This article, like Turnbull, is incorrectly equating cost with price. Emissions are a cost. Price + emissions = cost. Renewables have been beating coal on cost for quite a while, only now they can start to win on price.
but to dig a bit deeper, who pays each cost and who benefits from the value?
who directly benefits from the value of energy:
- australian energy consumers
- australian energy producers
who pays the costs for energy prices:
- australian energy consumers
who pays the costs for australian emissions *:
- people living in australia -- 0.3% of emissions
- people living in world excluding australia -- 99.7% of emissions
* assuming each person currently alive in world has equal interest in global climate. this is pretty crude as people who arent born yet get to carry the cost too.
Clearly we cant account for these shared global costs sensibly unless enough countries reach some kind of global agreement. The current australian federal government is taking a regrettable approach of self-interest and is waiting for the larger/more powerful countries to lead the way. Australia has plenty of coal to sell in the mean time.
Failure to act on climate change has a game-theoretic cost. Taking unilateral action massively improves your negotiating position and reduces the cost for other countries to reduce their emissions via economies of scale. One country taking decisive action could trigger a chain reaction of political pressure.
Australia has a horrendous wildfire problem. The frequency and severity of wildfires has drastically increased over recent years. A small increase in global temperatures could render vast areas of the country effectively uninhabitable due to the risk of fire.
I think that most Australians are willing to act; that will is being subverted by a powerful coal lobby. They see the hellish scenes every summer. They see the immense financial, environmental and human cost. They see the weight of scientific evidence.
> who pays the costs for australian emissions *:
> - people living in australia -- 0.3% of emissions
> - people living in world excluding australia -- 99.7% of emissions
Not that straightforward. Effects of emissions is global, yes, but there are also local effects due to pollution, certain chemical byproducts, etc... meaning the local cost is higher than the average worldwide cost.
One of the other costs of fossil fuels that isnt. mentioned as. much is the resultant pollution and environmental degradation. These externalities are real. Due to the air pollution that gets trapped in the LA basin, Los Angeles has the worst air pollution in the US. 1300 lives are cu5 short each year due to the smog and over the course of a lifetime, breathing the air will shorten your lifespan by a few years.[1]. Also, air pollution is thought to double the risk of dementia in women according to a recent study. [2]
Another grave consequence of bith global climate change and localized pollution is the loss of biodiversity and the chance to study and learn from other organisms and their unique genomes and adaptations.
To be fair, the maths behind rentability is tainted with so much agenda from all parts.
E.G: when you give prices for a nuclear plant in France, you include only assembly price and running costs. While for wind turbines you include assembly, disassembly, running costs and wiring (which must be underground by law). This makes it hard to make fair comparisons.
The turnover of EDF in France in the 90" was above $40 billion. 60% of its production was from nuclear, hence the nuclear costed more than $24 billion each year just to be operated. For a country like France this is huge, several percent of the GDP of that time. But nobody was discussing about that issue mainly because the CGT union had a tight grip on EDF governance.
Can anyone comment more generally on using lithium ion batteries for grid scale storage? It seems nonsensical to me.
Lithium makes sense for cars where power density is essential. But with grid scale storage, there are so many drawbacks, including
1.) High fixed cost vs. other batteries
2.) Degradation from dendrite growth
3.) Need for constant cooling
4.) Possibility of catastrophic failure in case of short circuiting
In contrast something like Zinc-Bromine flow batteries have unlimited cycling with zero loss of energy storage, and are inherently composed of fire retardant materials, making them impossible to catch fire or explode [0]. The trade off is in energy density, but that shouldn't be an issue for fixed grid-scale deployments.
This story feels like forcing a solution with the power of good marketing, not solid engineering.
They aren't trying to solve the problem of 'doing it the best way'.
They're trying to solve the problem of 'what else can we do with these high performance batteries'. So they have some where else to put overproduction, have more buying power of raw resources due to scale, more research dollars to put into li-ion batteries responsibly, or they already have the well made hammer of li-ion batteries so everything is a nail.
I'm excited about flow batteries too, but they still have their analogues of the above.
1) Are prices publicly available yet? I haven't found one online, would be keen to know how much their 10kWh unit costs.
