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from the re-energizing-the-power-industry dept.
Tesla's Megapack Battery is Big Enough to Help Grids Handle Peak Demand:
Tesla announced a new massive battery today called Megapack that could replace so-called "peaker" power plants, which provide energy when a local electrical grid gets overloaded. Tesla says that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) will deploy several Megapacks at Moss Landing on Monterrey Bay in California, which is one of four locations where the California utility plans to install more cost-effective energy storage solutions.
Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy at a time, and it's possible to string enough Megapacks together to create a battery with more than 1 GWh of energy storage, Tesla says. The company says this would be enough energy to power "every home in San Francisco for six hours." Telsa will deliver the Megapacks fully assembled, and they include "battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker and controls." Tesla says the Megapack takes up 40 percent less space, requires a tenth of the parts to build, and can be assembled 10 times as fast as alternative energy storage solutions.
Also at cnet.
Would also have the benefit of essentially instant activation versus peaker plants which take some amount of time to spin up, even if kept warmed up and idling.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:13PM (18 children)
i dont understand the hate the intermitand nature of solar gets.
it's a reverse load. you dont run your fridge (compressor) constantly?
you dont kepp your lights running 24 hours?
you dont run your cookie baking oven 24/7?
you dont run your electrical water boiler all the time?
you dont store your handyman drill running on?
all your normal loads are intermitant, some times on, sometimes off.
i dont see the big central powerplant complaining about that?
so what if i carry some of the load myself (via solar) only during the day?
what the central powerplant should register when they measure is that it needs to "work less" (and thus can also only profit less from producing pollution and using up precious limited fuel sources). it's as if their were less customers during the day.
sure, batteries are good, but not a requirment to install grid tied solar, methinks.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:20PM (4 children)
> i dont understand the hate the intermitand nature of solar gets.
It's just hate for solar, full stop. Some people can't stand the thought of fossil fuel companies losing their profits. Weird, I know.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:22AM (3 children)
The total costs of the grid infrastructure will not change and will be divided among the users. The house next to me installing solar power means I am paying it's bills in electricity.
That's called "riding the infrastructure".
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:34AM (1 child)
So make everyone on the grid pay a basic "grid maintenance fee" as the base of their bill, and then charge energy used on top of that. Just like you pay "line rental" for your phone and then pay for calls on top.
That's wasn't hard, was it?
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:15PM
That "maintenance fee" will be almost what you pay now. I, for example, use less than half of electricity as compared to average and probably already being subsidized by others. Idle power generation is not much cheaper than at full capacity.
The only fair way to use new energy sources is to use them for new consumption only. You bought Tesla, you have a right to charge it from solar on the roof. The rest of your consumption you have to buy off the grid as everybody else or help them to pay their bills.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by Sabriel on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:36AM
That's not a problem with solar, that's a problem with whoever's in charge of the grid and/or billing in your part of the world.
We have separate line items in our utility bill for the service (the grid), consumption (what gets used) and production (what gets produced, whether by solar, wind, hydro or anything else). Heck, there's even a line item for the cost to read the meter.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:23PM
Utilities try to keep solar down (lobbying state legislatures) with various fees or maybe bad pricing for selling it back. The battery could prove its worth by allowing you to use the extra energy yourself at night. If it significantly adds to cost of your installation, then maybe not. Powerwall 2 can be around $10k [cleantechnica.com]. But if you can get access to a subsidy [electrek.co]...
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @01:51PM
and then statistics come into play and why power companies can manage with a not-so-large power margins. That's why randomness is so important to functionality of the grid. If everyone turned on the fridge at the same time, it would no longer function no matter what.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:23PM (8 children)
The "hate" is I think mostly the result of internalizing political talking points.
The legitimate criticism on the other hand...
The problem is that solar doesn't scale to a significant percentage of production capacity, and it's not nearly as good an investment for the grid as the raw production numbers make it look.
Without significant amount of energy storage on the grid every watt of power must be generated in the same instant it's consumed - turn on a hair drier at home and the power station miles away must immediately begin generating the extra power to supply it. Which means that to avoid rolling blackouts you need to build enough fossil generating capacity to handle peak load at times when all the intermittent sources have died down (or get society used to rationing power during such times, but that's a different conversation).
Now, there's nothing inherently *wrong* with that - but if you're normally producing half your power with renewables, that means half your fossil capacity is normally sitting idle - which means that they effectively cost considerably more to build per kWh generated, and the power they deliver is thus more expensive (and less profitable).
From a global warming perspective, solar panels are great. From a cost-per-kWh generated perspective, they're not bad, even beginning to edge out coal. But from a grid-scale cost/benefit perspective - it's a much uglier picture. You can't build solar power plants *instead of* fossil ones to increase peak load capacity, only as a supplement - which means capital outlay increases with no benefit to the bottom line.
