Tesla Batteries

Where is he going to put the battery? They were designed to fit in a car, not a house.

Wrong. Boost converters are quite common. The 375V Tesla car battery can easily be charged with 240VAC. That's what runs the various "plug in" chargers that people install in their homes and offices to charge their Tesla cars.

I'm not sure, but I think it's ok. However, you won't get more life out of the battery by trickle charging it. "Want lithium-ion batteries to last? Slow charging may not be the answer"

What's a "normal" charger? Most EV chargers try to charge at very high charge rates as limited by what the AC power line can provide.

You scare me. I'm worried that you might actually build what you're suggesting which would then either explode or catch fire.

My main concern is the life of the builder and owner.

Permit me to offer a different way to look at this. If you design a home power system, the way to make the battery last as long as possible is to not use the battery. Yep, just charge it up, leave it up, and don't pull any power from it. It's the charge and discharge cycles that tend to kill batteries. Reduce their frequency and depth of discharge, and your battery will last longer.

There's a reason that everyone isn't rushing out to replace their lead-acid and nickel-iron solar battery storage systems with LiIon. Read about the relative merits and disadvantages of the common battery chemistry choices:

I have no idea. I can't afford a Tesla car and don't have any experience with its power system.

That will mostly likely be the result of your investigation. The only justification for designing your own system is if you need some feature that's not available in commercial systems. Even so, if you decide to roll your own, be advised that insurance companies take a dim view of do-it-thyself high power devices that have not been tested by UL (or the UK equivalent) for safety and fire problems. If your house burns, and an investigation demonstrates that the fire originated with your do-it-thyself contrivance, the insurance company can justifiably refuse to pay.

Here's a teardown of a Model S battery: Interestingly, the author has the same idea as you suggest and is building a off-grid solar system using a Model S battery. (Note that the article is from 2014):

Other than how the internet hardware is powered, there's no connection between where the home power is generated, and how the modem/gateway/whatever connects to the internet.

Alternative energy is not quite yet ready for cookie-cutter systems, where one side and configuration fits all users, uses, and applications. Because the hardware and installation are still rather expensive, an optimum system will need to be designed, not thrown together.

I realize that you don't have numbers yet, but this is getting ridiculous. You don't have a budget, you have no idea how much energy (kw-hrs) you need. You don't know anything about the electricity time of use pattern or peak power requirement. You've ignored any lifestyle changes which offer huge reductions in energy consumption. You don't even know where the system will be located. Never mind the available roof or ground area where it will be located, local ordinances, safety issues, government incentives, tax benefits, etc. All you seem to know is that you plan to use an unspecified model and condition Tesla battery.

Can I run away while I'm still sane?

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Note that solar and wind system, as well as off-grid systems, that provide their own power, don't appear on the graph. Only those system that draw power from the grid appear. As such, we have peaks at about

7 AM and 5:30 PM. The trough at noon is when solar power is at maximum, which reduces the maximum demand.

That's exactly what it's for. You charge up your PowerWall late at night, when electricity is cheap, and discharge it during the early morning and evening, when electricity is more expensive. No solar involved as everything is powered by the grid.

That's a different animal. That's using solar or wind power to generate electricity, which is then sent to the grid for "storage" or to be consumed by someone else. In theory, you're saving the local utility the cost of gas and oil needed to generate that electricity. Of course that assumes that there's someone available to consume the electricity you generate, or that the utility or grid have a way of storing it. It's conceivable that on a really sunny day, residential solar power could generate more power than users could consume.

That's the industrial Tesla PowerPack. They come in different shapes and sizes:

Locally, Tesla and PG&E are working at installing a PowerPack at the Moss Landing power plant: The justification is that it is cheaper to install these giant battery packs to deal with the demand peaks, than it is to increase generation capacity to handle the demand peaks.

Which one? The home PowerWall or the utility PowerPack system? I once found and posted in this group the web site that monitors the PowerPack, which provided numbers for what was going in and out. However, I can't find it again. I'll try again tomorrow or day after.

No time tonite to comment on the rest....yawn.

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Interesting quite how different UK and USA demand profiles are at this time of year. UK comes up to a level plateau at 0800 until 1600 for the working day and then peaks in the early evening around 1800 as people return home to start cooking and using heating and lighting.

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It is actually very mild for winter at the moment around 8-10C so that there is comparatively little heating demand. It spikes more when there is a cold snap to -10C (possibly by enough to bring the grid down). Successive governments have prevaricated for so long over new build nuclear that things are very borderline now for peak load vs capacity. They had to pay some heavy industrial users to drop off grid last winter (people like the electrolytic metals refiners - ultimate sink load).