2) The cell has a finite lifespan which is analogous to cell degradation - the warranty covers up to 36,500kWh of delivered energy for the 10kWh model, which equates to 3650 full discharge cycles. This is more than lithium batteries, don't get me wrong, but they're not immortal.
3) I don't believe lithium batteries need constant cooling in most cases, especially since for bulk storage your discharge rate is going to be less than 1C.
4) Fair call, lithium batteries have some scary failure modes.
Also, the round trip efficiency of these batteries is only ~77% which is a fair bit lower than lithium (I think they're 90%+?) and represents a large loss of energy over the life of the battery.
Overall I agree that there are significant advantages to flow batteries, especially at grid scale, but they do have drawbacks too.
129MWh is a laughable amount of storage when you need at minimum 10000MWh per day for 1mln people. So you would need at least $12.5bln to build enough plants for just one day per 1mln people. And that's not counting maintenance. For that price 2-3 nuclear plants can be built which can last 30-50 years unlike the 10-20 years of lithium storage.
Instead of hideously expensive (and potentially explosive) lithium storage, solution should be synthesizing and storing some form of gas. This gas can then be produced and stored in underground locations during summer, and then spent during winter.
The article, of course, is guilty of exactly what it accuses its opponents of -- truthiness. They say that this is affordable, and then don't even say how much it costs! He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense [1]
This is true, but I'd note this quite from the article:
Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap.
To address you specific point though - the price is less than A$150M/$US115M[1].
By comparison, the SA government is also building a new 250MW gas fired power station which costs A$360M[2].
It's difficult to compare the two because they are such different things of course. But I'd note that at periods of high wind generation the power price in SA does drop to zero, but the peak price is very high. It seems likely the price of energy from the wind farm plus battery will be extremely competitive with gas, and the investment price seems roughly proportional for the amount of energy made available.
How much is the price for kwh stored/dispatched , over the long term ? that's the missing data here.
And btw: i don't know the economics of this project, but in general, if this was cost effective, Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.
There is a great deal going on in the energy world right now around storage of electricity, I think it's a shame opEd websites such as the Guardian feature and focus on Musk, a single entrepreneur and his companies, over the broader advances that are unfolding...
You would think so, but I've been following this for 4 years and there are huge issues to resolve. There is a pre existing grid designed to distribute electricity generated from imported oil which is now woefully out of date.
There is huge home solar usage in Hawaii but the grid is incapable of redistributing surplus power created by owner panels.
Storage for redistribution at a reasonable cost is the big challenge there, and is being watched closely by other regions and places before they emulate...
From the Energy Dive article I linked to:
'At the end of 2016, about 26% of Hawaiian Electric’s customers’ electricity was sourced from renewables, Greentech Media notes. Customer owned solar power was the largest contributor at 34% of the renewables total, followed by wind, 29%, and biomass at 19%.
On the Big Island of Hawaii renewables accounted for 54% of customers’ needs and on Maui and Molokai it was 37%.'
Why is Snowy Hydro 2.0 "ridiculous" and "silly"? What exactly is advantage of battery over pumped storage? Big problem with pumped storage is that it needs specific location, but it seems they already have it.
As I understand, pumped storage is cheaper, more energy efficient, more mature technology. I understand battery swithes faster. What else?
Why is it important that something is done quickly? As I understand from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout it was caused by once-in-50-year event. I understand political urgency, but technically there doesn't seem to be anything urgent.
You mentioned location, but that advantage can't really be understated. How can you have pump storage near every major city? It's not feasible in most places. Then there is the enormous transmission cost to get the energy to (and from) that remote location.
Batteries can also meet fluctuations in demand instantly. Hydro cannot.
For wind at least, it turns out you want to put the batteries as close to the wind turbines as possible, rather than close to the consumer. The reason is that this evens out the power delivery over the grid. If you put the batteries close to the consumer, the grid from the turbines to consumer must cope with peak generation capacity (powering peak demand, plus charging batteries), whereas if the batteries are close to the turbine the grid only needs to cope with peak wind demand (i.e generation capacity minus battery charging), which is considerably less. Source: from a conversation with someone in high in a major wind power generator.
