That's why you need pumped hydro storage and grid scale batteries.
That's exactly why South Australia installed the first ever grid scale battery in November 2017, and half of it's capacity was immediately devoted to short term (within cycle) frequency control. They had a lot of solar cell generation, and their quick-start gas-turbine unit had failed to start when it was needed, so they went shopping for a better solution. Search for the Hornsdale Power Reserve.
But they can be offered cheaper rates to do it when the grid is less heavily loaded.
In Australia today about 40% of new roof-top solar comes with a Tesla power wall or some superior Chinese equivalent. About 30% of Australia's homes have solar cells on their roofs, so there may be quite a lot of retrofit business. The utility companies don't seem to have yet woken up to the opportunities this offers, but the smarter ones will get there eventually. They won't have to be much smarter than John Larkin to manage it.
The Hornsdale Power Reserve has been working reliably for seven years now. It cost $A90 million back in 2017, and more money has been spent on similar units since then, but probably no more than one billion.
It's perfectly mature. Not well enough known for the Spanish to have copied it, though there is a bigger unit in California (a small part of which caught on fire during installation) which seems to work just as well.
Holding off for a year or two looks more like ignorant idleness here.
Technically and economically, dealing with nuclear waste is many orders of magnitude easier than dealing with the consequences of burning carbon. Politically, ignoring or denying the consequences of burning carbon is many orders of magnitude easier than doing anything at all.
It's the same as pretty much any other problem with hardware - add some big capacitors, and it will all be much more stable.
Grid storage is a major part of the way forward in electricity distribution (the other component is high voltage DC lines). But lithium batteries like that one are no more than a stop-gap. Lithium is expensive, dangerous, a limited resource, and mining it is an environmental disaster (albeit much more localised than the disaster of burning carbon). The main battery type for grid storage should be sodium ion batteries.
On your last point, I think it goes like this: The power output of large generating plants is servoed to the frequency. If the allowed tolerance on the frequency is larger, the plant must operate with larger power margins, and thus will run farther from its optimum power setting. That costs money. I think these limits are the result of acrimonious negotiations.
Jeroen Belleman
The water consumption isn't particular to nuclear power. Whatever the source of the heat that runs the turbines, you'll need to cool the condensers at the other end.
The nuclear waste problem is a political problem, not a technical one.
Any large scale power technology is going to have problems. Those can be minimized, but it will always be a trade-off between cost and nuisance.
Jeroen Belleman
Why not?
Jeroen Belleman
Not much to Spain, the pipe is small and France opposes making it bigger, because then we would sell them electricity from our surplus solar power. Not much of an interconnection or an open market.
Think about it. Inverters can be locked in frequency to any timing source. No matter what's the tendency of the network, the inverters, which are millions, can keep the frequency they supply at, undisturbed. Locked in frequency and phase to a given time source. Infinite inertia. With whatever power they have at the moment, which in Spain was 70% of the total when the blackout happened.
Rotating masses can be pushed to change frequency by the load. Inverters can't, if so programmed.
Are the batteries in those cars designed to only accommodate the 5% normal usage? How would they cope with the constant charging and discharging needed to stabilise the grid?
If the source (grid) starts to fall in frequency the inverter will either have to keep in step with it or supply massive currents as the phase difference between the inverter and the grid begins to increase. If the inverter tries to stay on-frequency, the time will come when they are 180-degrees out of step, then things will get far too exciting.
It's a lot easier to replace the bearings in a generator than to replace lithium batters at that scale.
Sure, same as any rotating mass that tries to oppose the drift. The thing is, inverters have more "inertia" than rotating masses with a turbine of the same power, if so configured or programmed to do. Aggregating all of them, that's a huge inertia, way larger than rotating masses.
Say, program to oppose 1% the drift. Whatever. There are engineers that can study and decide what to do.
I can only say, if the cause of the Gran Apagón is found eventually to be the lack of inertia in wind and solar generators, it is just a matter of reprogramming the inverters or replacing them. An engineering and economics problem, not a political one.
I don't know what the batteries in those car are designed to accommodate, and clearly neither do you. It's going to be a lot more than 5% of the capacity.
I don't think that they would be used for the short term charging and discharging involved in providing short term frequency control for the grid - the ambition seems to be have them there to provide emergency back-up when there's a substantial disruption.
If we all went over to electric cars the grid would have to provide about 30% more electric power than it does now. Granting that cars spend
95% of their, time parked, the parked cars could offer about 5 times as much power as the grid for a couple of hours.
Nuclear fission waste is mixture of isotopes. Some of them are very radioactive and decay fast, and keeping them safe until they've mostly decayed is technically demanding. The less radioactive isotopes are easier to handle, but some of them stay dangerously radioactive for upwards of 100,000 years, and keeping them safely isolated for that length of time is an as yet unsolved problem
Until the climate gets warmer, sea levels rise, and tropical cyclones get more energetic. People are getting spooked by the changes they've seen over the last thirty years, and politicians are finding them harder to ignore.
Only if you do it right.
Lithium isn't particularly rare. Stars have been making it for the past
13 billion years. You don't have to wait for a supernova. We haven't put as much effort into finding lithium rich ores as we have put into finding copper, gold and silver, which are all heavier than iron.Mining is always an environmental disaster if you don't keep a sharp eye on the miners.
There are a variety of of opinions about what battery type would be best for grid storage. Vanadium flow batteries have their fans. In so far as lithium is dangerous, sodium is even more dangerous (and potassium is even worse). Cheapskates who cut corners can extract a disaster from the most innocuous materials.
Most of the "lithium is dangerous" propaganda comes from the fossil carbon extraction industry, who wants to keep on selling gasoline to be burnt in internal combustion engines.
Some people enjoy working with money. There are even people who like being accountants. Electronics is much more fun to me.
The real tragedy (for some people) is that things keep getting better.
Sorry.
How did you twist my question into that?
Usage and capacity are not the same things. It seems reasonable to expect that most of the time, car batteries will be between 20% and 80% of their capacity, though they will get closer to 100% for people who charge overnight at home. But 5% "normal usage" means a typical car is used no more than 5% of the time - a bit over an hour a day. That also seems reasonable to me, and it is the figure NXP use when estimating lifetimes of automotive qualified parts. (I.e., they give a lifetime of
10 years on the expectation that no more than 5% of that is at 125°C temperatures.)Not only do neither you nor I know how well car batteries, and the charging and discharging power circuitry around it, would work for grid storage, but I suspect the car manufacturers do not know either. The use-cases are very different.
Using electric cars as grid storage is just silly, in all kinds of ways. The trade-offs for things like power and energy densities and cost are completely different, the charge/discharge usage is totally different. And cars are frequently not plugged in at the right place when you want to charge or discharge the grid storage.
That would be less silly, but still silly.
It would be hugely more helpful to have distributed cheap battery storage in fixed installations (in homes, at grid transformer and distribution points, and most importantly, at electric car charger stations). All it will take is mass production of more appropriate batteries (such as the sodium ion batteries that China is pushing hard). The potential benefits of electric car batteries as "emergency grid storage" would then be negligible.
As I've explained on several past occasions, the frequency is a necessary feedback signal. Generating plants adjust the power delivered to the network by looking at the frequency error. There are limits to this, of course. If the frequency drops too low, the power demand rises beyond the generator peak power and it will trip.
There is no such thing as infinite inertia. Something /will/ break.
Jeroen Belleman
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