In the UK such battery packs are being sold in combination with solar arrays. Although we do have some cheap overnight electricity tariffs they have largely fallen out of favour - daytime is a rip-off. They are mostly a hangover of the "nuclear electricity to cheap to meter" era.

Government is presently rolling out dumb-as-hell cryptographically insecure "smart" meters to aid roll out of dynamic pricing. Snag is they don't work at all where I live - no mobile coverage inside the house. We can expect interesting times ahead when hackers try to damage UK power network infrastructure by switching domestic loads on and off the net in large chunks. My meter is prehistoric with counter rotating dials numbered 0-9 it confuses the hell out of younger meter readers.

There are second generation meters now but they continue to install the dud ones because they have them and also have a crazy deadline to miss.

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You couldn't make it up!

But if you are not at home during the day to use it then storing it in a battery means you get paid for (not) "delivering it to the grid" and then get to use it later when you come home. This is part of the reason why solar hot water is a non-starter in the UK. The feed in tariff makes it more cost effective to generate PV electricity and dump it into your hot water tank immersion heater since you get paid to do that!

We have a lot of gas turbine systems (and pumped storage) for demand peaks. It is a problem that most generation occurs in the north whereas the bulk of the consumption is in the south around London and SE.

It was the 12kW (or above) system that I was interested in. That would provide enough capacity to buffer a respectable amount of energy. I am thinking here of solar 4kW array with battery storage for my home.

My question pretty much amounts to can it support a 3kW discharge rate or would I always have to take some electricity for peak loads even if the battery was fully charged.

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Martin Brown

Are the car batteries and Powerwall internals the same chemistry 18650 AA cells? ISTR Powerwalls are allegedly happy down to around -10C which means they would be OK in an outside building in the UK. TBH I would not want one inside my house. I know just how well lithium metal burns.

What really hurts is to over charge them or over discharge them. The latter potentially destroying the battery and making it dangerous. The cutouts in laptop battery packs defend against such abuses.

If you are trying to pump the maximum in as quickly as possible then yes. I don't know about you but my instinct is that if you are getting the pack seriously hot when charging then lifetime is probably reduced.

The OP would do well to watch some of the videos of what happens to the really tiny lithium batteries in vaping units when the charging regime is not correctly followed. ISTR Royal Institution Christmas lectures did it to a decent sized battery pack a couple of years back (on the roof).

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Darwin Award would seem to be imminent.

He would be much better off using deep discharge lead acid since they are much less likely to catch fire when abused (as seems inevitable).

I'm less certain of that. If you don't cycle it every now and then they seem to lose capacity. My laptop batteries tend to die after about 5 years because they spend too much time on mains power.

Lead acid and nickel-iron will take a lot of abuse and still work.

UK MOD made a horrendous mess by applying an old power top up SOP to newly introduced NiCads back in the 1980's destroying a great many big expensive wet cell batteries in the process. Being cycled between 80% charge and full many times left them unable to provide full capacity. NiFe by comparison would put up with almost any amount of abuse.

+1
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Martin Brown
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Martin Brown

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Cheers

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Clive
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Clive Arthur

(Quick posting and I'm gone. Back tomorrow, I hope.)

Various US electrical power monitoring pool reporting sites. Note that these are NOT designed for public disclosure or to show usage patterns. Rather, they are for the convenience of electric power brokers and speculators.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. See "Electric Power Markets".

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California Independent Service Operators:

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There's quite a bit on the CAISO site, but much of it is buried under a terminally disorganized web pile and various security obstructions. In the past, there was considerably more information available to the public. However every time there's a security incident, the available information is reduced.

Independent Service Operators of New England:

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Midcontinent Independent System Operators

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New York ISO

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Electric Reliability Council of Texas

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New Brunswick Power System Operator

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Independent Electricity System Operator (Ontario Canada)

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Southwest Power Pool

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The European version: ENTSO-E

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Looking at the Volt wreck I would say....Ah! You're low on windshield wiper fluid there's your problem

Reply to
bitrex

ies for energy storage. These would be charged from solar panels.

of an AC operated 240 volt one, is that alright ? Will they charge properl y ?