In general the problem with hydropower is, that it is the best energy source if you have the location. Therefore the good locations were developed early on, Hoover dam in the 1930ies, Aswan dam in the 1960ies, and now we are left with marginal locations. In a way we already reached peak hydro.
Battery technology will continue to mature and at a certain point it will undoubtedly be the better option in most cases. Instead of a giant one-off civil engineering project every time (with all the ways that could go poorly), it would presumably be a relatively straightforward and repeatable install. Unless there is a dire need to bring a ton of storage online right now, it seems that investing in batteries is the better option.
I agree battery will be better in the future. But it doesn't follow that battery is better investment today.
On civil engineering project going poorly, I think that's the problem of poor project management, but I guess sometimes technical solution to management problem makes sense. I note pumped storage gets built routinely within time and budget without any fuss all over the world.
So basically we are transitioning from a fossil energy based world to lithium based one. Why does media never talk about the sustainability of build lithium ion batteries at large scale? Have the recycling problem been sorted out (I have a couple of lithium ion batteries and I don't know what to do about them) I also heard that lithium is very very scarce on Earth.
It's not talked about in "the media" (at least not front page stuff) because it is not a huge problem. While "scarce" is relative, global demand until the year 2100 is estimated to be between 12 and 20 million tons, while currently known reserves are about 39 million tons. So we should be good for at least 80 years. Recycling is also a solved problem, though we'll have to build a few more factories to keep up with the increased amount.
Note that eventually, graphene based energy storage may take over anyway. Or possibly someone will invent proper hydrogen storage.
Finally, you could easily have found multiple studies by respected universities about the estimated amount of lithium on Earth, about the feasability of large scale recycling of Li-ion batteries and about transitioning into a lithium-based economy. If you are willing to take advice, reading up first before become alarmed and posting concerned comments will help a lot for your peace of mind.
I love it when people make 80 year old predictions with a straight face.
Reminds me of "peak oil" when everybody was predicting us running out of oil. Today somehow that doesn't seem to concern us anymore. Some are even more concerned about over-abundance of oil (Saudi Arabia for one).
What crystal ball are they using to predict the future out for 80 years? Are they making the assumption that there will be no technological paradigm shifts and demand growth will continue along current levels? Do they factor in the effects of climate change and global instability?
If you use an estimate of demand to justify increasing demand, you immediately, tautologically invalidate the estimate: the estimate did not account for your policy decisions based on itself.
Seems like there is plenty of lithium, but mines are not keeping up with demand. Here's an interesting story from FT about Chile's lithium mines, with pictures:
It takes time to construct new mines. When Tesla started building the gigafactory, they signed long-term contracts with companies building new mines in the US and Mexico.
Isn't that an overstatement? Australia's installed generating capacity is 67GW and about 50% load factor. It needs at least 100 systems like that to make a significant impact on grid stability. Even in South Australia alone, at least 10x that much is needed.
Price of battery systems seems to be same now per unit of storage and lower per unit of peak power. So that's fine: all things being equal, battery is definitely better than a pumped storage plant.
They just need whole lot more than this 1 battery to solve the problem.
FYI: 129 MWh would be about 1300 42U-style racks for batteries alone.
Source: there's a guy in socal (Jehu Garcia) building a reclaimed peaker 1 MWh pack in about 10 racks from used batteries and equipment (50 kW 480VAC inverter) on the cheap in order to store energy off-peak (plus possibly charge using solar) and use it at peak supplemented by grid power. This is how manufacturing and other heavy industry / large electrical consumers can save money right now in US day-of-use billed grid systems.
Jehu Garcia's Youtube videos are definitely worth checking out, the guy is doing cool things with 18650 lithium ion cells. He converted a VW bus into an electric vehicle. My main takeaway after watching his videos and others in the same vein is that lithium ion battery packs are the gasoline of the 21st century.
You can build 18650 packs for electric bikes, scooters, boats etc... or build your own Power Wall type home electric energy storage.
The costs of these cells coming out of China have gotten down to $1 each in some cases of excess inventory...
