale stationary hydrogen storage isn't nearly as problematic. Combined-cycle natural gas plants could also be converted, which would reduce costs a whole lot. The key issue it seems is relatively low round-trip efficiency. Electrolysis tops out at 80%, and then you've got maybe 60-70% for CC generation, so under 50%. That's still potentially compelling due to the problems and expense of of Li-ion batteries. However, with the recent success of much cheaper sodium-ion batteries in China, that advantage might erode. No kind of battery can ever get close to the cost of hydrogen for long-term storage. Batteries are great for smoothing out a few seconds of fluctuation, passable for minutes, and with heroic effort and expense can do for hours. (Quiz: if you used all the money used to build OL3 (the stupendously expensive new Finnish nuclear reactor) instead to build grid-scale battery of equivalent power at the lowest cost per Wh that any grid scale battery project has ever been completed, how long would the battery last? Last I checked, 25 hours. Probably a bit longer now, grid scale battery projects are constantly trending cheaper.) European renewables have supply fluctuations that need to be smoothed out over the scale of three months. It is actually possible to build hydrogen generation infrastructure that will store that much energy, it never will be with batteries. Batteries + solar works just fine in California, where a study found that they only need storage for 3 hours. Tuna-Fish fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 15:22
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Endjinneer posted:What form does this storage take? I was under the impression that hydrogen is a fucker to store. Leakage scales with surface area, amount stored with volume. Leakage is a big problem at small scales (as in, hydrogen economy where everyone drives around in hydrogen-powered cars), but for grid storage you just scale the storage vessel arbitrarily large until leakage as a proportion is small enough you don't need to care about it.
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Mar 23, 2024 01:47
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