Not sure what this question is asking. I don't know exactly what a "240 vo lt one" is. Are you talking about a charger? I suggest that you use a 240 VAC powered Tesla charger and from the solar panels provide the 240 VAC to the charger. There is a lot of science and experience integrated into the battery packs and charging units sold by Tesla and you would be trying to reinvent the wheel by designing your own DC charger.

charging them there, but where this is going there are not going to be any charging stations. If a float charge can be maintained it would work. The reserve would certainly be there and it would be a matter of replacing what ever energy is used.

Uh, how would you get then to a "station". Are you talking about using the battery that is still in the Tesla car??? There is no way to get signific ant power out of a Tesla battery in the car, so what are you really talking about?

e a towmotor to install the batteries so we can't have them failing soon.

There is a guy on Youtube called "Rich" who is constantly doing things with salvaged Teslas. Usually he is trying to make cars work rather than gutti ng them and using parts (unless they are being used in Teslas). Look at a few of his videos where he manipulates battery packs. Not pretty.

ruck converted to a camper, but it is not going to live at a campground. Pl us I doubt that you can pull enough power from a campground to charge one. Of course the proper fittings can be installed and the thing driven to a ch arging station but we do not want to HAVE TO do that.

Ok, I get it now. You should have led with this paragraph. The solution t o your problem is easy. Use the Tesla electronics from a car that provides the charging capability from AC power. This can be 120 VAC or 240 VAC at currents from 12 amps up to 80 amps. That should be easy to get from your solar panels. 120 VAC at 12 amps will provide 1.4 kW of which 400 watts ar e wasted by the charger... at least that is the word on the street and my p ersonal experience. I've heard the chargers are built in 24 kW boards and cars use 2 or 3 of these depending on the model and the battery. You shoul d be able to get away with just one.

There is a "Universal Mobile Cable" (UMC) that connects the car's port to t he AC line. The more recent "Gen 2" cable that has a wide variety of swapp able connectors for everything from 120 VAC, 15 amp jacks to 240 VAC, 50 am p (which assumes it is 40 amps because of the NEC). This will let you plug in at campgrounds and such. There are also Tesla destination chargers whi ch can run at up to 80 amps scattered around the country.

So if you are using a Tesla battery pack, a Tesla charger and a Tesla UMC y ou can add a solar panel and a DC to AC converter and live a rich, full lif e without risking mucking up the battery or camper with design mistakes.

Did I mention that I charge my Tesla from 120 VAC (an actual 114 VAC by the time it reaches the car) at 12 amps? So charging slow is not a problem. Not sure what you thought it might be.

arged periodically. Are these batteries like that ?

know, there could be more than one in parallel.

These are LiIon batteries of Tesla's on proprietary formula which is slight ly different from others. They don't mind being ignored for a while, but d on't like sitting empty or 100% full. Keeping some charge on them is recom mended, but I don't think they have much self discharge. The cars loose ar ound 1% a day, but that is mostly vampire drain from the electronics.

The batteries don't like being too cold and I'm pretty sure a Tesla car wil l heat the battery from its own power when the temps get very cold to prote ct it. That's why they recommend that the car always be plugged in.

asons. However that could change depending on what kind of information I gl ean about this whole matter.

Don't know what you are talking about regarding a 300 volt system. AC or D C?

t what I can and can't do. Constant current is no problem if that's what's needed. But what would be the minimum current ?

Building a charger for these batteries would be folly considering this has been done and you only need to buy one that works.

I suggest you look up "Rich Rebuilds" on youtube to learn more about how ot hers use Tesla batteries. On guy squeezed a full set of 100 kWh batteries in a smaller car to electric power it to make a hot rod. He used Tesla par ts.

a slightly higher voltage than the state of charge dictates, but then can I taper off when it nears full charge ?

See my statement above about using a Tesla charger. There are a lot of com plex issues with charging these batteries to get a long life and Tesla has incorporated all this into their equipment. Why try to figure it all out. You just need to provide AC power. I don't know how you are going to get power out, but that is your issue to solve, not the charging.

Keep in mind that when the batteries are cold and/or low or high on charge, the charging current is cut way back. Some people have data on the chargi ng rates Tesla uses vs. state of charge. It varies with battery type (they keep improving this) and size.

, what are the consequences ? If some other type of battery would be more s uitable that can be worked in.