Wouldn't some kind of gravity-based storage be cheaper/safer? Just lift some huge weights with excess energy, lock it in place, and then let gravity pull it down to reclaim it.
Australian Synchrotron is already using three giant flywheels as an UPS, here is a short presentation. I am sure that you will be able to find enough information to determine if doing this would be feasible on a commercial scale.
There are a few experimental installations of these around. I don't believe they are viable for larger scale storage, but fit smaller scale they seem competitive.
Readit News
but to dig a bit deeper, who pays each cost and who benefits from the value?
* assuming each person currently alive in world has equal interest in global climate. this is pretty crude as people who arent born yet get to carry the cost too.Clearly we cant account for these shared global costs sensibly unless enough countries reach some kind of global agreement. The current australian federal government is taking a regrettable approach of self-interest and is waiting for the larger/more powerful countries to lead the way. Australia has plenty of coal to sell in the mean time.
Australia has a horrendous wildfire problem. The frequency and severity of wildfires has drastically increased over recent years. A small increase in global temperatures could render vast areas of the country effectively uninhabitable due to the risk of fire.
I think that most Australians are willing to act; that will is being subverted by a powerful coal lobby. They see the hellish scenes every summer. They see the immense financial, environmental and human cost. They see the weight of scientific evidence.
Not that straightforward. Effects of emissions is global, yes, but there are also local effects due to pollution, certain chemical byproducts, etc... meaning the local cost is higher than the average worldwide cost.
Another grave consequence of bith global climate change and localized pollution is the loss of biodiversity and the chance to study and learn from other organisms and their unique genomes and adaptations.
1 http://www.thoracic.org/about/newsroom/press-releases/journa... 2 https://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n1/full/tp2016280a.html
E.G: when you give prices for a nuclear plant in France, you include only assembly price and running costs. While for wind turbines you include assembly, disassembly, running costs and wiring (which must be underground by law). This makes it hard to make fair comparisons.
Lithium makes sense for cars where power density is essential. But with grid scale storage, there are so many drawbacks, including
1.) High fixed cost vs. other batteries
2.) Degradation from dendrite growth
3.) Need for constant cooling
4.) Possibility of catastrophic failure in case of short circuiting
In contrast something like Zinc-Bromine flow batteries have unlimited cycling with zero loss of energy storage, and are inherently composed of fire retardant materials, making them impossible to catch fire or explode [0]. The trade off is in energy density, but that shouldn't be an issue for fixed grid-scale deployments.
This story feels like forcing a solution with the power of good marketing, not solid engineering.
[0] http://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Garth-Corey-as...
They're trying to solve the problem of 'what else can we do with these high performance batteries'. So they have some where else to put overproduction, have more buying power of raw resources due to scale, more research dollars to put into li-ion batteries responsibly, or they already have the well made hammer of li-ion batteries so everything is a nail.
1) Are prices publicly available yet? I haven't found one online, would be keen to know how much their 10kWh unit costs.
2) The cell has a finite lifespan which is analogous to cell degradation - the warranty covers up to 36,500kWh of delivered energy for the 10kWh model, which equates to 3650 full discharge cycles. This is more than lithium batteries, don't get me wrong, but they're not immortal.
3) I don't believe lithium batteries need constant cooling in most cases, especially since for bulk storage your discharge rate is going to be less than 1C.
4) Fair call, lithium batteries have some scary failure modes.
Also, the round trip efficiency of these batteries is only ~77% which is a fair bit lower than lithium (I think they're 90%+?) and represents a large loss of energy over the life of the battery.
Overall I agree that there are significant advantages to flow batteries, especially at grid scale, but they do have drawbacks too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc–bromine_battery
Instead of hideously expensive (and potentially explosive) lithium storage, solution should be synthesizing and storing some form of gas. This gas can then be produced and stored in underground locations during summer, and then spent during winter.
129MWh / 10GWh / 1M people / 12.5G people
[1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap.
To address you specific point though - the price is less than A$150M/$US115M[1].
By comparison, the SA government is also building a new 250MW gas fired power station which costs A$360M[2].
It's difficult to compare the two because they are such different things of course. But I'd note that at periods of high wind generation the power price in SA does drop to zero, but the peak price is very high. It seems likely the price of energy from the wind farm plus battery will be extremely competitive with gas, and the investment price seems roughly proportional for the amount of energy made available.
