One big battery

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Dennis P Brown
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One big battery

Post by Dennis P Brown »

The Austrailians are going to build a 300 Mega-amp battery; that has got to be one big cell phone.

See: https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-aus ... ttery.html
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Richard Hull
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Re: One big battery

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Massive storage like this is the only solution or path forward for the capricious and undependable renewables to work to any useful advantage in future. Still, Australia should maintain those coal plants on hot standby. Batteries don't last forever. They lose capacity and have only a limited number of charge-discharge cycles. Not much is currently known about the economics long term or the reliability of such battery backup systems of flagging renewables over long time periods of renewable failures for any number of reasons. When renewables currently falter, their slack is taken up by quick to start gas generation.

Australia is a leader here and putting a lot of future reliance on renewables and battery backup for them. Good luck to them.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Ameen Aydan
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Re: One big battery

Post by Ameen Aydan »

Telsa was able to make a longer lasting lithium ion battery. The previous battery pack only lasted a few thousand miles. They have now created a battery that can run an excess of 1.2 million miles in charge-discharge cycles. Production has already started. They should last about 16 years in cars. This figure increases with power plants, since power plant batteries aren't used all the time.

All these figures are from a recent announcement made by the CEO, Elon Musk

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesl ... tion-catl/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/tesla-a ... ttery.html

The long term operation of this type of power plant makes the cost of operation significantly less than that of a coal plant. The reliability of renewable, it's cost and abundance has proved it's superiority to gas and coal.

Australia never actually took the step to renewables. Telsa made an offer to them amid a wild fire and energy crisis. They would build a solar plant powered by batteries in 100 days, or it would be free. The benefits were proven and Australia has been making the switch ever since.

I know this is gonna sound rude, but the negative attitude on these forms and irl is one of the reason progression has been so hard, particularly with renewables. It used to be, "they're not reliable" and now it's, "they won't last". Cmon... Sometimes I feel it only sounds smarter to just deny!

There is a common trait for people who are recognized as achieving greatness. Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawkins etc were never taken seriously and were assumed wrong in their new theories and ideas. But in the end, they were right. Fusion has been an odd ball, but it doesn't say anything for all the other fields of research out there!

Take what you will.

Some info here might be wrong, since it's off the top of my head. Always double check sources!
Ameen Aydan
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Richard Hull
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Re: One big battery

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Just like fusion it is a long term wait and see if this works out well not only for the energy source value, but the economics of getting the energy to the customer. Will their electric bills soar or drop? That is just one facet of the wait and see game over time. At some point in the future, we will see, and it won't be real soon now.

It is to be remembered that Australia's energy issues related to Air Conditioning and not a population increase based energy usage. Let's hope this will work as a total solution for them.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Maciek Szymanski
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Re: One big battery

Post by Maciek Szymanski »

When reading this kind of news I always wonder why do we tend to invest huge amounts of money into expensive, complicated and unreliable solutions (imagine that HUGE amount of toxic chemicals!) just because they are modern and fashionable? There are simple and proven solutions like pumped-storage hydroelectricity. That’s like electric cars for me - we spend money for ridiculous machines carrying around amounts of toxic waste bigger than a yearly emission from a gas powered car while we have working technology for electric trains and trams, which work and don’t need any batteries to operate.
“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
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Richard Hull
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Re: One big battery

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I agree whole heartedly! This is why I continuously recommend the feature length documentary "Planet of the Humans", found on You tube. Most folks can't sit still long enough to see it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

Recommended for the starry eyed. There are no free lunches and no free energy. There are, however definitely too many people, living orders of magnitude better and consuming more than our forbearers.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: One big battery

Post by Dennis P Brown »

As for pump and hydro - that is about location, location, location and most places that just does not exist.

As for battery storage, I agree - a possibly toxic mess waiting (not anywhere as bad as uranium fission, of course.)

Which brings me to another though related topic. A Nasa engineer has designed a very interesting, extremely low nuclear waste reactor; better for many, it is based on Thorium (using an oxice that allows for low temeprature melting enabling a liquid core.) Besides very low waste production, it is like but superior to the Candu in regards to safety - it literally can't have a run away under any circumstances so is immue to melt down. Too bad it is useless for subs - otherwise, this reactor would be ideal for commercial power production.

A link to their PDF: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/200 ... 038711.pdf
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Richard Hull
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Re: One big battery

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The entire issue with renewables is their need for rare earths and lithium, suitable silicon of warranted purity etc. Renewables will remain a joke without off line, backup storage, and that means battery storage of DC and then that up converted to usable AC power with that attendant losses.

More great videos dealing with these issues in some depth. The first of documentary length.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88jpgxSRVZU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xwxe0wU4b8

These are serious issues. I have a real history with the rare earths, having most of them here in my lab in both pure metallic and oxide forms. I remember paying $100 for 1 gram of europium in the 1980's and then once China got on the move and had a Canadian distributor in the late 1990's, things exploded in the rare earth market. My request from work in 1999 for an engineering sample of gadolinium from the Canadian firm netted a 2 kilogram sample of the pure metal arriving at no charge!!!

My work with the rare earths coupled with my work with radiation taught me that where there are rare earths there is Thorium and lots of it! Some rare tramp uranium is found within feldspars, but pegmatites are a major holder of these rare earths and Thorium. Monazite sand that is deep orange or black, especially, can be 50% rare earths but up to 20% Thorium.

As noted in the first documentary above, the acids and other chemicals needed to leach out the rare earths are always horribly contaminated with what they call radioactive material (read nearly 100% thorium residues). Such spent chemical contamination and need for disposal is the very reason the U.S., long ago, gave up on spent fission fuel reclamation. 85% or more of all fission reactor spent fuel consists of that much usable mass of still valuable U235 fission fuel! Currently, hundred of tons of usable, recyclable Uranium fission fuel is stored in spent fuel casks and cooling ponds around the U.S. It is like filling you car tank with 20 gallons of gas, burning two gallons and draining the other 18 gallons into a hole, then refilling the 20 gallon tank to drive out another 2 gallons, etc., over and over again.

We just don't want to recycle the spent chemicals used to get that 85% back into the valued closing of the fission fuel cycle. So it is with the demanded gathering of rare earth's spent billion year half life thorium in the waste.

Going green with renewables that have no more than a generations worth of use before replacement can be an ongoing, filthy, polluting business.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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