I don't know what you are talking about here. The only limitation is the c harger seems to knock the input power by 400 watts, so you need to supply a t least that. Maybe this number depends on the number of charging boards i n use, don't know.

ap. And we don't plan on really draining that much. There will be A/C but t hat will run of a generator. Want cooling go get some fuel for that. It is however not a necessity. We need the necessities to remain away from the gr id practically indefinitely. For example I am sure a propane stove would be nice because electric sucks, plus is less cost effective. But there would be electric alternatives. Intermittent use of things like a toaster oven, e lectric skillet, microwave and all that will be in there. We are aware of w hat kind of power that uses, so propane, as long as it is plentiful or near by would be the norm.

You can charge the battery from a generator too.

un one on 120 volts. There wouldn't be much running off the inverter but wh at does will want amps. Al the lighting will be low voltage LED, even fans. Just things with a compressor are the problem there.

Ok, whatever.

m to be elusive. For example I could calculate by what the charger pulls at 240 volts in the garage normally and get an idea. But there are specific t hat will be lacking unless I can get the whole setup and test it. That woul d be impractical, we are not buying a whole Tesla, just some batteries. Thu s the question about self discharge, used batteries might not quite have th e capacity as new ones, so two of them might be better. That is of course i f they don't kill each other.

As I've mentioned you need to buy everything Tesla from the AC wall socket to the battery. Then you will have a solid solution that will not gouge yo ur very expensive batteries.

Used Tesla batteries will likely have 80% of the original capacity. I beli eve that is the warranty level at which they will replace them free.

BTW, if you know anyone who is buying a Tesla, connect them up with my refe rral. They get free supercharging and it helps me get a wall connector.

Rick C.

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Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

On Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 1:02:08 PM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote :

ery is around $200/kWh. Leaf battery would be better deal, as long as you don't fast charge it too much.

. 50 kwhr. No way they can sell for $35k otherwise.

What are you talking about??? He is buying a used battery which will cost what it costs.

Also, you have no idea what the Tesla batteries cost Tesla which is the num ber you seem to be throwing around. The problem with the Leaf batteries is they don't last. Battery design is very complex and not a type of science that can be planned or simulated. Improving the exact mixture of material s for batteries is a random search of a multi-dimensional space. Improve o ne or two aspects of a battery and you may well degrade significantly one o f the others. Currently no one has a "magic" formula that improves all the properties significantly over the other formulas.

Rick C.

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gnuarm.deletethisbit

know about these things.

han a constant current source.

m. I tend to figure worst case. So he has this fridge in mind that is rated 3.5 amps running and 6 amps to start. I think it reasonable to assume that the starting current is going want close to the 720 watts, but in run it i s not going to be 400 watts. Thing is, worst case scenario just figure the

400 and enjoy whatever headroom.

I don't think the issue is power factor. The issue is knowing what the act ual consumption is. You seem to be aware of that. Why can't you measure i t? There are no shortage of power measuring devices around.

na cost you WAY more than you think. "

afraid of buying Tesla batteries I doubt he intends to be penny wise and po und foolish.

e that whatever they put together could be enhanced.

of money. "

I don't know what pitfalls you may encounter in tapping the battery for the DC, but the charging side of things seems rather simple.

This is not likely the best place to get advice since no one here has done anything like this. "Rich Rebuilds" is the closest to someone who has done what you want. In particular I would dig about for the video on the guy w ho shoved the 100 kWh battery into the sports car. There would be some goo d info there and you might try contacting some of the people in the video.

Rick C.

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Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

atteries for energy storage.

In the US we have a morning peak and a late afternoon peak. Both peaks are due to the overlap of business and residential usage. In the summer month s the morning peak becomes insignificant to the afternoon peak because of t he AC. Of course this varies somewhat with region. It is a large and vari ed country.

You mean during peak times, right? It would make no sense to have them shu t down. Just let them work other than at peak. Most factories like that w ork multiple shifts anyway.

e

Not sure what that means. What does nuclear have to do with peak rates?

That's what I had until recently when they installed a digital meter. Oh w ell.

delay/

u

I don't understand what you mean by "paid for not delivering it to the grid "???

12 kW is four times my typical peak usage. Much of the day when the heat o r AC is not running my consumption is around 1 kW... peak.

I haven't looked up the spec, but it would be a pretty crappy battery if it couldn't deliver 3 kW. That's about 30 amps at 120 VAC or 15 amps at 240 VAC.

Rick C.

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Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

these were not designed to power anything."

la car batteries.

rops off. Of course the power wall won't need anything like the rates you see in a car battery.

If you don't like LiIon you might want to dump your phone and nearly every other battery appliance you own.

You simply don't want to design your own charger and none of that becomes a nd issue. But it is worse than that. You don't want to 100% charge them o r discharge to 0% and let them sit. When not in use they should be kept be tween 20% and 80% for maximum life. 10/90 is not so bad, but 0/100 is defi nitely a problem.