Which means that as a society looking at what we're going to collectively pay per collective kWh used, we need to keep in mind that it doesn't actually matter if solar is cheaper per kWh generated than coal - it's still going to drive up the price of electricity unless "solar + backup power supply(batteries, coal plant, whatever)" is cheaper than coal. And currently that's mostly not the case. Obviously solar + fossil will never be cheaper than fossil alone, at least not without dramatic shortages or environmental taxes on fossil energy. However, solar+battery might eventually be able to - especially when you consider how quickly batteries can respond to demand fluctuations, and what that means in cost savings to other aspects of the grid (e.g. thinner power cables that only need to deliver average demand to a neighborhood rather than peak demand). And the fact that "battery" doesn't have to mean traditional chemical batteries - now that solar has gotten cheap enough, lots more money is being invested in R&D of more grid-friendly alternatives - a large stationary battery has very different design constraints than a small portable one, and things like pumped water and stacked stone (gravity batteries) become more attractive. As does compressed air, thermal storage, hot liquid metal batteries, carbon-fiber flywheels, etc,etc,etc,etc.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:45PM (7 children)
Solar and battery technology are still seeing relatively rapid improvements. We'll probably see at least a doubling of maximum battery energy density and lower costs. And then there's grid storage stuff you mention, like pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
It bodes well and solar is continuing to grow exponentially [wikipedia.org], at least for now.
Solar is a good stopgap until we get fusion, or dare I say... thorium?
(And that's not to ignore natural gas, which is a better option than coal.)
By stuffing enough large-scale storage into the grid, we can accommodate a future in which almost every new home/building has solar panels on it, but a grid connection is needed to account for bad weather or high individual demand.
In a more distant future, every building with roof tiles should have "solar tiles" instead, or solar panels. And the grid will be powered by cheap fusion energy.
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(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:47PM (1 child)
Another place where utilities are resisting progress is on smart grids. To have more decentralized power like batteries and wind/solar the grid needs to be smarter. But that costs money and the utilities resist.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:22AM
It isn't just the utilities resisting. The one around here had to go through recertification of their meters to switch to smart ones. There are normally a handful of people at utility meetings and even less comment. There were 5 people there to comment because the smart meters would allow the meter to charge different amounts in each direction. There were 38 people there to comment about the smart meters causing everything from headaches, nausea, and muscle pain, to cancer, autism, and infertility. Finally, one of the board asked the utility representative for a six month delay because she wanted the utility to provide evidence that the meters were safe. "After all, these people didn't show up for nothing. There must be some sort of evidence it's bad, right?" My friend, the utility representative, just told her she could call one of their engineers would be happy to talk about it with her.
That was a long story, but should illustrate the problems they do have when they finally want to put them in. But, you really should Google it because that crazy goes quite deep.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
I like your non-dystopian views of the future of the composition of the electric grid. Here's hoping for something even remotely close to what you've outlined.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 31 2019, @07:11PM
In solidarity with using less fossil fuel, I too raise my cigarette lighter in honor of your ideas ... wait, sorry about that.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:28AM (2 children)
The price for it will be similar to what we pay now for the whole electricity consumption.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 02 2019, @03:13AM (1 child)
Why would you assume that? It would cost a lot less to provide, and even a grid monopoly would still be in competition with the much more competitive battery industry.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 03 2019, @01:22AM
Let's take an extreme example. Hover dam will cost us roughly the same no matter how much electricity we get from it. All other, shall I call them classic, ways of getting electricity are very similar to this once all the costs are factored in, including, again for example, a cleaning costs of abandoned coal station, which will be more than building it. Note that the coal station clean up will not be done by the utility who owned it. Similar to mining industry the utility in question will simply go under and all the costs will come from taxes.
I am all for the new and green energy, but the way to get there is not what happens now.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
OK, you don't understand it. But *ALL* the electric utilities do, because storage has been a big problem. If this solution works well, look for the electric utilities to start promoting solar, as long as they can get paid for storing the overflow. (They don't like generators, either.)
Without good storage solutions, when the amount of local excess generation gets above, I think it was 30%, the grid becomes unstable. This is not good for ANYBODY. With good storage, you still need to maintain the grid, and that's not cheap.
FWIW, if wind were a common, there'd be more hate for wind than for solar, because it's less predictable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday August 02 2019, @03:36AM
Indeed - if they can charge you... twice(?) as much to provide power on demand as they pay for your excess when available, then there's a nice economic window for someone to make money operating grid-scale battery facilities. Essentially you're renting space in someone else's batteries, along with use of the power grid to get the energy there and back again, and at least occasionally access to backup power generators. All handled invisibly for you.
Heck, with the right incentives you could radically decentralize the power storage as well - make it easy for any idiot to allocate N% of their home battery system to "grid support" for a fair market value and anyone with the capital could get in on the profit - even people with no generating capacity. I imagine a Powerwall could makes for a great alternative to an emergency generator, especially if it would actually pay for itself within several years and start turning a profit.