[1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-aus...
[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-stat...
And btw: i don't know the economics of this project, but in general, if this was cost effective, Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.
I know Musk promised the 100-days or free thing, which makes a nice headline, but I really doubt that is what the actual contract says.
I may be wrong but would be very interested to know.
There is a great deal going on in the energy world right now around storage of electricity, I think it's a shame opEd websites such as the Guardian feature and focus on Musk, a single entrepreneur and his companies, over the broader advances that are unfolding...
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/teslas-kauai-solar-storage...
By putting the two together, the combination looks like a conventional power plant in terms of the grid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Hawaii
If solar is cost effective then Hawaii should be an easy place to build it?
From the Energy Dive article I linked to:
'At the end of 2016, about 26% of Hawaiian Electric’s customers’ electricity was sourced from renewables, Greentech Media notes. Customer owned solar power was the largest contributor at 34% of the renewables total, followed by wind, 29%, and biomass at 19%.
On the Big Island of Hawaii renewables accounted for 54% of customers’ needs and on Maui and Molokai it was 37%.'
As I understand, pumped storage is cheaper, more energy efficient, more mature technology. I understand battery swithes faster. What else?
The Snowy Mountains (the location of the hydro) is a very long way away from South Australia and not even in the same state.
So for SA location is a problem.
But I think the bigger problem with Snowy Hydro 2.0 is time and the cost.
The Snowy Hydro 2.0 feasibility study has only just begun and will be finished in December of this year.
If that study finds the project is feasible, it will be many years before the project even starts.
Compare that with the SA battery project which will be finished even before Snowy Hydro 2.0 finishes it's feasibility study.
Batteries can also meet fluctuations in demand instantly. Hydro cannot.
I already said battery switches faster. You are simply repeating what I said.
Because, at best it's 10+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars away, and that is being very, very optimistic.
The Big Battery is not a pipe dream. It will exist in 100 days.
On civil engineering project going poorly, I think that's the problem of poor project management, but I guess sometimes technical solution to management problem makes sense. I note pumped storage gets built routinely within time and budget without any fuss all over the world.
Note that eventually, graphene based energy storage may take over anyway. Or possibly someone will invent proper hydrogen storage.
Finally, you could easily have found multiple studies by respected universities about the estimated amount of lithium on Earth, about the feasability of large scale recycling of Li-ion batteries and about transitioning into a lithium-based economy. If you are willing to take advice, reading up first before become alarmed and posting concerned comments will help a lot for your peace of mind.
Reminds me of "peak oil" when everybody was predicting us running out of oil. Today somehow that doesn't seem to concern us anymore. Some are even more concerned about over-abundance of oil (Saudi Arabia for one).
If you use an estimate of demand to justify increasing demand, you immediately, tautologically invalidate the estimate: the estimate did not account for your policy decisions based on itself.
https://www.ft.com/content/cde8f984-43c7-11e6-b22f-79eb4891c...
(You may need to Google for the title to bypass paywall: "Lithium: Chile’s buried treasure")
Sodium ion aren't really commercialized yet but the cost implications provide a whole lot of motivation to figure it out.
Dead Comment
They just need whole lot more than this 1 battery to solve the problem.
Source: there's a guy in socal (Jehu Garcia) building a reclaimed peaker 1 MWh pack in about 10 racks from used batteries and equipment (50 kW 480VAC inverter) on the cheap in order to store energy off-peak (plus possibly charge using solar) and use it at peak supplemented by grid power. This is how manufacturing and other heavy industry / large electrical consumers can save money right now in US day-of-use billed grid systems.
You can build 18650 packs for electric bikes, scooters, boats etc... or build your own Power Wall type home electric energy storage.
The costs of these cells coming out of China have gotten down to $1 each in some cases of excess inventory...
Edit:cheapest aliexpress ones i see are about usd$2.00 each. That's not bad though.
I'd love to emulate his work.
ecobot ! assemble !
http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/wao2012/talks/Thu_Aug9/McG...
Most datacenters use batteries instead.