No AC charger for Tesla batteries comes even close to maxing out the charge rate. Fastest AC charger is 80 amps or about 20 kW. Fast DC chargers are up to 120 kW.

Better to watch some videos of what others are doing with Tesla batteries.

No reason to abuse them. With nearly half a million cars in the world an n o reports of batteries catching fire from charging.

The problem there is sitting at 100% charge all the time. Most laptops wil l warn you of that. Unfortunately they aren't smart enough to not charge t hem to 100% or to give you a way of controlling this. They only let you kn ow it is a problem without giving you a solution.

And weigh a ton or three. Remember, while this is not going to move the ve hicle, it is going in one.

Don't know what MOD or SOP are. Since when are NiCads wet cells?

Rick C.

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Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

3, these were not designed to power anything."

esla car batteries.

t

drops off. Of course the power wall won't need anything like the rates yo u see in a car battery.

y other battery appliance you own.

and issue. But it is worse than that. You don't want to 100% charge them or discharge to 0% and let them sit. When not in use they should be kept between 20% and 80% for maximum life. 10/90 is not so bad, but 0/100 is de finitely a problem.

,

t.

ge rate. Fastest AC charger is 80 amps or about 20 kW. Fast DC chargers a re up to 120 kW.

d
.

no reports of batteries catching fire from charging.

ill warn you of that. Unfortunately they aren't smart enough to not charge them to 100% or to give you a way of controlling this. They only let you know it is a problem without giving you a solution.

lenovo does

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Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

m:

ey

will warn you of that. Unfortunately they aren't smart enough to not char ge them to 100% or to give you a way of controlling this. They only let yo u know it is a problem without giving you a solution.

Wow! I'm amazed. Lenovo actually did something right! My Lenovo wouldn't even let me run it on a charger if it wasn't an exact match to the expensi ve one that came with the laptop. It was without a doubt the worst compute r I've ever had including the single board Technico 9900 I still have in th e basement somewhere, but it doesn't have a USB port.

Rick C.

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Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

Simple gas turbines are cheap, but the fuel cost may be significant, if you have to run them at more than a few hundred hours each year.

The great advantage of battery packs is that it can immediately react to loss of production capacity of rapid increase in demand. Thus 15-30 minute storage capacity is enough so that you can get gas turbines started. This also reduces the need for spinning reserve in continuously running power plants.

While pumping storage is possible only in Scotland, but gas turbines could be installed everywhere as long as there are nearby pipelines. The North Sea oil and gas fields feeds these pipelines.

Reply to
upsidedown

so you don't know how that setup works

or that

rather unlikely

why?

Peak consumption of 3kW is possible but most unusual in the developed world.

No it isn't.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

ministry of defence. standard operating practice. 1899.

Reply to
tabbypurr

I take this to imply that cooked breakfasts are more common in the USA then.

No I mean that last year they had to pay heavy industrial users to drop off the grid because gas availability and electricity generating capacity were maxed out during "the beast from the East" weather - an extended cold snap (which may happen again this year).

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It has got worse since that 2014 article.

Nuclear needs a higher base load. In the 1960's when nuclear was all the rage building the power plants it was said by the British government spokesman that we would have "electricity too cheap to meter".

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(a phrase apparently coined by Lewis Strauss of USAEC)

Economy 7 was a tariff intended to encourage people to use electric storage heaters overnight on cheap electricity. They were utter crap.

You get paid for exactly half of what your PV array produces

*irrespective* of what you actually do with it. Most people turn it into copious hot water but if you are cunning you can store it in a battery and use it later in the evening. Hence battery with PV combo sales are more popular in the UK to avoid using grid electricity.

I think in the US they may well measure the amount of energy you deliver to the grid and "bank" it or something.

I meant 12kWh battery capacity.

Regular discharge at C/4 is quite stressful for a battery. 3kW is a typical peak load in the UK for kettles and electric fan heaters.

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Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

I thought fracking had made gas prices plummet. UK has certainly had a "dash for gas" in the past couple of decades incredibly short termism.

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I can see that adding a certain amount of this to the mix might save a bit on spinning reserve wear and tear.

The UK's biggest pumped storage is actually in Wales. I knew one of the engineers who worked on it. Dinorwig is a 1.7GW plant.

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It is thirty years old and only now are they thinking about adding more despite having a far more volatile mix of renewables on the grid.

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Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

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