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from the get-by-with-a-little-help-from-my-friends dept.
China spins up giant battery built with US-patented tech:
The world's largest vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) has been connected to the grid in Dalian, China, where it was built using technology patented in the United States.
With a current capacity of 100MW/400MWh and plans to double it, the Dalian VRFB will reportedly be able to meet the daily energy needs of 200,000 people, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said. The battery will be used to manage supplies during peak power demand periods, and could allow electricity companies in the Dalian region to adopt more renewables to feed the system.
VRFBs are free of lithium-ion and are far safer than traditional batteries, instead relying on mixtures of liquid electrolytes and acids. VRFBs can hold a charge for far longer than traditional batteries as well, and are also designed to be charged and discharged for decades without degrading.
The Dalian VRFB dwarfs other projects – Australia's largest VRFB only boasts 2MW/8MWh of capacity, and a similar test project in the San Diego area recently stood up a similarly sized battery. Other large VRFB projects are still far smaller, like the Sumitomo battery in Hokkaido, Japan, that was brought online earlier this year. It has a capacity of 17MW/51MWh and was described as one of the world's largest VRFBs.
As reported in August, the VRFB built in Dalian appears to be one designed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) that cost US taxpayers $15 million dollars to develop, and for which the US government owns the patent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday October 04 2022, @11:52AM
I've seen people who just think this is a choice between less and more emissions without regard for the tradeoffs. There's several problems with the above narrative. First, the problem isn't people who claim cuts to emissions aren't a solution. It's that we're doing important things collectively with the activities that generate those emissions and we will do less of those important things, if we cut emissions. It isn't a choice between better and worse - why would anyone choose worse? It's a tradeoff not a "more magic" button that we refuse to press.
Related to that is the poor outcomes of emission reduction schemes to date: for example, Germany's Energiewende program which hasn't reduced Germany's dependence on fossil fuels in large part because they decided to tilt at the nuclear power windmill - more on that later, and doubled the cost of electricity in Germany. If these emission reduction policies and programs would actually achieve the goals they claim to want, it would make some sense to consider them. They don't even do that.
Third, our focus should not be on emission reduction, but on poverty reduction. I keep hammering this point, because it is the single most important difference we can make in our world. Not only do we reduce genuine suffering in the world, but we also reduce population growth in the mildest and lowest pain way we know. Wealthy people are low fertility people and we have a many decades trend towards both greater wealth and lower fertility. And there's a lot of stuff, including climate change, that is positively affected by having less poor people in the world.
Finally, what is next? If we cripple our economies just to do token efforts on climate, what poor policy choices are next? 4 day work weeks [soylentnews.org]? Trace amounts [soylentnews.org] of chemicals we don't like? We already see the nonproblems that will be attacked next - causing real harm to avoid an imaginary one. It's time to get sensible before we throw away this opportunity to be a better people.